Chapter 45
Kiera
Relief buckled my knees.
Korvin choked and gurgled, then collapsed over Nikella’s spear.
He was dead. At last. And I was free. Alive. He couldn’t hurt me anymore.
Nikella let his body slide off her spear like a dead fish. She was breathing heavily, and her spear shook.
I clambered to my feet and stepped around Korvin’s bloody body. I pried the spear from Nikella’s grasp and laid it in the cold grass. Her eyes were wild, fixed on her dead brother. Sweat clung to her scars, carving silver paths on her face.
I clasped her trembling hands in mine. “It’s over, Nikella. You saved the world from a monster. He’s gone.”
Finally, she looked at me. “I had to do it. I had to be the one.”
I nodded. “Are you hurt?”
“No. But you are.” She pulled her hands out of mine and pointed at my leg.
I glanced down to see blood dripping down my thigh, a long sliver of wood stabbing through my skin.
My stomach rolled as the pain registered once more. “Oh. Right. From the explosion . . .”
“You set off one of my bombs,” Nikella said sternly.
I winced. “Couldn’t find any weapons.”
She sighed. “We should get back to the others and make sure the other explosives and logs are safe.”
She picked up her spear and led the way back up the hills to the burning camp. I glanced back once. Just to make sure Korvin was still lying in a dead heap.
Aiden, Maz, and Ruru met us on the edge of the campsite, weapons still drawn, chains flapping about their wrists and ankles.
Aiden’s gaze darted between me and Nikella. “He’s dead?”
Nikella nodded.
Ruru let out a tired whoop.
Maz clapped Nikella on the shoulder. “I would’ve liked to slice off a few pieces of him, but you deserved that victory.”
Aiden wore a look of savage triumph that turned to concern when he noticed the splinter in my leg. “Gods damn it, Kiera. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We were a little busy—”
He grasped my arm and pulled me into tent after tent—the ones that weren’t destroyed—until he found one with some healing supplies.
He sat me down on a chair and tore the hole in my pants wider. As he worked the splinter out, pasted my skin, and bandaged it, I tried to breathe the fear and pain from my body.
“Thank you,” he said, “for freeing us the way you did. We would’ve died without your quick thinking.”
I frowned. “You never have to thank me for that.” An echo of the truth he’d spoken to me out of anger.
He gave me a soft smile, his black hair sticking to his forehead and cheeks. “At least we know the bombs work.”
“But now we have less of them.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he whispered. “Don’t give up, little thief.”
A corner of my mouth quirked. “Never.”
He finished my leg, which was already throbbing less. Then he pulled me to my feet, a conflict raging in his eyes. His jaw flexed as if he were the one in pain.
I cupped his bristly cheek in my hand. “What’s wrong?”
His brow furrowed, and he gently folded me into his arms. “When he hit you . . .” he murmured into my neck. “When he held his knife to your face . . . I would’ve done anything to save you, Kiera.”
He pulled back enough to stare deeply into my eyes. “I could say I would burn this world for you, but the truth is, I would burn for you. To keep that beautiful heart beating, I would burn until I was nothing but ash and a name on your lips.”
My heart beat wildly as if trying to escape my chest. Was he saying what I thought he was saying?
He loves me. Surely he must love me as I love him.
But I didn’t just love him.
I trusted him. The words he spoke. The fervor behind them. That anguish didn’t stem from a promise to my mother, but from something deeper.
He had bared his heart to me over and over. And each time had sealed tiny shards of my broken trust back together.
But had I healed his shattered trust in me?
I tried to speak, but no words came out. I licked my lips and tried again. “Aiden, I—”
“We found the shackle key,” Ruru announced as he burst into the tent, holding a rusty key aloft. His eyes widened when he found us embracing. “Oops. I’ll, uh . . . be out here.”
“No, Ruru,” I said quickly. “I’ll take it.” Aiden probably hated still being shackled.
Ruru handed it to me and disappeared.
Aiden smirked and lifted one of his cuffed wrists. “Would you like to free me a second time, little thief?”
I smiled back at him. “And I didn’t even have to steal the key this time.”
“No. Just everything else.”
I inhaled sharply, gazing up at him. The way he said it, soft and deep, was far different from the way he’d said it right before he’d kissed me, drunk and bitter. Now those words held a treasure mine of emotions and meanings.
I unchained his wrists and handed him the key for his ankles. But instead of releasing his shackles, he kneeled down and inserted the key into mine.
His fingers grazed the inside of my ankle as he unlocked one, then the other. Chills raced along my skin.
I made a small noise in the back of my throat. He looked up at me, those green eyes practically glowing in the soft light.
I wanted a thousand things in this moment. And all of them included him.
But we were running out of time.
“We won’t have shackles for the last leg of the journey,” I rasped, gesturing at the broken, discarded chains. “We won’t look like true prisoners.”
Clenching his jaw, he bent to unlock his ankle cuffs. They sprang open. “We’ll just have to hope they don’t notice. Or don’t care.”
Several other problems crowded my mind. We didn’t have Shayn or our papers. We’d used some of our supplies. And this delay with Korvin could make us late.
I stretched out my hand. Aiden grasped it, and I helped him rise.
“We need to talk to the others,” I said.
We found them gathered around the fire. They had contained its spread with large stones. Their discarded shackles lay in a heap by the table that was now empty of our bombs.
“I moved everything into one of the other logs,” Nikella said, wrapping a strip of fabric around a bleeding cut on her arm. “What was left, anyway.”
I cringed. “I’m sorry, Nikella. I—”
She held up her hand. “It was smart. We still have enough bombs for the mine, especially if we supplement with some fireseeds from the forge.” Her brow creased.
“As far as the blackrust powder, I’ll just have to think of something else for the cliff gate.
Losing Shayn is far more troublesome—may the gods find his soul. ”
We all murmured the same farewell.
Aiden walked over to one of the dead soldiers. He picked up his helmet and put it on his head. “I’ll be our new guard.”
“What about our bloody papers?” Maz asked between gulps of water from a canteen. “None of these men had any on them.”
“We’ll have to go without,” Nikella said grimly.
“Perhaps they’ll be too busy to check,” Ruru added with a shrug.
Unlikely. But we’d spin that lie when needed.
Another problem was that, if Aiden was our new guard, he wouldn’t be able to help me and Ruru free the prisoners.
I glanced at Ruru.
He nodded solemnly at me. “We can do this.”
“We’ll need more time,” I told Aiden.
“I’ll think of something.” He glanced at Maz and Nikella. “That means you’ll have to hold off on lighting the fuses a bit longer.”
“We’ll wait for the signal, brother. As long as it takes.”
I fidgeted with the end of my braid, then dared to ask, “What if Skelly and Jek and the others aren’t there?”
Maz scowled at me. “They’ll be there.”
“But if they’re not?”
“Then we’ll try to steal one of their ships anyway,” Aiden said quietly. “Escape with those we can and destroy everything else.”
The silence crackled between us like the fire.
We were probably headed to our deaths. The memory of the prisoner woman’s face from a few days ago surfaced in my mind. Her desperate gratitude, her shock at being free.
There were a hundred more like her in the mine. Plus thousands of frightened Rellmirans in Aquinon.
They needed us.
“We should go,” I said. “But first, we need to burn the bodies to cover our tracks.”
Nikella shook her head. “Leave them. We’ll lose too much time. Even if a patrol comes by and spreads a warning that reaches Calimber, our mission will already be over.”
I nodded, relieved at her reasoning.
Aiden stripped the soldier of his uniform and donned it over his rags. I swept up the shackles and dumped them into the river while the others heaved the raft back into the water. My thigh throbbed as we scrambled on board.
On the bridge, Aiden cranked up the barrier, then leaped onto the raft as we passed through.
He looked strange in a soldier’s uniform, almost like the night of our heist when he’d dressed as one of Asher’s guards.
We’d worn so many disguises, yet I always knew who he was underneath. Just as he knew me. More and more, until nothing could hide us from each other.
We paddled away from the smoldering tents and empty bridge. Away from the lone body in the cold grass. The husk of a defeated enemy.
“How did you survive the swim?” Ruru asked, glancing at Nikella as he pushed the raft away from the riverbank.
Her shoulders tightened. “When I was a young girl, I learned to hold my breath for a very long time.”
My little Nik would never drown.
My lip curled. I hoped the Four would throw his soul into the Abyss, where it belonged.
We paddled as long as we could and slept in shifts, trying our hardest to reach Calimber in time. The journey was much more bearable without the shackles. But the added fear of being discovered almost outweighed it.
A patrol passed us, heading west, and we crouched down to hide our unshackled legs. They shouted to Aiden, who shouted back, using similar replies to what Shayn had.
They were eager to report to Korvin, bloodthirsty grins lighting up their faces. Little did they know of the carnage they were going to find.
We saw the smoke spirals of a dozen fires at dawn. Then the mass of tents and blockades came into view. The river picked up speed, rushing us toward the cliff and the waterfall that spilled over it into the Niviath Sea.
I barely had a moment to breathe before our raft raced up to the dock. Soldiers hooked it with their long poles, pulling us in, while Aiden tied us to the mooring posts.
Calimber. Gods, we’d made it. Soldiers and prisoners bustled everywhere. Horses tramped through the mud, pulling carts and carrying riders. Men ran through shouted drills with their swords and spears in the field next to the river.
How in the deep, dark, wandering hell were we supposed to defeat all this?
My legs shook as Aiden stepped onto the dock. A thin man with wild gray hair hurried up to him with a ledger.
“Twaryn, load 713?” he snapped, already scribbling something down.
“Yes,” Aiden answered immediately and with much more calm than I felt.
“You’ll have to use your own prisoners to unload and chop the wood. We’re short,” the man spat, as if this were Aiden’s fault.
Aiden frowned. “Didn’t the Shadow-Wolves arrive with more prisoners?”
“Clearly not, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking you,” he sneered and hurried off, barking at someone else.
My heart sank to my toes. They weren’t here. Skelly, Jek, Yarina, Sigrid . . .
I glanced at Maz. His face was whiter than bone as he stared at the distant, empty horizon.
We were alone.