2. TWO
TWO
Calverous
Location: Jiradesh Desert
Sixty hours .
A body would expire within sixty hours at the heart of the Jiradesh without water.
Calver sat in the pre-dawn dark of the desert, eyes closed, fingers digging into the sand.
Not the powdery sand of Kaidech’s beaches; gritty, compact sand, too hot beneath the sun, too cold beneath the moon, abrasive enough to have worn through his only boots in a ten-day.
He visualized his dowagian forms, the martial study he’d built his life around.
If he was lucky, visiting them in daydreams might compensate for his crippling lack of a weapon… but Calver was seldom lucky.
After ten hours beneath the wicked Jiradeshi highsun, the body’s blood would thicken and slow in the way that sap turns to amber.
After thirty, it would lose enough of its retained fluids to fail to perspire.
After fifty, its kidneys would no longer filter.
In the end, it would be the body’s own unfiltered waste that killed it.
The irony did not escape Calver that death, in this way, was a byproduct of living.
Just as his own was destined to be.
But not yet. A full year stood between him and the Tera’thian coronation.
He needed to keep his skills sharp if he wanted to make it that far.
He might be free, temporarily pardoned until a formal trial was held for him in Seraphinden, but he was surrounded by enemies.
Because the Red Wing’s restrictive orders against him kept him from training with the recruits, he trained alone, at night, and at a distance.
Time passed to a steady overture of whistling wind and fading starlight.
Despite his best efforts, Calver’s mind strayed west, in the direction of the Rollard Isles.
As they’d left things, there was little guarantee Fankalo would hold an audience with him.
But when the Red Wing came closer to the shore on its three-month course toward Steila, he would still take his chance.
With the Survivor, the sinister spirit that had possessed him since childhood, finally absent, he could face her without fear of bloodshed.
Not that she would understand the difference.
Fankalo had never grasped the line where the Survivor stopped and he began. Only Raimee ever had.
Raimee… She had dropped into his life—the heir to Seraphindo’s throne, with unthinkable powers but no control over them—and they’d spent two ten-days unraveling a conspiracy neither of them understood. Together.
Calver swallowed the thought. Forced himself to visualize a swing, a parry, a pivot.
There it was: that ever-pressing itch. He missed that little scholar like this desert missed the rain. But she was an impossible thing, and even if he were to have her, he wouldn’t know what to do with her.
That didn’t make him any less thirsty.
He opened his eyes. Stars of every hue blossomed through celestial dust, flung from the distant dunes into the heavens like frozen volcanic plumes.
There was no point in reminiscing. Raimee had clung to him because she had been backed into a corner.
Now that she’d had some space to reflect on what he’d done, now that she’d spent time around civilized people, she was probably lifting a prayer of thanks that she hadn’t wound up tethered to him.
She was with Roskaad Thyatira, now—the Red Wing’s General Prime, the man who had sliced out Calver’s tongue when he was twelve and sentenced him to become a walking science experiment.
Raimee had probably already told him everything, given them information Calver had let slip to her.
It was probably exactly what they needed to pin Fankalo down.
They might have captured his sister already.
She might have a blade over her neck this very second. She—
The hairs on Calver’s arms rose, stirred by no desert breeze. He resisted the urge to turn. It was a twenty-minute walk from the Red Wing’s encampment to the rocky crags he’d found for solitude. If someone had come, they had not done so by coincidence.
Calver listened through the ever-present sounds of the desert for several breaths: the chittering of an insect, the whisper of breeze, the rasping of dry brush needles. Then, without precursor, came an acute pattering. A sloshing of fluid.
He had been watched since the beginning of the Red Wing’s campaign.
Command wouldn’t have given him freedom—regardless of royal pardon—if they weren’t watching him.
But he doubted they worried he would run.
This deep into the Jiradesh, days from any known settlement, they assumed the desert to be its own trial, with only one sentence.
The sound stopped. Someone watched him from behind a cluster of sedimentary spurs that jutted from the sands like gnarled fingers. Whoever it was released a bated breath.
The steps crept closer. Close enough. Calver spun into a crouch to regard his foe.
Raimee chuckled at his defense—a slight thing, not mocking but genuine. A pack weighed her down, loaded with canteens and—his chest expanded—a dowaga, the three-bladed weapon as vital to him as a limb.
It was as though the sand had shifted beneath him. Not real. Too good to be real. Between the warring compulsions to pull her into his arms or run as far and fast as he could in the opposite direction, Calver could not move.
Her lilting lisp honeyed his ears. “Remember me?”
He hadn’t been able to forget. Not even for a second.
“Let’s go.” She let the pack slip from her shoulders and to the sand, as though inviting him to inspect it. He didn’t need to. It would not last them two days in the Jiradesh. “Should last us a tenday. We won’t have long before they realize I’m gone, but we can get a head start.”
Not if they weren’t on horseback. Even then, Calver hadn’t intended to move west until the distance to the coast was at its shortest, when the Red Wing drew parallel with Thaligan, in two months.
But all intent to argue fled him in a single glance. The spaces beneath her cheeks were hollow. Her body was frail all over again, like in Chira’na when he’d worried her sickness would take her.
The way the first drop from a stormcloud raced to cracked earth, Calver closed the gap between them. His hand found her chin. He lifted it and turned her face from side to side, looking for any indication of abuse or ailment.
Raimee startled, like she had been expecting something different.
Calver retracted.
Touching her enlivened his every sense. Raw power coursed through his veins.
The pieces took shape inside his mind, forming something sharp enough to wound.
Was she like this because of… because of him?
Had he been the common denominator of Raimee’s illness all along?
She’d healed him the last time they were together.
Neither of them had stayed conscious through the end of it.
Don’t act desperate. His hands flew. That was definitely desperate.
For some reason, Raimee’s cheeks had deepened in color. “No, I-I’m fine.”
“No. In fact, they helped me through my remission.”
Remission?
“They did, but they’ve been civil. I didn’t tell them anything. I kept my word. I’ve been trying to get away from that counterfeit commander and back to you ever since.”
Well, there went everything he thought about anything.
The idea of ‘security’ this deep in the desert was laughable, were he the type to laugh, but he was sure command wouldn’t have let her wander out after him.
They’d certainly told him not to go near her.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t even heard her approach until she was nearly on top of him.
Her smile pulled the speckles across her face in a way that made his stomach float. “There are layers to that answer. It only seems fair to admit now. I can usually tell where you are. At least, when you’re… Well. Most of the time.”
That was problematic, considering her proximity to him was now a multifaceted death warrant. And it sounded too similar to the ability possessed by Cul’Mon—commander of Tera’thu’s legions and the master he’d run from for the last eight years—to locate him.
“But Cal, something’s changed. I’ve changed. I’m distorting, and I’m positive it has everything to do with you—”
“Well, yes, but that’s not what I mean.” The casual admittance that he was enervating her and she was perfectly fine with that might just kill him if everything else didn’t.
“I—I can’t really show you much right now, because every time I do, it takes a toll.
” That wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
A Ruxian—Seraphinden’s lost ruling class, somewhere between history and fable—was supposed to have infinite power. “But...”
Raimee’s brow furrowed, and she stared down.
A sheen of dirt floated from the ground between them, then trickled into a stream that reflected silver moonlight.
It spun into a ball over her palm. She’d taken dirt and made it beautiful.
He watched, awestruck, until he noticed the way her face paled, her fingers trembled.
He swatted the sand from her palm.
“But that’s how I got away. And that’s what’s going to get us out of here.”
Shifting sand?
“Look, I’ve not been at this long. I’m distorting energy now.
I just can’t figure out a way to distort…
not my energy.” Raimee dove into a long-winded explanation on distortion principles and the theoretical translation of energy from potential realities.
Calver couldn’t hear it past the beating of his heart against his eardrums. When he’d met her, she had no knowledge—and less control—of her power. What was happening?
He tugged the hood of her cloak farther around her hair, her eyes. Her mouth pinched shut.
he signaled, glancing first toward the Red Wing encampment and then over his shoulder into the Jiradesh. He cupped her elbow and pulled her toward the encampment.
Raimee’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t ask to be chaperoned through this fated place by the army I was actively avoiding.” She wrestled her arm from him. Wisps of silver escaped from beneath her hood and lifted in the breeze. “We have to go. We have to find Methu’su.”
Before they were captured in Chira’na, they’d been searching for the traitor—or perhaps the sage—Methu’su: the thread that wove together his past and her future.
It had felt like destiny. Returning to that journey together felt like a dream.
It turned into a nightmare as Calver imagined General Prime Thyatira slicing through her throat for this very interaction, then imagined Raimee tripping, catching his hand mid-fall, and withering into a skeleton.
he repeated.
Raimee stared flatly, as though his hand signals were nonsense. She gestured toward the desert. “It’s the only chance we’ve got before we get too far inland.”
They already were.
Her mouth dropped open. She tested her words, speaking slowly. “But you can… With you I can.”
It took all of his will to avert his gaze.
“What if there was another way for us to get to the coast? A faster way? Because Cal, I can—”
Silence: the sickness he spread, the legacy he would leave.
Raimee broke it. “But I thought you and I…”
His hands worked before he could think.
Calver would have been perfectly happy if the ground beneath him had chosen that moment to become quicksand. The signals were so fatedly loud, he was sure the entire desert had heard them.
Bleeding fool. She could have thought anything, and he should assume nothing in relation to what he thought. What he felt.
Her silver eyes widened. Her sharp cheekbones rose to meet them.
he finished. He was more dangerous to her now than Thyatira ever had been.
Raimee’s face fell, and the burgeoning dawn seemed to grow a little darker with it. “What do you mean?”
He couldn’t signal anything else.
Raimee sucked in through her teeth. “Calver, I don’t know what you gave up back in Chira’na to stay with me.
But you have to know I’m grateful. I didn’t mean for”—she motioned to the endless sky and sand around them—“this to happen. Surrendering was the only way we were going to get off that roof alive. I just wanted to protect you.”
Calver let it play out in his mind: pulling her into his arms and telling her he would get them out of this. Running with her, on his back if he must, to the coastline.
It would never work.
“But Cal—”
He cut her off with a slice of his palm.
It only provoked her. “Then why are you still here? Why are you letting the Red Wing drag you along on this caravan, if you’re not waiting for me?
” Calver had slipped into Chira’na for months without the authorities catching on, yet Raimee could decipher his motives in the space between heartbeats.
“I know you. You could escape and go back to that Hand you serve any time you want!”
Her voice carried too much, and she knew it.
She cupped a hand to her lips. Her eyes welled.
Calver knew that look: desperation. How many times had he seen it right before he’d ended a life?
He nearly moved in and held her, the Fates tempting him against what he knew to be sabotage of all he had fought for.
But he’d spent half a lifetime fighting the Survivor’s temptations, and he was damn good at it.
“You’re a terrible liar.”
He turned from her. Closed his eyes.
Behind him, her breath caught and turned to quiet sobs.
Wonderful.
She should have moved on. Nearly as much time had passed in the caravan as they had spent together outside Chira’na. She should have found new people to help her. Better people than him.
Why hadn’t she moved on?
The sloshing of her canteens moved away from him. Calver kept his back to the sound until it disappeared, then gripped at his elbows.
One syllable. One word. One motion. If he’d chosen a different one, then perhaps she might have believed him.
‘You thought right.’
He should have signaled, ‘You thought wrong’. What was a single word of a lie if it meant she might live out her years? If it didn’t continue an association with him that would set Thyatira, Cul’Mon, and Fankalo alike on her like wolves taking to prey?
He tried signaling the lie to the desert.
The desert did not respond.