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‘Thea…’ Kipp said, his voice serious this time. ‘We’ve just ridden through the night and slayed a dozen cursed men. I can’t speak for Cal, but my generally useless arse isn’t up for abattle with a Warsword. We need to rest. We need to regain our strength before we take him on.’
The truth of his words hit her hard in the chest. She clenched her jaw. ‘We make the most of the daylight and ride until nightfall. Then we’ll rest. How does that sound?’
‘Deeply unpleasant.’
‘You can have my share of the ale…’ Thea offered.
Kipp gave her a sideways glance. ‘Keep talking.’
She laughed. ‘That’s it. That’s my offer. Take it or leave it.’
‘You drive a hard bargain, Highness.’
Thea shuddered. It had been a long and hard road to learning her true identity as one of the lost heirs of Delmira, the fallen kingdom. Harder still had been discovering that not only did she and Wren have an older sister, but that this so-called sister was the one they called the Daughter of Darkness, the evil prophesied as the bringer of fire and blood. That she and Wren came from a royal family of power-hungry traitors and shadow-lovers.
‘Beware the fury of a patient Delmirian.’Malik had spoken those words to her a long time ago now, and when Thea first thought she understood them, she’d assumed they were in reference to her. But she’d been wrong. It wasn’t her who Malik had been talking about.
With a start, she realised the others were waiting for her response. ‘Piss off,’ she quipped, and started forward in earnest once more.
‘Not very princess-like!’ Cal called after her.
Thea urged her mare to quicken her pace. ‘I’m not a fucking princess,’ she shouted back.
True to her word, as dusk fell around them, Thea begrudgingly allowed them to stop, handing her flask of ale over to her eager friend. Exhaustion settling deep into her bones, she made her way through the dense forest, searching for a suitable spot to set up camp and finding an alcove that offered a small reprieve from the biting wind. While the others gathered kindling and wood, Thea tried to create a level surface for their tents, her fingers aching in the cold. She knew it would make more sense to share a tent with her friends given the freezing temperatures, but she simply couldn’t bring herself to do it. The last tent she’d shared had been withhimafter the battle of Notos.
‘I need you,’she had whispered.
‘You have me. Every part of me belongs to you…’
Lies. So many lies. And she’d believed them all. Was he laughing at her out there? At how easily he’d gotten under her skin? At the apprentice he’d fucked and thrown to the wolves?
‘Should have stayed in the village,’ Cal moaned as he returned and began preparing the fire, holding his blue-tinged fingers over the weak flames and blowing air into the kindling.
‘Blame Thea,’ Kipp said, cheerfully taking a swig from his flask after tending to the horses.
‘Oh, I do,’ Cal replied, holding his hand out for the ale.
Thea watched her friends quietly as she finished setting up her tent, wishing she could find that sense of ease once more. But her mind was troubled by thoughts of the fallen Warsword, of fate stones and daughters of darkness, of a tearing Veil and a world on the brink of destruction. And so she ate her rations in silence and retired to her tent, leaving Cal and Kipp to their ale and bickering.
‘Wake me when it’s my turn for sentry,’ she said, closing the flap behind her and lighting a small lantern.
With more vigour than she intended, she unbuckled and unlaced the outer layers of her armour, hating thathe’dbeen the one to give it to her. Every time she put it on, she was plagued with the memory of him kneeling before her, his touch skimming across her body as he strapped her into it. A small part of her had considered getting rid of the set for that reason alone, but it was too fine a make, too good a fit, and she’d never find a decent replacement on the road. So every day, she wore it with resentment, and every time it saved her from bodily harm, she cursed Wilder Hawthorne anew.
Even after she had removed the most cumbersome parts of her armour, Thea feared sleep wouldn’t come easily. It rarely did these days. She busied herself with Audra’s meditation cards, reading over the mental exercises her former warden expected her to do while she hunted down a traitor. Thea nearly laughed at that. It was exactly the sort of thing Audra would expect. She was a hard-arse, if there ever was one.
She shuffled the cards. Each was the size of her palm, the corners bent, the surfaces smudged with grime and soot, the ink bleeding on some of the ones she’d dropped in the snow. It hardly mattered. She knew most of them by heart now.
Thea closed her eyes and tipped her face towards the ceiling of her tent, taking a deep breath.Strong of mind, strong of body, strong of heart,she told herself. She didn’t know why, out of all thirty cards, that one had resonated with her the most. But when those words were echoing in her head, she somehow felt less broken, as though there were some small hope in the world that she might put the pieces of herself back together. It was a brief reprieve from the hollowness inside, where the kernel of her power had once bloomed.
In the privacy of her tent, she sought it out again, night after night, to no avail. She combed through the lessons she’d had with Audra and Wren.
‘What does your lightning and thunder tell you?’Wren had asked in Notos.
‘I am the storm…’ Thea muttered now. But with every utterance of those words, that empty space ate away at her, a constant nagging sensation from the deepest part of her soul.
With a quiet curse, Thea stuffed the cards back in her cloak pocket, her fingers brushing against the other item she couldn’t seem to leave alone. The sapphire she’d taken from Hawthorne’s effects before she’d left Notos.
The brilliant blue gem gleamed in her palm. Of all the things for her to take, she found no rhyme or reason to another woman’s jewel making it into her possession.
