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She had never seen him falter, had never questioned whether or not he’d keep fighting. Until that moment.
In her thrall of storm magic, she had seen glimpses of the nightmare the reaper had inflicted upon the Warsword. Not a nightmare, she realised, but amemory. The day that Malik had been hurt; Talemir too, from what she had seen. Wilder’s helplessness and sorrow had laced each flash of memory she’d witnessed, had been so poignant it had nearly overcome her at one point.
‘You saw?’ Wilder asked, voice hoarse with shame. He studied her face, and Thea cursed herself for not masking her emotions. Wren had told her she should be better at that by now.
‘Only fragments,’ Thea replied, suppressing the urge to reach for him, to comfort him. She wanted to tell him that it was alright, that his pain was her pain, and that —
‘You saw me fail them,’ the Warsword croaked.
Thea shook her head. ‘I saw you fight. I saw you fight until you could fight no more.’
Wilder gave a dark, broken laugh. ‘Call it what it is.Failure. And because of it, the two people I loved most were changed forever.’
Thea didn’t argue. She knew her words wouldn’t land, not when he was still in the space between freshly carved-open grief and the present. Instead, she went to their packs and brought him a canteen of water.
‘Drink,’ she ordered.
‘I’m the one who’s supposed to look out for you…’ he murmured.
‘That’s not how friendship works.’
‘No?’
‘Not ours.’ She folded her arms over her chest. ‘Drink.’
And to her surprise, he did.
Thea left Wilder in the shade of the ruins to find their horses. She knew he needed to process what had happened and that he needed to do it alone. It hurt to leave him there, and she fought every protective instinct that screamed to hold him close. But she wanted to do what was best for him, and right now, she knew he needed to fall apart and rebuild his armour in privacy. They were much the same in that respect.
Thea herself needed to keep moving, lest the shock of what she’d done hit her and render her useless – and she knew that shock was coming.
The combination of her fear for Wilder’s life and the tenuous link to her ancestral homeland had sparked that ember of magic to life within her… and now she worried that there was no putting it back in the bottle.
The reaper had dragged the worst of Wilder’s memories before him, a loop of pain and suffering and guilt designed to slice over and over, death by a thousand cuts. But it hadn’t only been Wilder’s memory flashing before her, but her own as well – or what she had guessed to be her own.
A field of flowers. Two pairs of small hands braiding them together to form a necklace.
The smell of heather.
The darkness of being hidden in a wagon, hurtling over uneven terrain, a small body either side of her.
Remember me.Those words over and over, an eerie melody from the past she couldn’t bring to the forefront of her mind, except in the fragments the reaper had shown her.
Her mind clawed at itself, demanding the images to form before it, for her toremember. But she had been so small, so young and so scared.
Only when Thea came upon the horses did she come back to herself. She checked the beasts over, and when she was sure they were fine, she tied them to a nearby post, something in the corner of her eye snagging her attention.
A sign that had fallen from its iron frame and sat in the dust by a shattered door.
Dorinth Armoury, it read. The place that had once housed all the secrets to the brilliance of Warsword armour. Except for Wilder’s… He’d passed the Great Rite after Delmira’s fall and had never been gifted the same armour as his predecessors.
Thea found herself walking towards the armoury. It looked like little more than a rundown shopfront, its windows smashed in, only pieces of the door left on its hinges. That didn’t stop her peering inside or stepping over the threshold.
The place had been looted or destroyed by wild animals long ago. A thick layer of dust coated all the surfaces, and there wasn’t much besides broken furniture and the odd tool scattered around. Thea’s boots crunched atop broken glass as she paced the room, imagining how it might have been set up during its prime. A fitting room in the corner, perhaps; a pedestal for the freshly appointed Warsword to stand on while he was measured for each piece of his armour…
Thea felt more connection, more sense of history in this broken little shop than she had amid the ruins of her family’s castle.
Funny, that,she mused, running her hands over her own armour as she scanned the shelves behind the counter.
