Chapter 8
Ever
ENSLEE SHAKES HER HEAD AND drops her gaze at the shot I just fired.
I know she recognizes the phrase; it’s what she said to me right after she informed me that she sent my Flight into a trap and they were missing.
To be fair, I’d just called her reckless and she was pissed, but I stand by my statement.
“I can see you’re still mad—” Enslee starts, in that placating tone she knows I can’t stand.
“Mad doesn’t really begin to cover it,” I counter, leaning back against the dresser behind me.
Enslee tracks the movement and levels me with an offended glower when she notices I just put my weapons within reach.
“So that’s how it is?” she accuses.
“Please. Like you don’t have at least ten blades hidden on you right now.”
“I’m not reaching for them,” she argues.
“Neither am I. I was just making myself comfortable, since you seem to be in the mood to play games.”
“Games?” she demands.
I scoff. “I look better , Ens? Really? A human could have scented that lie. I look like shit. I know it, you know it, so why fucking lie about it? We don’t do that,” I tell her, gesturing between us. “At least, we didn’t used to, so what the fuck?”
“Fine,” she snips, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You looked like death before, and now you look like sun-scorched shit. It’s technically an improvement, so I’m not lying, but if you want to count scales, I will. Happy?”
“Ecstatic,” I snark.
“Great, I promise to be a judgmental bitch at all times moving forward. I’ll never attempt to spare your feelings again. Let it be written into law,” she pontificates and then aims a haughty look my way.
“Spare me, Your Highness . Let’s not pretend you take my feelings into account at all anymore,” I growl.
Enslee pops up from the chair and squares off with me. “I do, Ever , but you’re not the only person I’m responsible for. I have to consider what’s best for everyone, not just what’s best for you.”
I push away from the dresser and meet her head on. “And yet you did neither when you sent my Flight on a wild sorcai chase on the other side of the divide. And you did it despite being advised not to let anyone out of the fucking wards!”
Emotion constricts my lungs, and my face feels hot with frustration and fury.
I try to think about my mother’s words and the fact Enslee and I don’t fight, not like this.
However, I can tell by the anger radiating off my sister that we both have a lot we need to get off our chests, and there will be no moving forward for either of us until we do.
Enslee growls and threads her fingers through her hair, tugging on the roots like the movement will calm her outrage. She starts to pace and then stops herself.
“The bankers passed along intel about a Blood Crafter, just like they have dozens of times before. They sent a description that matched the Matron to a T,” she tells me, her hands punctuating each syllable.
“What would you have done in my shoes? They had no idea who we were looking for, so I had no reason to question the information. I had to act on the intel. It could have been our only shot at the Conduit for all I knew. What was I supposed to do?”
“You weren’t supposed to do anything, Enslee?.?.?. you were supposed to listen ! We’d been ambushed once already. I warned you that we had a traitor. Not shutting things down until we’d caught them was a bad fucking call!”
Enslee extends her arms in exasperation and throws back her head.
“I know that now, but at the time, the potential payoff of killing the Conduit outweighed the risks of sending a Flight to investigate. We’ve combated these odds on every hunt we’ve executed.
There have always been hazards and risks. You know that better than anyone.”
I mirror her body language, indignantly throwing my own arms out as I start to pace.
“Exactly, Enslee. I know the risks better than anyone, including you ,” I snap as I round on her, rage scalding me from the inside out.
How does she not understand? How is she missing the big picture?
Yes, killing the Conduit was important, but not at any cost. We’re not The Horde, we don’t sacrifice one Flight for the greater good, it’s not worth it.
There’s fifteen of us left, and all fifteen Syphons deserve to see things through to the end. I thought she understood that.
I wring my hands and try to stopper my mounting worry and hurt, but the tape and glue I’ve been using to hold myself together begin to unravel.
“You were supposed to trust me, Ens. How are we ever going to tackle what’s next if we don’t trust each other?” My voice gives under the weight of the enormity of what I’m asking, and I can’t help but feel our relationship teetering on the precipice of ruin.
Would she sacrifice me? The wyverns? More of the others? Where’s the line?
Enslee deflates and tears well in her eyes. We stare at each other, lost, hurt. I wish I could retrace our steps, figure out how we got here and prevent it somehow, but I know all too well that’s not how life works.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she tells me, shaking her head as though it will contradict what she sees blaring in my gaze. A tear breaks free and she hastily wipes it away. “I know I fucked up, Ever. I get it, I really do, and it will never happen again.”
Silence fills the space between us. I want to believe her.
We all make mistakes, but this feels different.
Maybe it’s the bombardment of betrayals that have been hitting us lately, or the fact that I’m not the same person I was the last time I sat in this room and talked something out with my sister.
We’ve always been one half of a whole. There was no me without her .
Then the last four months happened, and now I don’t know how I fit anymore.
Not just with my sister, but with everything, because how do you fix the unfixable?
“We’re looking for them, Ev, I promise,” she vows, tears spilling down her face now. “We’ll bring them home, we’ll find them.”
Slowly I shake my head, a desolate huff slipping out of me. I sense her sincerity, but she doesn’t know what she’s saying. If Wistan has my Flight, if he’s doing to them what he did to me, they won’t be whole when we finally get them out of there. I know I’m not.
“I don’t want this,” Enslee declares quietly, and the pain in her voice feels like it’s hollowing me out with a dull spoon. “I know you’re mad, Ev, but I love you, and I don’t want to fight with you.”
My chest burns with emotion as I take my sister in.
She clears tears from her cheeks and stares at me with an earnest need for us to find our way back to each other despite everything that’s happened.
I blow out a resigned breath and run a hand down my face, my anger cracking under the significance of who Enslee is to me, who she’ll always be.
“I love you too, and I don’t want to fight with you either,” I confess. “And you’re right, I am mad?.?.?. so fucking mad, but it’s not just at you, it’s at everything, because what was the point?” I ask angrily, blinking back the tears now stinging my eyes.
Enslee takes a step toward me and then stops, unsure if I want comfort or if I’ll allow it from her even if I do. That hesitation, that reluctance where there used to only be trust and support, cracks me wide open.
“It feels like everything I went through these last four months was for nothing. Getting back here to you and the others, it’s all I had to cling to. It was the only thing keeping me going after Ren?.?.?.”
Pain fissures through her name and I’m forced to stop as the dam I’ve erected to hold back my grief starts to crumble.
It was only a matter of time. The minute I opened the door to my past earlier, I knew what would come surging through.
You can only bury things for so long before they start to take root, and at that point you can either tend to what’s burgeoning or lose yourself to it.
“What was the point?” I ask again, only this time it’s a desolate whisper.
I stare into my sister’s doleful gaze, the green of her eyes growing brighter with each tear that spills over.
“Our whole lives, Enslee. All the pain?.?.?. all the death?.?.?. for what?” I demand, knowing there’s no adequate answer, no explanation that could ever make any of it feel less devastating.
“I survived, but now my Flight is gone, we’re fighting, and somehow?.
.?.” I fight back a sob. “Somehow?.?.?. I’m the only one with a dragon mark. ”
And just like that, I finally shatter. There’s no holding back, no tempering it or diminishing the damage; the deluge is instant and all encompassing. I cry for Ren. I cry for myself. I cry for my Flight and my kindred, and I cry when Enslee finally wraps me in her arms and we break together.
We mourn. Grieve. Rage. Sometimes in turns.
Sometimes collectively. We purge a lifetime’s worth of tears in what feels like hours.
We sit in my room fracturing and piecing ourselves back together, and in the end, it changes everything, while also fixing nothing.
Ren is still gone. The Tainted have our people.
The Horde is breathing down our backs. But despite it all, we’re together again, and it does make everything feel a little less insurmountable.
My father’s voice suddenly comes to me loud and clear, and I remember something I heard him say to my mother once.
“Anger and grief can hit you like a forest fire. It can blaze through everything you have, everything you are, until you’re nothing more than a crumbling husk.
But when the embers fade and the ashes clear, something impossible sprouts and starts to grow.
It’s then that you realize, the inferno was both the end and the beginning, and the forest will never allow one without the other. ”
Slowly, our tears dry, our feelings settle, and the rift between me and my sister starts to mend.
I stare out the window, the position of my favorite constellation telling me we only have a handful of hours before the sun slips over the horizon and greets a new day.
The silence in my room goes from comfortable to abradant when I remember that time is our biggest enemy right now.
“Did you not feel the curse break?” I ask, leaning back against the dresser from the spot I’ve claimed on the floor.
“We felt it,” Enslee answers next to me, her head tilted back and her gaze tracing the grooves in the metal ceiling. “We knew instantly what it was, but then nothing happened. We waited, but we didn’t reveal, didn’t manifest affinities, couldn’t heal. No one knows why.”
I stare down at my hands as though the answer might be hiding within the lines and calluses found there, but none of it makes any sense.
Why me and not them?
“The morale around here has been pure boar shit. Everyone’s in a dark place while they come to terms with the possibility that we’ll never shift, never be whole, never leave this place,” she tells me, gesturing around the room.
“Then you show up out of the blue with a dragon mark, and it’s sparked hope and a barrage of endless questions none of us can answer. ”
“So none of the Syphons here felt any change in their magic?” I press. “Nobody passed out or—”
“No,” Enslee cuts in, and I look over and find worry etched in her features. It’s the same worry inscribed in mine.
“Craith thinks it could have something to do with our protections here. Maybe the wards are keeping us from revealing. Amadi suggested it might be a proximity-to-dragons thing, since you were around them recently and we weren’t. But we have no idea. We never do.” She laughs, but it’s empty.
“Why can’t anything just be easy?” I groan, dropping my head into my hands and rubbing my temples.
Enslee sighs. “Honestly, I don’t know what I would do with easy. Probably poke it with a stick and declare it severely boring. Then again, that might not be such a bad thing. I could seriously go for some boring these days.”
I raise my hand like I’m flagging down a waiter. “We’ll take boring for two,” I call out, and Enslee snorts.
“Can we also get a bottle of humdrum for the table and some perfectly ordinary for dessert,” Enslee fake orders, and my stomach grumbles loudly like it thinks we’re actually onto something.
With a groan, Enslee gets up and stretches her back. She offers me her hand and I take it, letting her pull me up.
“Let’s go get some real food, and then you can fill me in on everything that’s happened since the first ambush,” Enslee announces.
My affinity perks up like it’s been waiting patiently to remind me we have unfinished business. I sense my dragon languidly unfurling in my chest, and then it just sits there?.?.?. waiting.
“Deal,” I agree, as we step out into the metal hallways of the stack. “But after we gorge ourselves, I need to do something.”
“What?” she asks, heading for the ladder that leads down to the kitchen and dining hall.
“Nothing crazy,” I lie, trying to be sensitive and not make a big deal of things. “I just need to pop over to the arena real quick and reveal my dragon.”