48. Lucy
Lucy
Carry an onion in your pocket through a sickroom. It will take the illness meant for you. Bury it after, deep, and tell no one where.
Twelve.
Twelve meant the river might not run. Twelve meant spring planting on a knife’s edge.
Twelve meant the city I’d been living inside for weeks, the people who’d fed me and sat with me and given me red dresses and honey cakes and a purpose I hadn’t asked for, might not have enough to survive until next winter.
I knew where the thirteenth was.
The Ossira warmed against my throat in agreement, orienting itself south and east the way it always did at sunset. Thirteen Moonborn. Thirteen, and the city prospers. Thirteen, and the river runs.
I moved to the edge of the crowd. The last of the light was going fast, the fog taking the color out of everything above the mountain line. I found the place I’d been using, away from the lanterns, away from the people still watching the pass, and waited.
“Lucy!” Emrys had pushed through the crowd and was running toward me, slightly out of breath, like he’d been looking and had only just found me.
“Wait,” he said. “Just a second.”
He reached into his pocket and held out his hand pulling out a fistful of rocks. Small ones, varying shades of blue and gray and black, smooth-edged stones he’d clearly collected over time. He looked at them and then at me with an expression he was trying very hard to make casual.
“If you have time out there,” he said. “I want to know which one is the shade of the ocean. Maybe you could take them with you.”
He dropped the rocks into my hand. I looked at the rocks then at his face. At the city behind him with its floating lanterns and its honey cakes and its dragons who had never once seen the water that stretched farther than they could imagine.
I didn’t laugh. I wanted to, but I didn’t, because it would have come out wrong. Instead, I dropped the rocks back into his palm.
“The ocean is every one of them,” I said.
“Every shade you’re holding. It changes with the weather and the time of day and how deep it gets.
Usually, it’s so dark it’s almost black.
Sometimes it’s the gray of early morning.
Sometimes, when the light is right, it’s the blue at the bottom of your pile there. ”
He looked down at his hand.
“Close your eyes,” I said.
“Don’t make it weird,” he said with a grin.
“Just close your eyes before I have to go. Trust me.”
Copper lashes fell to flushed cheeks.
“You’re standing on a cliff,” I said. “Not like the ones here. Lower. The ground drops away fast and the water is right there beneath you, close enough that the spray reaches your boots.” I watched his face.
“It’s loud. That’s the first thing. Louder than you expect, this constant sound underneath everything else, like the world is breathing.
” His brow smoothed out as he listened. “And the smell is salty and cold and alive, and the wind comes off it different than any wind you’ve felt, heavier somehow, like it’s carried a long way to reach you.
” I paused. “And it goes on forever, Emrys. You look out and there’s no end to it.
Just water and sky until they become the same thing. ”
He was very still.
“That’s it,” I said quietly. “That’s the ocean.”
He opened his eyes and looked at the rocks in his hand for a long moment as the Ossira began to burn.
“Keep them,” I said. “So you remember.”
He closed his fist around them. “Take me with you.”
I stumbled backward. “What?”
“Maybe if you hold my hand, we can walk through together. I can help you with whatever you’re doing out there. I promise I won’t get in the way and I’m a good flier.”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this.
“Yes. Yes, of course. And maybe if I can get you out, you don’t have to come back, Emrys.
You could find a life outside of the walls.
You could watch the tide every single night and the sun rise over the ocean every day.
There’s a perfect spot for you in Aventh Gate.
That’s where I’m from. You could experience city life and love the ocean. You could have something different.”
My heart was racing. If I could get Emrys out, then I could come back for Tavian. I could find the thirteenth Moonborn, make sure the city survived with fresh water. I could bring food back in and night by night help someone else escape. The plan was brilliant.
I grabbed his hand. “Don’t let go. The second I shift, wrap your tail around me to hold the connection.”
His eyes were as wide as mine with excitement. We were doing this. He’d see the ocean in minutes.
“Don’t let go. Got it.”
We shifted together.
The change moved through us both in tandem, wings erupting, the world expanding, and I felt him beside me, light blue, large and solid and real, his tail already finding mine, looping once around it the way I’d told him.
I launched into the fog.
The cold hit immediately, that familiar bone-deep bite of the wards pressing in from every side. I pushed through it, felt Emrys’s tail tighten around mine, felt his presence right behind me, and for one brilliant, breathless second I thought it was going to work.
Then his grip vanished.
I tumbled forward, spinning in the white nothing of the fog, and landed hard on the other side in a shower of ash and cold air, alone.
I was through. He wasn’t.
I spun and flew back immediately, throwing myself at the wall of fog, reaching for the place where he should have been. The wards hit me like a closed fist, slamming me backward, refusing entry the way they always did.
I tried again. Same result. Again. Harder. The fog gave nothing. The wards held.
I hovered in the dark on the outside of the wall, wings beating, chest heaving, staring at the white barrier that separated me from the city and the dragon who had closed his eyes and listened to me describe the ocean like a man who had been waiting his whole life to hear it.
He couldn’t get out.
The Ossira burned, pulling me south and east, indifferent to all of it. I pressed my forehead against the edge of the fog where it thinned just slightly, not enough to pass through, just enough to feel the cold of it against my scales.
“We’ll find a way,” I said, to the white and the dark and whatever fragment of magic might carry it through. “I promise we’ll find a way.”
The fog said nothing.
If I found the thirteenth Moonborn and kept him safe and the river ran and the city survived the season, they'd all still be there when I figured out how to bring the walls down properly. One night hadn't worked. That didn't mean it couldn't be done. It just meant I had more work to do first.
The Ossira burned and I followed it south, and for the first time since it had been placed around my throat, I was grateful for the direction it gave me. Find the thirteenth.
I flew hard. The Ash stretched below, black and silver in the moonlight, and I tracked the pull. The Ossira was pleased with my obedience. It’s hum at my throat more comforting than it’d ever been. Close. He was close. And tonight was our night.
Something slammed into me from the left.
I spun, wings catching air, claws finding nothing, and then his hands were on my arms and the shift took me without warning. I landed on two feet in a red dress in the middle of the dark Ash with the thirteenth Moonborn somewhere to the southeast and Riot standing directly in front of me.
He looked at me.
Looked at the dress.
Looked at me again.
“You—” He stopped.
“Riot.”
His eyes moved from my face to my shoulders to the way the red caught even the faint light out here and back to my face again. “That color.”
“I need to go.”
“It’s very—” He made a gesture toward me, losing his composure and fight in one fell swoop.
“Riot.” I stepped closer, which I recognized immediately as a mistake. “I have to go. There are twelve Moonborn and I know where the thirteenth is and if I find him tonight—”
“What happens if you find him?” His voice had steadied but his eyes hadn’t quite caught up. They dropped to the neckline of the dress and came back up with visible effort.
“The city doesn’t starve.” The pull sharpened in my chest. “Twelve means the river might not run in spring. Twelve means the farmland fails. If I deliver the thirteenth, Luneth Hollow survives. The Ossira has been pulling me toward him for weeks and tonight I finally understand why. That’s the bargain.
That’s what it wants. I complete the hunt and maybe it releases me. ”
Riot went very still, his obsession with the gown vanishing as the words settled in. “Lucette.”
“I know where he is. I just need—”
“It can’t be right.” He stepped forward, and the distance between us disappeared entirely.
“Someone who keeps an entire city prisoner, who forces you to hunt through pain and demand, who built something that burns you when you resist and strips you of yourself every single night... That person cannot have good intentions. Whatever story you’ve been told about what this saves and why, it belongs to someone.
It’s their narrative. It’s not the truth.
I’m going to need you to see reason. Think about it. ”
The pull tore at me. South and east and insistent and real.
An entire city, held behind wards. Collared dragons flying patrol.
Targets selected and sent to a beach I’d never seen.
Moonborn delivered like an offering to someone that had never once shown themselves.
I remembered choking on air. I remembered the burning at my throat so badly I thought I’d die.
I remembered when I couldn’t remember at all. And my capture…
He was right.
Fuck. He was right. What was I thinking? But the children in the city…
I started moving. Three steps south, three steps back, three steps south again. The Ossira pulled and I moved against it, using the pacing to keep myself human and present while my mind tore through everything I thought I’d understood.