Sadie lowered her axes slightly, eyes narrowing. “They always send the creepy ones last.”
I said nothing.
Its mouth moved, voice like caverns; far reaching and hollow of any emotion. “You’re too late, cursed king.”
My jaw tightened.
The thing took another step. “We know where she is.”
I didn’t blink, didn’t breathe.
“You can’t save her now.”
Sadie’s lips curled into a snarl. “Shut up.”
“Hail the Queen that was promised,” it hissed. “Her blood?—”
I struck.
Blades crossed, then split.
The Nameless’s head dropped into the sand.
Still smiling.
The body collapsed moments later.
Silence.
Just the wind. Just the blood. Just the weight of what it had said.
Sadie exhaled beside me but didn’t speak, our game long forgotten. I cleaned my blades on the cloth at my hip, jaw locked tight.
They knew where she was.
That made one of us. For what felt like a week we’d been traveling toward the Fold. The desert plains giving way to canyons told me we were getting close. That and the increase in run-ins we had with the Nameless. They bled through the gap between the realms, spilling out into the hellish atmosphere of Eversus.
Every spare moment, I spent sleeping, hoping to dream of her, but every time she evaded me. Even with Corvo playing go-between for us, the time never synced quite right. Sadie was exhausted taking watch so often. Meanwhile, I was a different kind of tired. The anxiety that clawed at my chest every second of every day made it hard to function.
“What do you think he meant by ‘the queen that was promised’?” Sadie asked.
“No idea,” I replied. This wasn’t the first time the Nameless referred to her as a queen, or more specifically,theirqueen. It happened every encounter. The final monster would step forward spewing prophetic bullshit about Meera being destined for Evorsus. In the beginning I entertained it, hoping to get more information, but the Nameless picked up on that and ended its own miserable life.
If a rise was what they were looking for in me, they’d found it. Since then, Sadie or I cut them down regardless of the words they said. Meera’s sister was more than admirable on thebattlefield. She was a godsdamned machine, wielding axes and unlimited fury. The first time they taunted her about Meera she went into battlelust, and I had to stay back until she finished slaughtering the party that found us. Since then, we’d both been more on edge but we didn’t speak of it.
“Hey,” Sadie said, bumping me with her shoulder. “She’s going to be okay. Corvo would have told us if something bad happened.”
“Would he?”
Sadie arched a brow. “You know he would. Mercurial as that cat is, he has a soft spot for Meera. Him being gone right now is a good thing, because it means he’s with her and no news is good news.”
I sighed. “I hate how things ended between us before the split.”
“I’m sure she does to. Instead of spending your time worrying about the worst imaginable scenarios, maybe think about what you’re going to say when you see her again.”
My jaw worked, but I didn’t answer right away. There were a hundred things I wanted to say, and none of them seemed like the right place to start.
She gave me a pointed look. “Don’t tell me you’ve been trudging through hell all this time without thinking about what you’re gonna say.”
