30. Max
Max
The dragon didn’t land in the courtyard so much as hit it, and I was off his back before his talons finished tearing furrows in the flagstones.
Elenmoor blazed with lights and soldiers, guards already pouring into the search grid while my Nightingale crew came running half-armed. The heirs fanned out around me, barking orders.
Everybody’s mouth was moving, and the sound arrived a half-second late and wrong, the way voices come down a shaft.
The one night a year when every eye in the kingdom turned up toward the mountains, when the gates stood open by sacred custom and the streets ran thick with people, the enemy struck.
They hadn’t beaten our security. They’d read our calendar.
I’d studied the duty rosters myself. I’d seen the doubled watch and told myself it was enough, and then I’d climbed onto a dragon and flown away.
My hands wouldn’t close all the way. I kept flexing them and they kept not closing. Out past those open gates my sister was somewhere in the dark with every minute costing us a mile.
I tried the square. In four, hold four, out four. I got as far as the hold and my lungs quit on me.
Max? Max. The Coldiron had gone small and uncertain on my arm. Where’s the hunt? Tell us what to cut.
Nikolai and Caspian stayed with me while Drakken and Aelindor took the new hunt.
We hit the infirmary first, a long room that smelled of blood and medicine, with three beds down one wall.
My stomach came up so fast I had to stop walking and stand there with my hand on the doorframe and swallow it back down.
Corporal Dane had the first bed. My sister’s shadow guard lay gray and slack with a healer’s hands buried to the wrist in his side.
Josette had the second, her wrists strapped down so she’d stop reaching for the door. The woman from the Haven who’d stood in my doorway with her hands folded and asked to take care of my sister.
One of the healers spoke without looking up. “She’d been down a long while before anyone found her.”
“Live, Josette,” I said, and hoped she could hear it.
Marco had the third bed, and he was fighting two medics to get his boots on the floor.
“I’m joining the search,” he rasped.
“You’re staying in that bed, Marco.” Nikolai put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re not out of the woods. We’re here now.”
“Heard something on the west stair and went to look.” He pressed the wad of bandages over his ribs and got the rest of it out in pieces, breath by breath.
“Met Frost in the corridor with Missy asleep over his shoulder.” His jaw locked.
“Said he had to take her somewhere safe, and then he put a blade in me. Inch off my heart. If I hadn’t twisted at the last second, I’d be ash.
” His eyes came to mine. “I called it in and I followed. Tracked them as far as the second lane, and then my legs quit.” A breath. “I failed her.”
“What was she wearing?”
Marco blinked.
“When he had her over his shoulder. What did she have on?”
“A blue nightshirt,” he said.
I nodded.
Missy had been wearing that blue nightshirt she’d picked out herself in the lower market, the one with the crooked hem she wouldn’t let anyone mend.
“I didn’t do it.”
Frost stood in the doorway, and for the first time since I’d known him, the major looked shaken.
“Fucking traitor!” Marco came off the bed, and Nikolai pressed him back down.
“Stay down, Commander Marco!”
The Coldiron came off my forearm before I decided anything.
It was halfway to a blade and pointed at Frost—a man who had carried my sister on his shoulders and brought her a whole library—and my arm had done it without asking me. The only reason it stopped was that Caspian said my name.
Max, stop.
Frost hadn’t moved. He hadn’t so much as shifted his weight, and I understood that he’d have let me do it.
“I was in the operations room from sunset.” Frost’s voice thinned. “Forty officers will swear to it. It wasn’t me.”
I got the metal back. It went sullen and slow. No joyful murder today? Shit.
“How did the alarm go up?” Nikolai asked.
Good question. A better one than any I’d managed since the flagstones. I stood there, breathing hard, and let a vampire run my investigation for me.
“A clerk from the quartermaster’s office wished me a good evening on the stair.
Then she asked whether the little one was all right since I’d carried her out past her window a quarter hour before.
” Frost’s hand closed on the doorframe. “I ran the whole way. I was already too late when I started running.”
He looked down at his empty hand. “We haven’t found her.”
“Major Frost is clean.” Quill had her deck in one hand. “No strings, no taint. Whoever put steel in you, it didn’t come through this man’s mind. Somebody wore Frost.”
Thelxin came in behind her. “There’s a shapeshifter inside our walls, and it’s been in here long enough to know which corridor Missy sleeps at the end of.”
Aelindor’s residence was supposed to be the safest place on this base for her. The room dropped another degree.
“It’s not one of us,” Quill said. “The rescued are loyal to you. I skimmed them.”
“Where did you find them?” I asked. “Dane and Josette.”
“Dane at the vehicle bay, behind the fuel drums. Lured out there and put down where nobody had a reason to look.” Frost’s voice went flat. “Josette in the cleaning room off the west stair. She dragged herself into the corridor afterward. That’s the only reason the search party found her at all.”
Quiet work, both of them, on a night when the whole base was out watching the mountains burn.
“Desta is missing too,” Frost said. “She’s nowhere on the base.”
“If it’s her, she’ll be so fucking sorry.” Caspian’s wolf was up in his eyes. “I fucking swear it.”
I swallowed. “Desta doesn’t have magic. She was screened. Twice.”
Nobody answered me.
“Twice,” I said again. “She came up clean both times and I sat with her for the second one.”
Nikolai said carefully, “Nobody is disputing the screening, Eirath.”
“Then what are you—”
“We’re saying she didn’t need magic to walk out with Missy.”
It hit me like a spike of Coldiron.
She hadn’t needed magic. She’d needed a door, and I’d given her one. I’d argued for her to stay. She’s my oldest friend alive; she’s from the mine.
The shapeshifter got Frost’s face. It didn’t need Desta’s. Desta walked out of here wearing her own.
And Desta had combed Missy’s hair. Desta had loved her like a sister too.
She’s been in his house too long. Things change in the dark.
My old demon’s warning came up out of nowhere.
Warned. I’d been warned, in my own skull, in words I could still hear, and I had heard it and filed it and gone on being right about her because being wrong meant something about me I wasn’t prepared to carry.
I had chosen. That’s what killed me. Nobody fooled me. I looked straight at it and I chose, and my little sister was going to pay the bill.
Quill spread her cards on the floor and swung a location charm over a map. It circled once, dragged, then pulled hard toward the southern edge of the paper.
And kept pulling. Past the walls, off the map entirely.
“Missy is with Desta,” Quill said. “And they’re already outside the base.”
Beyond the walls, beyond the wards, out in a night with his agents already standing in it. I got a breath in, and it stopped halfway.
The room went narrow at the edges, everything sliding off to the sides.
Caspian stepped in on one side of me and Nikolai on the other, as close as the geas allowed.
Close enough that I could feel the heat coming off Caspian and the cold coming off Nikolai, and not one inch closer.
“Eirath.” Nikolai crouched into my line of sight so I had to see him. “Look at me. Not at the wall. At me.”
I dragged my gaze to him.
“Breathe, Eirath. She’s alive. Your sister is alive.”
“How do you know?”
“Because a corpse is worth nothing to the monster who wants you,” he said. “She’s a bargaining piece, and bargaining pieces are kept whole.”
Air came back into my lungs.
“Let’s go hunt.” Caspian’s voice had gone to gravel. “My wolf will find her.”
The parties split to cover more ground. Caspian took me and half the Nightingale team, while Nikolai led the other half with a squad of guards.
Aelindor led his Fae warriors in a sweep of his western region, and Drakken took a spread of his men through the east side with the Spartans out beside them.
The heirs had already locked down every road out of the capital, checkpoints strung across the map.
Getting out of the base was its own battle.
The streets were a solid river of celebration, lantern processions winding six abreast, children in little zodiac masks riding shoulders, off-duty soldiers deep in their cups, dancers and drummers and vendors’ stalls narrowing every lane to a throat.
We shoved and shouted and lost whole minutes to the joy of people who had no idea, and every laughing face I pushed past made the noise in my skull climb another notch.
A woman held a little girl up over the crush to see the beacons burning on the ring. Five, maybe six. The girl shrieked with delight, and her mother had both hands locked around her ribs, laughing with her.
I went eleven steps past them before I could breathe again.
I rode the dragon round all twelve beacons tonight.
I stood on his back over this town and watched these people cheer and thought: the lights hold, we’re still here.
The whole time I was up there being a symbol, a woman I’d let in was walking my sister out through a gate that stood open because it was a holy night.
Caspian shifted, and the wolf came up big as a dray horse and put a snarl into the night air. The crowd came apart in front of us like a wave hitting rock.
Someone screamed. Someone else laughed, because it was a festival, and a giant wolf in the street was a fun thing on a night like this, and a drummer three stalls down started up a beat for him.
They still didn’t know. Not one of them. The kingdom went on being happy all around me, and I ran through the middle of it with my chest full of broken glass.
We ran the cleared path out the southern gate. Nobody along it had seen Missy or Desta. There were too many people, too much light and noise, and my sister was small enough for a crowd to swallow whole without leaving a mark.
At the gate the wolf put his nose down and worked a half-circle, and then his head snapped up along the exact bearing Quill’s charm had pulled.
South. One town south, and moving.