Chapter Twenty-one
THEA
S he still felt the storm in her bones, in her heart; still felt the tempest raging within as she helped Wilder to his feet, the Warsword worryingly pale.
She had never known such terror, never known horror to run so deep as it had when she’d seen him collapse, the darkness lashing at his mind as well as his body.
It had hurt him. And that had unlocked something inside her, rendering her incapable of conscious thought. She had moved on instinct then, funnelling that fear for Wilder into something more powerful, more deadly – rage.
In rage she found her magic. In rage she summoned the storms and wrought them upon the enemy. There had been no strategy, no caution, only action.
Only lightning in her veins and thunder in her heart.
And she’d unleashed it upon the realm. Had used it without rhyme or reason, to defend the one thing in the world she couldn’t live without.
Thea watched Wilder, the fear for him still raw and fragile in her chest. He was visibly shaken, that towering wall of warrior rendered speechless in the wake of what he’d seen, in the wake of what she’d done.
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 a memory .
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 to remember . 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.
There, she found a stack of yellowed parchment bound in a protective leather sleeve. Frowning, she blew the dust from it and spread the pages on the workbench.
Sketches. Dozens of sketches depicting various types of armour. She recognised the full-body jacket armour made of quilted linen or wool known as a gambeson; Esyllt wore one of these every winter and then cursed its insulation in the summer months.
Thea turned the page to find a design for armour made with boiled leather – this was what most of the Guardians of Thezmarr wore, as it was the cheapest to produce and could be easily sourced from Harenth.
It was what her own set was crafted from.
Though Thea knew it wore out quickly, especially if the warrior failed to oil it regularly – which, of course, most of them did.
She still needed Wilder to teach her how to take care of her set.
A dripping sound distracted her and she glanced down to find herself bleeding. A nasty gash carved through her left arm. She vaguely remembered it happening in her battle against the wraith, but she couldn’t feel a thing now.
Thea continued to sift through the sketches: chain mail, steel plates, brigandine and combinations of them all, until she got to the final page.
In the top corner was a symbol she knew well: two crossed swords with a third cutting down the middle, the emblem of the Warsword.
And beneath it were several more sketches for armour.
Thea held the parchment by its edges, mindful not to smudge the designs or mar them with her bloody fingers.
Her chest was suddenly tight as she thought of the Warsword who had never seen this armour, who, despite passing the perils of the Great Rite, had not been gifted that which those before him had been.
Her heart cracked a little, and as it did, she carefully folded the final sketch and slid it into her satchel.
When she emerged from the armoury, she was surprised to find dark clouds still lingering over the ruins. She could taste the storm on her tongue, and again she felt the flicker of magic in her veins, itching at her fingertips.
That restlessness she’d always felt, that pressure, had started to build again.
She knew Wilder was right; the rheguld reaper had been on a scouting mission, and it had learnt of Thea’s power for its master. It would report that an heir of Delmira lived, and that her magic could summon lightning from nothing. That secret was no longer her own.
But that wasn’t the only thing it had gleaned from their skirmish.
Now, it knew not only of her strength…
But of her weakness, too.
Wilder Hawthorne .