“We don’t have an end-choice, brother. Only the middle. The story finishes the same no matter how it’s written. The last page is inked by the Elders. The rest is written by your pen.”
“She is aSoulBinder, Kyla.”
An infuriated huff of sound fills our small camp. “Sheisnota SoulBinder,” the demon almost growls in exasperation, and Kyla’s lips twitch in response.
“Is she not, BloodLetter?” Kyla asks me, as though she already knows what answer I’m going to give, but still wants to hear it.
“Do you doubt me?”
Straightening immediately, she walks over to me and lays a quick hand on my shoulder. “Never, brother. Never.” Switching to our tongue now, she stares at the creature ebbing in and out of focus in the shadows of the flickering fire. “But Idodoubt thatsheknows what she is. She seems very convinced that she’s something else. I wonder if it would be useful to us in some way to have a Binder who is not a Binder. If there is some sort of play to be made that we aren’t seeing at the moment. The Gods left her there for you to find, blind and indebted to you, no? Is there a way to, I don’t know, tame her for our people? I worry that if we continue this treatment of her, by the time we get to the city to ask those who may have answers, she may have turned against us. That we will have lost some advantage we were gifted.”
“What do you suggest?” I ask, feeling completely irritated that she’s seeing something I missed, but still needing her counsel. “Treat her as an honored guest of our people?” Snorting derisively, I shake my head. “They would ride off a cliff after me, Kyla, but that would be…” Letting my voice drift, we sit in silence for a moment, staring into the fire. It takes too long for the wheels to start turning in my brain, but she sits without speaking, waiting for me. “Perhaps…” I begin slowly, thinking it through. “Perhaps there is a halfway point. A guard, a mount, no hood. She will be a horse on a picket line. Enough freedom to show herself, to earn us some favor. But on a choke chain, you understand? And a blade through her heart the minute anything goes sideways. I’d rather explain a dead Binder to the Elders than one we let steal souls.”
“It’s your taste we’re going off, Axton. Is she lying when she says she doesn’t bind souls?”
“She isn’t, not exactly, but it’s a muddy flavor, Kyla.” I know I sound troubled, but Ifeeltroubled. Nothing is clear about the Binder; blood tells no lies, but hers tells no truths either. “She believes she isn’t aBinder, that much is certain.”
Kyla makes a low, humming sound at the back of her throat, a thoughtful, cautioning vibration of noise, and we cease talking immediately. Moments later, from the woods, I hear a rustling, then Teo emerges leading two strange men behind him.
The instant their faces show in the firelight, the pale woman, who up until now has been silent, surges to her feet, hands clasped at her throat, eyes wide and wild. “Oh!” she says, and there is so much in that one, tiny word, it feels like a book of meaning. “Oh!” she says again, her throat closing on the sound, entire body trembling, shaking as though the earth beneath her is unsteady, and she collapses back onto the small stump where she had been sitting. Heartbreak and hope flash across her face, emotion crashing into her in a lightning strike.
They are across the clearing before Kyla, or Teo, or I can move. Across the clearing, around the fire, and kneeling in the dirt in front of her.
“BoneKeeper,” one says, and if she can’t hear the sunrise of sound in the way he says her name, then she is deaf as well as blind.
“Flame,” the other murmurs at the same time, and it’s as though he had the executioner's blade on his neck, only to be spared in the final second.
Whoever they are, she is a compass point in their world. Whoever she is, they are a light in the darkness to her. Kylabet and I exchange long looks; Teo glances at me for guidance, and I wave him off in abrupt dismissal. Whatever happens here, the less eyes the better. He obeys immediately, fading back into the shadows soundlessly. I trust him with my life, but secrets spill when they fill more than one mouth.
Nothing more has been said by the peculiar trio, the silence thick and heavy, at odds with the looks on their faces, at the furious restraint of their bodies. So it is a shattering sound when Kylabet speaks, voice tight and carefully considering.
“SoulBinder, how did you see them when they entered the clearing?”
Three heads whip around to face her, three faces completely blanked of emotion.
“Yes indeed, my little blind demon,” I whisper, teeth and talons clear in my words. “The truth. Or I will know it.”
SoulBinder.
CAREFUL STEPS
RANNOCH
Wren.Wren. The world breathes in and exhales, everything constricting and releasing around me.Wren.If I never step away from her side again, it will be too soon. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her face waxy and tallow white. She doesn’t look bruised, or bloodied, but something is wrong, something is hurting her enough that it is written in the lines of her body. Where is Tahrik?Where is Tahrik?
Wren is pieces loosely strung together, tiny tremors along her skin showing the cracks of where she has broken, and I want to kill whoever fractured her, but we are in a foreign place with unknown people, and as long as we are alive, I have to step carefully. Pushing every other emotion aside, I focus only on her, reaching out to take one of her now tightly bandaged hands; questions regarding those will have to wait. There are other, more pressing ones filling my throat. Kaden does the same beside me to her other, and her frantic, white-knuckled grip belies the emptiness of her face.
“I thought you were dead,” she says, voice so hollow there is an echo in it. Turning away from the man and woman who stand near us, hands on blades, violence carved in every sharp movement, she stares at us, breath rapid and shallow. “I thought…” Swallowing hard, she tries to force the words out, sorrow thick in her mouth, nails digging into my skin. “You were so still. I couldn’t see…”
“What happened?” Kaden asks gently. The man beside us steps forward, clearly angry at being ignored, but the woman lays a cautioning hand on his arm and he stops, muscles taut with barely restrained fury. “We woke to an empty camp, a dead fire…you, and Tahrik, and my horse gone.” The Trader attempts to smile, shaking his head ruefully. “Raging headaches. And sick as dogs. We came after you as soon as we could. Ipromise.” His voice stutters; he clears his throat and continues. “The first few days we were too weak to do anything other than stumble along like fools. Thank the Sea and Sky Rannoch is such a good tracker, or we would have missed you altogether.” No hint of the chaos that consumed us laces his words, no shadow of our howling madness, of the blinding panic that seized us in the helpless hours, drove us to walk until our feet were blistered and bloody, pushing on until our muscles failed. Eyes darting quickly to the strangers near us, he lifts a sardonic brow. “There were many,manytrails. And all led different ways. For a group this size, such deception of movement is impressive.”
“Whathappened?” I feel stupid, but we’ve been frantic since the moment we woke up, cold and shivering, mouths painfully dry, heads filled with shards of glass. Kaden is smiling now, but threw up blood for the first hours of being awake. For a time I thought he wouldn’t make it; he was close to the shadows between life and death until his stomach was empty, until he could finally keep down water, until I had a fire built. Even then he shivered uncontrollably near enough the flames that I had to pull him back to keep him from burning himself. And it still took all my strength to prevent him from leaving immediately, from killing himself to find Wren. The nights stretched to eternity without her, not knowing what happened, if she was even alive. Now she’s here, in front of us, and the person we’ve been dreaming of looks like she is trapped in a nightmare.
There is only so much we can do under strangers’ watching eyes; I don’t know what move I can make that is safe for her.
She’s quiet. So completely quiet, and I know whatever she is about to say is what changed her, what caused the canyons in her to open.
“Tahrik.” Her eyes fill, and though she blinks frantically, she is unable to stop the tears from falling, cascading down her cheeks in shimmering tracks. And can’t continue on, though she tries.
