“What the hell, Hanna?” he hissed, flitting down the aisle. “Why would you go so far…”
Finally, in the last compartment, he spotted a small shadow.
He knocked tentatively. “Hanna?”
She didn’t answer.
Domenic wrenched open the door. Hanna slumped across the cot, Syarthis still clutched in her lap—like she’d been sitting and had toppled over. Both her eyes and the wand’s were clenched shut, and though she didn’t appear to be conscious, her expression twinged with pain.
“Hanna.”Domenic lunged for her, then froze, unsure if it was safe to touch her, if he should call for Glynn. Syarthis’s heat filled the compartment, so humid that sweat broke out on Domenic’s brow.
Then Syarthis’s eyes shot open—pupils focused, as they seemingly always were, onhim.
Hanna gasped. Her own eyes opened, and she made a revolted face.
“Wh-what is it?” he sputtered. “Are you all right?”
Hanna’s head whipped toward him in surprise. The cot creaked as she wearily pushed herself upright. “I’m fine. I just bit my tongue. It happens sometimes when I…Don’tlook at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re worried. It’s never looked pretty, Dom.”
Domenic flinched and retreated a single step, knocking into the narrow desk. “I’ve always worried about you.”
Somehow, his words only deepened her scowl. She ignored him as she withdrew a tube of eyedrops from her trouser pocket, then leaned her head back as she applied them, as if she’d done so a thousand times before. Domenic didn’t even know she owned eyedrops.
“Are you mad at me about something?” he blurted. “Whatever it is, just tell me, and I’ll fix it. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve spent the past few days trying not to lose my mind, and I could really use my best friend actually having my back.”
“Really? You’d accusemeof not havingyourback?” Hanna glared at him through watery eyes. One of her sclera had burst when she’d been unconscious, making a splotch of red join with her brown iris. “I’ve seen every past cataclysm, you know.Allof them, even if Syarthis’s memories are cloudier the older they are, even if it’s awful, digging so deep. But that’s what I’ve done, ever since Valmordion woke. Because that’s the duty of Syarthis’s wielder. I’m the historian. I’m the one who has to remember. But now thatyou’vebonded with Valmordion, shit, do you know how many times I’ve watched the Thirty Years’ Chill descend? Over and over and over again. And I know you, Dom. I know the way you get your hopes up. But just because you apparentlypulled it together so far doesn’t mean this will all be easy. You can’t slack off. You can’t get distracted.”
Domenic’s frustration warred with his shame. But as he opened his mouth to refute her, his focus snagged instead on the purple caverns below her eyes. Her choice of the farthest compartment. Her own admission:Over and over and over again.
Warily, he studied Syarthis. Its tongue curled back, stroking Hanna’s thumb. Yet she didn’t shift away, either because she didn’t notice or she didn’t mind.
“When’s the last time you slept, Hanna?”
She seethed and smoothed down her hair. “Just… get out. Please.”
Domenic squeezed the doorknob. Words roiled deep within his chest, ugly and awful and coated in mire. He couldn’t bring himself to speak a single one.
Then, as he opened the door, Hanna murmured, “It’s not as bad as it looks.” She sounded almost apologetic, and Domenic hovered on the threshold, waiting for her to take back what she’d said, to at least acknowledge he wasn’t the same person she’d dragged into the Vault. But she added nothing else.
He wondered what it would take for her to see that he’d changed.
He wondered if it was his own fault if she never did.
After they arrived at the station, it took another three hours by off-road vehicle to reach the most isolated alban tree in Alderland. It grew within the country’s largest national forest, cradled between two mountain ranges and dappled with frozen lakes and marsh. Though Winter had stripped away its leaves and smothered the underbrush beneath a hard layer of snow, this wood bore no resemblance to the Barren’s graveyard. Ice glazed every branch, as if the entire world had been dipped in glass. The conifers preened in lush green glory. A squirrel darted up the slope of a trunk.
While Glynn and Hanna debated over a map, Domenic and Ellery wandered off the gravel and into the tree line. Now that they’d arrived, his nerves sizzled like static.
“If this root network really does span the entire country,” he said, “whatever we’re about to try is big. Bigger than any ghast or scurge.”
“Are you scared we’ll mess up?”
“Mess up. Blow ourselves up. Blow the whole damn country up.”
Ellery’s laugh cracked, brittle. “Oh, is that all?”
