فصل شانزدهم

Sixteen: Mare

“I’m not an idiot, Evangeline,” I growl as the changing-room door slams behind us.

She just sighs, shoving a training suit into my chest. With practiced, even motions, she strips out of her simple gown and tosses it to the side, discarding the puddle of silk like a pile of trash. Naked but for her underclothes, she pours herself into a training suit of her own. Clearly custom-made for her, printed with a scaled design of black and silver.

Mine is less ornate. A simple navy blue. Furious with her scheming, I pull off my own clothes before forcing the suit on.

“You might as well just shove us into a closet and lock the door,” I snarl, watching her braid her silver hair away from her face. She does it quickly, without thought, forming a crown around her head.

Evangeline only twists her lips. “Trust me, I would if I thought that might work on you. Him, yes. A closet would be enough. But you?” She throws her hands wide, shrugging. “You can never make anything easy.” “So, what, you’re going to try to beat the shit out of me and hope he feels some pang of sympathy? Maybe have him nurse me back to health?” I shake my head, disgusted.

“It seemed to be working in Montfort.” Her eyes paw over me. “Those Silences did a real number on you.” My eyes narrow. “Well, I have my reasons,” I snap back, defensive. The memory is like a slap to the face, followed by a deep kick to the gut. I dig my nails into my palm, trying not to slide back into the sensation of being suffocated. In the mountain foothills, in a palace bedroom. From Silvers or from manacles. Without thinking, I circle my fingers around my wrist and squeeze. It almost makes me vomit onto the polished tile floor.

“I know,” she replies, softer than before. If she were anyone else, I might think that was concern shadowing her voice. But not Evangeline Samos. She doesn’t have the ability to feel sympathy toward Reds.

I cough, regaining some of my composure. “Even if you somehow did drive us back together, it wouldn’t accomplish anything. You said yourself, he’s not the abdicating kind. It’s a stupid plan, Evangeline,” I add, for both our sakes.

She looks at me sidelong, buckling a brace of daggers into place around her thigh. One side of her mouth lifts. I can’t decide if it’s a smirk or a smile. “We’ll see.” All grace and agility, she crosses back to the door, gesturing for me to follow her out onto the waxed wood.

I do so reluctantly, pulling my hair back into a neat tail. Half of me hopes Tiberias is already gone. I focus my eyes on a spot between her shoulder blades.

“It’s a stupid plan, not just because Tiberias already made his choice,” I continue, sliding by her onto the training floor. Instinctively I shift my weight to the balls of my feet, almost bouncing as we walk. I grin back at her. “But also because you’re never going to lay a finger on me.” She clutches a hand to her chest in false pain. The changing-room door slams shut behind her. “Mare, I’m supposed to be the overly confident one.” I keep grinning, walking backward to keep my eyes on her. I don’t trust anyone to fight fair, especially her. “Maybe Elane can lick your wounds?” Evangeline only raises her chin, looking down her nose at me. “She does, and frequently. Jealous?” My face flares red. I feel the heat of it all down my neck. “No.”

Now it’s her turn to grin. She shoulders past me, knocking her arm into mine with marked force. I twist, but she keeps her body squared to me, never letting me pass out of her eye line. We start to resemble dance partners turning in a ballroom. Or wolves circling in the dark, predators testing each other. Searching for openings and weaknesses. Opportunities.

I have to admit, the prospect of blowing off some steam, and maybe getting a few good rounds in, has me excited. Adrenaline already surges through my veins in anticipation. A good fight, the kind without consequences or any real danger, sounds especially delicious. Even if it means admitting Evangeline was right about sparring.

Across the floor, I spy Kilorn looking on, with Tiberias standing beside him. Ptolemus keeps his distance. I don’t waste my attention on them, even though Evangeline wants me to. She’ll probably slice my face the second I drop my guard.

“You should train more,” she says, her voice a bit louder. It echoes through the open space. I wonder if Evangeline was simply born without shame. “Work that stress out of your system in other ways. Or with other people.” I blink a rapid tempo, truly surprised. My entire body floods with warmth, and for once, it isn’t Cal’s fault. She grins at my discomfort, even tipping her head toward Cal and Kilorn a few yards away. Both of them are clearly listening to our conversation, while simultaneously trying to look like they aren’t. Evangeline raises an eyebrow toward Kilorn, surveying him with a keen eye.

The implication dawns on me. “Oh, he’s not—”

“Don’t make me laugh,” she sneers, taking another step backward. “I’m talking about that other newblood. The Montfort one. White hair, deep voice. Thin and tall.” Suddenly the heat coursing through my body turns icy, and I feel the hair on my neck rise. Cal pushes off the far wall. His eyes slide past me as he turns, dropping into his final routine. Push-ups. He works at a steady but fast pace, rising and falling. In the silence, I can just hear his rhythmic puffs of breath over the embarrassing thud of my own heart.

Why are my palms so sweaty?

Evangeline leers, more than satisfied. She dips her chin a little, nodding. Goading me on. Do it, she mouths to me.

“His name is Tyton, and he isn’t here,” I growl, hating myself as the words come out. Across the room, Cal quickens his pace. “This an even stupider plan,” I add, leaning in to whisper as low as I can.

Evangeline tosses her head. “Is it?”

She breaks my nose with her skull before I can answer.

My vision spots: I see black, red, all colors in a dizzy spiral as I slump sideways, falling to my knees. Crimson blood spurts down my face, running into my mouth and over my chin. The familiar tang wakes something up. Instead of collapsing, I gather my legs under me and spring.

My head collides with her chest bone, and I hear a whoosh as the air goes out of her lungs. She stumbles, arms pinwheeling as she lands flat on her back. I swipe a hand across my face. It comes back sticky with blood, and I wince, trying to think through the yowling pain.

Across the floor, Cal is on his knee, eyes wide, jaw tight, about to get up. I shake my head at him and spit blood on the ground. Stay where you are, Calore.

He does.

The first dagger sings past my ear, a warning. I drop beneath the second, rolling across the smooth, almost slippery wood floor. Evangeline’s laughter rings in my ears. I silence it quickly, lunging forward to grab her by the neck. She twists before I can get a good grip and shock her into submission. Only a few sparks touch her as she slides away, using the polished floor beneath us to her advantage. Still, my sparks are not gentle. She twitches as she moves, as if trying to brush off a particularly tenacious insect.

“You’re better than I remember,” she pants, coming to a stop a few yards away.

I clench one fist, the other pressed to my nose in an attempt to stem the river of blood. Not a pretty picture by any standard. Red spatters the floor already. “I could drop you where you stand if I wanted,” I tell her, remembering what I learned with the electricons. Web lightning, storm lightning. But not Tyton’s impossible brain lightning, which I still have no control over.

Evangeline shakes her head, smiling. She’s enjoying this. “You’re welcome to try.” I match her grin. Fine.

My lightning erupts, purple and white, blinding, burning, hissing through air already damp with sweat. She reacts with near-inhuman speed, her knives suddenly melded into a single, long band of steel. It pierces the floor as the lightning hits, making it ripple into the metal. It misses its mark with a flash that blinds even me.

Then her elbow cracks into my chin, throwing me backward. I see stars again.

“Nice trick,” I mumble, rolling the blood around my mouth. When I spit this time, I think I hear a tooth ping off the floor. I confirm my suspicious with my tongue, feeling the sudden, unfamiliar gap in my bottom teeth.

Evangeline rolls her shoulders, her breath coming in uneven gasps. “Had to even the playing field somehow.” With a small grunt, she yanks the spear out of the floor and twists it around her wrist. “Finished warming up?” Slowly, I laugh.

“Oh yes.”

I wait my turn, watching as Wren works on Evangeline’s face. One of her eyes is swollen shut, colored a black and sickly gray-purple that deepens with the passing minutes. The other eyelid twitches every few seconds. Some busted nerve. She huffs at me, shoulders rising and falling, then winces, pressing a bloody hand to her side.

“Stay still,” Wren mutters for the third time. She traces the side of Evangeline’s face, and the swelling recedes in her wake. “You broke a rib.” Evangeline glares as best she can with one barely working eye. “Good fight, Barrow.” “Good fight, Samos,” I answer with some difficulty. Between a split lip, the nose, and the bruised jaw, even talking stings. I have to lean, keeping my weight off my left ankle, which is steadily dripping blood from a neat gash above the knobbly exposed bone.

The three men stand back, giving us all the space we need to breathe.

Kilorn looks between Evangeline and me, his mouth hanging open in disbelief. And maybe fear. “Girls are weird,” he mutters to himself.

Tiberias and Ptolemus bob their heads, agreeing.

I think Evangeline is trying to wink. Or the twitch is worse than I thought. Maybe I’m exhausted from the fight, but I almost laugh. With her, not at her. The realization sobers me up, and the pulsing, electric feel of adrenaline starts to fade. I can’t forget who she is, and what her family has done to mine. Her brother, sitting just a few feet away, killed Shade. Robbed Clara of a father, Farley of a partner. Took a son from my mother and father. Stole a brother from me.

And I’ve tried to do the same.

Evangeline senses the shift in me, and her gaze drops, her face returning to carefully sculpted stone.

Wren Skonos is skilled: her skin-healer abilities restore Evangeline to fighting shape in a few minutes. The two young women contrast each other, Evangeline with her braided silver hair and pale skin, Wren with a long braid of gleaming jet hair cast over one bare blue-black shoulder. I don’t miss the way Ptolemus watches the skin healer as she finishes up with his sister. His eyes linger on her neck, her face, her collarbone. Not her fingers or her handiwork. It’s easy to forget he’s married to Elane. At least in name. Though I suppose his sister spends more time with his bride, while he spends his own with Wren. What a confusing family.

“Now you,” Wren says, gesturing for me to take Evangeline’s spot. The Samos princess stands, stretching out her newly healed abdomen with the grace of a cat.

I sit gingerly, wincing as I do.

“Big baby,” Kilorn chuckles.

In response, I grin aggressively, careful to show the new gap in my bloodstained teeth. He pretends to shudder.

Ptolemus laughs at the display, earning a glare from both of us.

“Something funny?” Kilorn sneers, stepping closer to the silver-haired man. My friend is too brave for his own good, with no regard for the magnetron prince who could cut him in two.

“Kilorn, I’ll be along in a second,” I cut in loudly, hoping to kill any conflict before it starts. I don’t fancy wiping Kilorn’s blood off the training floor. He glances at me, annoyed by my nannying, but I stay resolute. “It’s okay, go on.” “Fine,” he grinds out, careful to glare back at Ptolemus as he walks away.

When the echo of his footsteps dies, Evangeline smoothly stands, her intentions clear. She barely smirks as she leaves us too, her brother in tow, and they head in a different direction. She glances over her shoulder. I catch her gaze as it flicks between me and Tiberias, who is still silent, hanging close. Hope flares in her eyes. It only makes my heart sink.

It’s a stupid plan, I want to say again.

Relief pulses from Wren’s fingers, soothing each aching muscle and blooming bruise. I shut my eyes, letting her prod and pull me in different directions. Wren is Sara Skonos’s cousin, a daughter of a noble house torn between two Calore kings. She served Maven before, working as my healer in Archeon. She watched me through those days. Kept me alive when the weight of Silent Stone would otherwise kill me. Kept my face and my body presentable for Maven’s broadcasts. Neither of us could predict where we would be today.

Suddenly, I don’t want the pain to go. It’s an easy distraction from the want in my heart. As Wren’s fingers dance along my jaw, stimulating bone growth to replace my lost tooth, I try not to picture Tiberias. But it’s impossible. He’s close enough to feel, the familiar warmth of him steady and constant.

Before, Evangeline said I was the difficult one. I think she’s wrong. If she trapped Tiberias and me in a room together, I’d probably snap.

And would that be so terrible?

“You blush a great deal.”

My eyes wrench open to see Wren hovering in front of my face, her full lips pursed. She blinks at me, her eyes the same stormy gray as Sara’s.

“It’s hot in here,” I reply.

Tiberias blushes too.

We walk in silence. The glass walls of Ridge House look out on flat darkness, the long, clean lights of the passages bouncing back at us. Our reflections keep pace, and I’m struck by the sight of us side by side. I never forget how tall he is, but this is a firm reminder of how ill suited we are. Despite the training session, the sweat still clinging to his skin, Tiberias is a prince born, descended from three centuries of kings. He was bred to be better than anyone else, and it shows.

I feel smaller than usual beside him. A dirty little speck of scars and heartache.

He feels my gaze and glances down. “So, New Town.”

Sighing, I brace myself for the discussion. “We need to do it,” I reply. “Not just for the war, but for us. Reds. The tech towns are little more than enslavement.” I’ve never set foot inside one, but I’ve seen Gray Town, a city of ash and smoke crowded onto the poisoned riverbank. I’ve seen Cameron’s neck and her brother’s, both harshly tattooed with their assigned place. Their “profession.” Their prison.

I intend to leave New Town and the other slums as little more than corpses. Empty, dead. Doomed to rot and disappear and be forgotten.

“I know,” Tiberias says softly, his voice tinged by blue regret. As I watch, his eyes darken. He knows what I’m really saying. If there were no crown between us, I would take his hand, kiss his shoulder. Thank him for even such a small display of support.

I bite my lip, blinking quickly to chase off the urge to touch. “I’ll need Cameron.” Her name wakes him up. “Is she . . .”

“Alive?” I offer, letting the word echo off the tumbled stone of the passageway. It lingers, a question as much as a hope. “She has to be.” He slows his pace. “Farley still hasn’t heard anything?”

“She will soon.”

The Scarlet Guard contingents in Piedmont, now converging on the Lowcountry to evacuate anyone who escaped the base, should have reports back in a matter of hours. And Ibarem should have more intelligence to relay when Rash gets to the other survivors. There is no realm of possibility where Cameron isn’t on the list. She’s too strong, too smart, and too damn stubborn to get herself killed.

I can’t even entertain the idea.

Not because we’ll need her to help destroy her wretched home, New Town, but because she’ll be one more body on my conscience. Another friend I pushed toward death.

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying not to think about the others who were still in Piedmont when Bracken took the base. Cameron’s brother, Morrey. The teenagers of the Dagger Legion, rescued from one siege only to be caught in another.

Nothing compares to the agony of losing Shade, but losing the others could destroy me just as easily. How long will this last? How many people will we risk losing?

This is war, Mare Barrow. You risk everyone, every single day.

Especially the person next to me.

I bite my lip, almost drawing blood, to stave off the thought of Tiberias, Cal, dead and gone.

“It doesn’t get easier,” he says, the words ragged.

I open my eyes to find him staring ahead with the dogged focus he usually saves for a battlefield or a war council.

“What?”

“Losing people,” he growls. “There’s never a moment where it goes away, no matter how many times it happens. You never get used it.” An eternity ago, when I was Mareena Titanos, I stood inside a prince’s bedchamber. He had books all over the place: manuals, treatises on war, strategy, diplomacy. Maneuvers and manipulations for gigantic armies and single soldiers. Calculations weighing the risk and reward. How many people could die and yet he’d still be able to claim victory. Back then it was a stark reminder of who he was, and whose side he was on.

It disgusted me to think of him as a person who would trade life so carelessly. Spill blood for another inch of progress. Now I’ve done the same thing. So has Farley. So has Davidson. None of us are innocent.

None of us will ever be able to forget what we do in these days.

“If it never goes away,” I murmur, feeling as if I might be drowned, “it will eventually be too much.” “Yeah,” he says hoarsely.

I wonder how close he is to his line, and how close I am to mine. Will we cross it on the same day? Is that the only answer?

Do we walk away, broken and beyond repair, together? Or apart?

His eyes smolder over me. I think he’s asking himself the same thing.

Shuddering, I quicken my steps. A firm signal to both of us. “What’s the plan for Harbor Bay?” I ask, looking down the long hall. It bridges this wing of Ridge House to the next, arcing over a weaving garden of trees and fountains barely visible in the darkness.

Tiberias matches my pace easily. “Nothing is set until Davidson comes back. But Farley has ideas, and her contacts in the city will certainly be of help.” I nod in agreement. Harbor Bay is the oldest city in Norta, a warren of Red criminals and their gangs. A few months ago, one of those gangs, the Mariners, tried to sell us to Maven as we searched for newbloods. But the tide is changing. The Reds of Norta are falling into line as the Scarlet Guard grows in power and notoriety. Our victories are having an effect on some, at least.

“There will be civilian casualties,” Tiberias adds, matter-of-fact. “It isn’t Corvium or Piedmont. Harbor Bay is a city, not a fort. Innocent people, Silver and Red, will be stuck in the middle of this.” He flexes a hand, stretching out long, keen fingers before cracking his knuckles one by one. “We’ll start with Fort Patriot. If we can take control there, the rest of the city will fall.” I’ve only see Patriot from afar, and the memory is vague. It’s smaller than the Piedmont base, but better equipped and far more important to Maven’s armies.

“Governor Rhambos and his house are sworn to Maven,” I reply. “They’re still firm allies.” Due in no small part to me, since I killed his son in the arena during a failed execution. Of course, he was also trying to kill me. “They won’t surrender easily.” Tiberias scoffs. “No one ever does.”

“And if you win the city?” I prod. If you survive?

“Then I think we can get Maven to the table.”

The name sends a jolt through me. At my collarbone, Maven’s brand smarts and warms, itching for attention.

“He won’t negotiate. He won’t surrender at all.” I feel sick at the thought of Maven’s empty eyes, his wicked smile. The cloying, unbreakable obsession plaguing us both. “There’s no point in it, Tiberias.” He winces at my use of his full name, eyes sliding shut for a second. “That’s not why I want to see him.” The implication is clear. “Oh.”

“I have to be sure,” he grinds out. “I asked the premier about whispers in his country. If there are any newbloods like Elara. Anyone who might be able to help him.” “And?”

When I walked away from Tiberias in Corvium, he looked heartbroken, agonized. This is no different. Love has a way of cutting us apart like nothing else. “He didn’t think so,” he admits quietly. “But he said he would keep looking.” I lay a hand on his arm, still damp with sweat. My fingers know his skin as well as my own by now. He feels like quicksand. If I linger too long, I won’t be able to escape.

I try to be gentle. “I doubt even Elara could fix him now. If he would let her.” His flesh flares hot beneath my hand and I pull away, remembering myself. He doesn’t react. There’s nothing he can say, and nothing he has to say to me. I know what letting go of Maven Calore looks like.

The passage ahead of us dead-ends at a T-shaped junction, trailing off to the left and right. His rooms to one side, mine to the other. We stare at the wall in silence, neither of us daring to move.

Speaking to him feels like a dream, a painful one. Even so, I don’t want to wake up.

“How long?” I whisper.

He doesn’t look at me. “Davidson will be here in a week’s time. With another week to plan.” His throat bobs. “Not long.” The last time I set foot in Harbor Bay, we were on the run. But my brother was alive. I wish I could go back to those days, hard as they were.

“I know what Evangeline’s trying to do,” Tiberias says suddenly, his voice thick with too many emotions to place.

I glance sidelong at him. “She’s not exactly subtle about it.”

He doesn’t return the gesture, continuing to stare at the wall in front of us. Never leaning one way or the other. “I wish there were some middle ground.” A place where our names and our blood and our pasts don’t matter. A place without weight. A place that has never been and will never exist.

“Good night, Tiberias.”

Hissing, he clenches a fist. “I really need you to stop calling me that.” And I really need you.

I turn and walk toward my room, my footsteps echoing and alone.