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Gerarda wiped her eyes and stared down at her boot. “She pulled me out of the fire and knew what would happen when the soldiers came. I was too young to understand what happened to Halflings in the kingdom, what ouroptionswould be as females.”
My stomach plummeted, knowing that her sister had acted the way countless other siblings had in the face of my blade before.
Gerarda lifted her hand to the ends of her hair along her jaw. “She cut through my hair with a paring knife. Lobbed thick chunks of it onto the ground and caked my face in mud.” Gerarda looked up at me with strained eyes. “I think she knew that the only hope for me was at the Order. I think she sensed that I was … different and would not take well to the dresses and duties of a courtesan.”
A chill ran down my spine. “She made you ugly for the guards and hoped they would leave you at the Order’s doorstep?”
Gerarda nodded through her trembling chin. “And that’s what they did. But she hadn’t had enough time to do the same for herself, so I was dragged into one carriage and she another.”
I placed my hand over Gerarda’s along the wheel. “That last memory must be a heavy one to carry.”
“It wasn’t the last time I saw her.” A tear rolled down Gerarda’s cheek. “I spotted her in the streets of Koratha during my first patrol as an initiate. Carston almost killed me with the lashing she gave me for leaving my post, but I had to follow her.”
I blinked. “You spoke with her?”
Gerarda nodded. “I told her as much as I could in those few minutes and she listened just like she always had. But then I grabbed her hands and realized they had taken one from her.”
I winced. It was a common punishment for courtesans who tried to run away from their houses. There were dozens working the streets of Koratha who no longer had hands at all.
I grabbed Gerarda’s arm. “I’m so sorry, Ger.” Somehow the shortened name felt right on my tongue.
Her lips twitched but her dark eyes were glazed with a veil of memory. “There was nothing I could do for her as an initiate. I couldn’t sneak her onto the island, and that had been the first night I had ever left it. But I promised her that I would return. As soon as I earned my hood, I would find a way to free her. Use whatever leverage I had to get her a placement with a kind lord on a small parcel of land. Days of laundering clothes was not freedom, but it would have been something.”
There was a sharp edge to Gerarda’s voice that cut through my hope.
“And I did.” Gerarda adjusted the wheel along the sea without looking at me. “The day after I passed my Trials, I told her of my plan. She was so happy she wept. And then I finally earned my cloak and found her a placement. I returned and found her dead.”
My breath hitched. “That’s why you always fought to—”
“Be the best.” Gerarda nodded in disgust at her own foolishness. “I made it through the Order quicker than any other initiate, trained harder than any other Shade to earn a title, but in the end it didn’t matter. The cough took her before I had the chance to save her.” She grabbed the ends of her short hair and my chest cracked open. She had kept it the same length for over sixty years.
The night air turned cold and abrasive against my skin. I reached my hand out to comfort Gerarda but she stepped away from me. “That’s why I was hard on you before we went to Elandorr.” She glanced up at me with hard eyes, but there was a fondness there that had never been before. “I won’t apologize for what I said; you needed to hear it. But now you know that I wasn’t trying to be cruel. I had lost people too.”
I swallowed thickly as Gerarda made another tiny adjustment to our course. She was right. She had come to the Faeland with the samelosses as me—her mentor, the Shades, her family, she even believed her love had been taken from her. She knew that I could survive the weight of that grief because she was carrying the same load.
My lip twitched; somehow knowing that made me understand her in a way I never had.
“You are much stronger than I am.” I planted myself beside her, not touching but close enough that Gerarda was letting me into the wide berth she kept around herself.
Gerarda lifted her chin. “I’m aware.”
I flicked her on the head before I could stop myself.
Her jaw hung at the side as she glared at me. “Do you want me to cut you?”
I shrugged. “I heal fast.”
I half expected Gerarda to pull out one of her thin blades, but instead she laughed. Light and airy at first but then it bellowed deep from her belly and out into the sea. Her grief-stained cheeks were washed away with lighter tears as her laughter mellowed.
I turned back to the mast, readying to climb up the pole to the eagle’s nest, but there was still a question tugging at my mind. I turned back to Gerarda. “How did you find the strength to keep going, to keepleading, in the face of so much proof that there was only more pain to come?”
“Spite.”
I chuckled, thinking she was kidding but Gerarda’s face was entirely serious.
“There’s a reason Aemon designed the Order the way it was, the way he designed the entire kingdom. The ones with the most power to use against him always suffered the most. So we can’t succumb to our losses, Keera, because there will be no one left to fight. Aemon counted on that, and so does his son.”
CHAPTERTHIRTY-FOUR
