I find my practice sword resting in a patch of trampled grass. Muscles spasming with the effort, I pick it up and frown at Mather, who stares past me into the plains. His face is blank, his expression hidden by the veil that makes him both a perfect monarch and an infuriating friend.
“What is it?” I follow his gaze. Four shapes wobble toward us, heat shaking their silhouettes in illusions of waves. But they’re unmistakable even at this distance, and my breath catches in relief.
One, two, three, four.
They’re back. All of them. They survived.
Chapter 2
MATHER BLOWS PAST me through the grass. “They’re here!”
From camp, Sir’s wife, Alysson, gathers her skirts into a knot and hurries away from the food she’s been fixing, and Finn sprints out of a tent with a medical bag.
I drop the sword and follow Mather, focused on the shapes before us. Is that one Sir? Is he leaning too far forward in his saddle? Did he get hurt? Of course he did. Two of them went to the outskirts of Abril, the capital of Spring, and the other two infiltrated one of Spring’s seaside ports, Lynia. Neither is terribly deep inside Spring’s borders, but they’re still within Angra’s domain, and any mission there ends in at least some bloodshed.
Mather and I reach them first. Finn’s girth doesn’t stop him from beating Alysson, and he stumbles to a halt seconds behind us, tearing bandages and creams out of the bag.
Dendera collapses off her horse, panting on the ground. She’s in her late forties, Alysson’s age, and her white Winterian hair hangs over a face creased with the slightest wrinkles around her eyes and mouth.
She wraps one arm across her waist and turns to Greer as he climbs off his horse. “His leg,” she murmurs, pointing Finn toward the gash in Greer’s thigh.
Greer waves him back to Dendera. “She’s worse,” he says, resting his forehead against his saddle as he takes deep, even breaths. His short, ivory hair clings to his head, matted with sweat and blood. Most days it’s easy to forget he’s the oldest of our group, hiding his age behind his unwavering determination to take on any task, any mission.
Henn slides off his horse next to Dendera, wrapping one of her arms around his shoulders to keep her up. The way he cradles her makes me want to look away, like I’m watching something intimate. It shouldn’t feel any different than the way we all treat each other—a haphazard army with Sir as our commander rather than a family. But I can’t help wonder whether, if our situation was better, Dendera and Henn would want to be a true family.
All four of them bleed from various spots on their bodies, torn shirts and makeshift bandages stained brown-red with a mix of dried and fresh blood. Sir is the only one who eases off his horse and stands straight, towering and immovable and watching us detachedly. With all the time I spend with Mather, I should be better at decoding emotionless looks. But I just hover there, my body frozen with anxiety, unable to move to help Finn and Mather pass out bandages.
My eyes travel up and down each horse, each bag. Did they get the locket half?
“William!” Alysson’s shriek precedes her by a few heartbeats as she hurls herself at her husband, injuries be damned. Seeing Sir wrap his arms around her, hold her tiny body off the ground, is like watching a bear clutch a rag doll—power and might alongside fragility and meekness. They fold into each other in a rare moment of vulnerability.
Sir sets down his wife. “It’s in Lynia. Got there the day we left.”
Finn lowers the handful of bandages he pressed against Greer’s leg. Mather looks up from where he holds a small water sack for Dendera as she drinks. I suck in mouthfuls of the hot, heavy air, my mind whirling.
We’ve been searching for the locket throughout Primoria since Winter fell, but only a handful of times have we gotten leads on where one of the halves would be. Angra keeps half of it moving, bouncing from cities in Spring to remote settlements in the unclaimed areas of Primoria—the foothills of the Paisel Mountains, ports on the sea—to make it harder for us to get both halves back.
Now we’re close. My chest swells with the same excitement that I know everyone is feeling, or felt before they ended up here, broken and bleeding. Sir will send someone back for it. Fresh and rested people make for the best soldiers, so he won’t send anyone who just returned. Which means—
I rush toward Sir as he looks Mather up and down, then does the same to Finn. “You two, leave now,” he says. “They’ll move it again soon, since they know we escaped.”
I stop. “They’ll need everyone. I’ll go too.”
Sir looks at me like he forgot I’d be here. He frowns, shakes his head. “Not now. Mather, Finn, I want you ready to leave in fifteen minutes. Go.”
Finn scurries off, his bulk swaying around him as he hurries back to camp. Obedient without thought, like everyone always is.
I stare up at Sir with my jaw clenched. “I can do this. I’m going.”
Sir grabs his horse’s reins and starts walking it toward camp. Everyone falls in behind him—except Mather, who hangs back farther, watching us, his eyes calm.
“I don’t have time to argue this,” Sir snaps. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Too dangerous for me but not for our future king?”
Sir looks at me as I walk alongside him. “Did you beat Mather in sparring?”
I grimace. Sir reads that as my answer.
“That’s why it’s too dangerous for you. We’re too close to take any chances.”
Prairie grass pushes against my hips, my boots tearing into the dirt with every step. “You’re wrong,” I growl. “I can help. I can be—”
“You do help.”
“Oh yes, that bag of rice I bought in Autumn last month saved our kingdom.”
“You’re most helpful where you are,” he amends.
I grab his arm to make him stop. He turns to me, his face streaked with dirt and blood through his white beard, frizzled strands of ivory hair sticking out around his face. He looks tired, hovering between taking one more step and collapsing.
“I can do more than this,” I breathe. “I’m ready, William.”
I called him Father once. In the wake of his stories about my real parents dying in the streets of Winter’s capital, Jannuari, as Spring overtook it, and how he scooped baby-me up and rescued me, it seemed logical to an eight-year-old that the man raising her should be called Father. But he turned such a shade of red that I feared he’d start spitting blood, and he growled at me like he’d never done before. He was not my father and I was never, ever to call him that again. I was only ever to call him by his name, or a title, or something to show respect. But not Father. Never Father.