Her tension loosened somewhat. She smiled. “Only after you saved mine.”
His lips twisted into something that resembled a smile but lacked the happiness.
“How’s your shoulder?” she pressed on, nodding down at the heavy bandages. Veronyka had some bruises and scrapes along her face and neck but was otherwise unharmed from the attack.
He shrugged—then grimaced, the movement no doubt causing a spear of agony to rip through his wound. “I’ll live.”
“Good. That’s good,” she said, nodding. Glancing over her shoulder, Veronyka settled more comfortably next to him. “I was hoping I could ask you about Ilithya.”
He was clearly surprised by the question, but his frown quickly shifted from confusion to regret. “I . . . I didn’t know her for very long,” he admitted, a slight waver in his voice. “And I don’t know much about who she was before all this.”
Veronyka shook her head, feeling her heart reaching, grasping at every word like a thirsty plant in newly watered soil. “That’s okay. Tell me what you did know. What was she like?”
He rubbed a hand along the back of his neck, considering. “She was bossy. Brutal at times. She had a sharp tongue and a quick wit. She told the best stories. And she was kind, too, though I think she tried hard not to show it.”
Veronyka found herself smiling. Most of this she already knew, and it erased any lingering doubt she might have had as to whether they were talking about the same Ilithya. It felt good to know that the woman from her memories wasn’t some fiction, like Val had been. She was real.
“How did you know her?” Sev asked, drawing Veronyka back to the present.
“She, well . . . she was my grandmother.”
Sev sat up straighter. “You’re Veronyka, aren’t you?”
Veronyka darted a terrified look around. Luckily, Sev was fairly isolated, and most of the people who were awake were the healers and helpers tending the more gravely wounded in the other hall. Nobody had heard him.
“Did she talk about me?” Veronyka whispered.
“No,” he said, somewhat apologetically, “but she said your name in her sleep. Always yours . . . no one else’s.”
Veronyka wasn’t sure what to make of that information. On the one hand, it was validating, proof that her grandmother hadn’t forgotten about her, that the love they’d shared was real and lasting. On the other, it reminded her of all the lost time they could have spent together.
Veronyka forced herself to smile. She was grateful to him and glad that, for whatever reason, their lives had intersected in so many ways.
“Where did you find them?” she asked, nodding toward the satchel on the floor next to him. The sight of the eggs would have sent her heart bursting from her chest a few days ago, and though Xephyra had returned and so much had changed, they were still desperately important. In the face of the recent attack, the growth and development of new Riders seemed paramount.
“I didn’t. It was Kade who—one of the other bondservants,” he said, practically choking the words out. “He and Ilithya found them and kept them concealed throughout the journey.”
They must have come from somewhere in the empire. Could there be more? Could the empire hold the key to the Phoenix Riders’ survival, right in front of them but still out of reach?
“When it looked like they weren’t going to make it,” Sev continued, clearing his tight throat, “I delivered them instead. I never thought to ask where they came from, but if I had, Ilithya probably wouldn’t have told me. She loved her secrets.”
Veronyka huffed. “Secrets,” she muttered. She’d had enough of them to last a lifetime. Val, Ilithya, even Veronyka’s own identity was a tangled mess that felt impossible to unravel.
A full, wide grin split Sev’s face. It changed him, turned him from a beat-down soldier back into a boy. “That’s the thing with secrets,” he said, the words sounding like a bit of repeated wisdom and not something he’d come up with on his own. “They never really die. Just when one bursts into flames, another rises up to take its place.”
“Unless you break the cycle,” Veronyka whispered.
Sev tilted his head, considering her. “Or you ride them to the bitter end.”
Day 2, Eighth Moon, 170 AE
My dearest Avalkyra,
They say you plan to fly in force on the capital. Please, sweet sister, do not turn our home into a battleground.
We must speak again before this war makes corpses of us all.
I know I am no longer welcome in Pyra, and make no mistake, your army is not welcome here.
But you could come, Avalkyra. Alone.
I will wait atop Genya’s Tower every day after nightfall. Please come.
I have so much to say.
All my love, Pheronia
I was frightened at first, but I knew I must not fear the flames. I am the flames.
- CHAPTER 43 -
SEV
VERONYKA’S VISIT LEFT SEV in a dark mood. Darker mood. It hadn’t been sunshine and rainbows inside the infirmary, fighting through pain, ebbing in and out of consciousness, and listening to the wails of the dying and the unhappily living.
Sure, it had been nice to see her again, and it was good to know that she had survived this mess. It had also been good to talk about Trix, but with thoughts of her came thoughts of Kade. And no matter how he tried to see the positive, the fact of the matter was, he’d lost them both far too soon.
In the first few hours after Sev had arrived inside the infirmary, the terrible truth of all that had happened closing in, a bleak part of him hoped that Veronyka’s sister was here as well—the one who’d stolen his knife—and that she would make good on the promise she’d made outside her cabin. There was a moment, as he lay on his pallet half asleep, that he swore he did see her, but Sev had been tired and heavily drugged. There’d been no sign of her since, so it looked like Sev would just have to go on living.
The healer woman had said he was lucky the quarrel didn’t strike bone, and that chronic pain and limited movement were better than a shattered, useless limb.
The guard being treated next to him said he was lucky it was only his arm and not his chest, for surely a wound to the lungs or heart would have ended his life.
Lucky.
Sev couldn’t help but think Teyke was playing a cruel joke on him. So much luck, and yet he didn’t feel lucky at all.
They didn’t understand. It wasn’t the wound that made Sev slump on his pillows and stare absently into space. If anything, he saw it as a badge of honor. He had earned the pain and the scars; they were a part of him now and marked him as a survivor. No, it was the people he’d lost that left him feeling broken and hollow inside.
Trix was dead. Kade was surely dead as well. Sev had no idea what had happened to Junior, who was far too young to die, and the sheepherders Tilla and Corem. He hadn’t let himself think much about them until he’d arrived here, his message delivered and his task complete. Now, with every breath, a vast space of unfeeling emptiness opened wider and wider in his chest. Or was it so much feeling that Sev didn’t know what to do with it, or how to identify the sensation? He had gone from nothing to everything to nothing again, but things were different now. He was different.