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  “Yes,” Tal said stiffly.

  “But it is a sore topic,” she mused, shrewd as ever.

  “Yes. So can we talk about something else?”

  “Certainly. There are many other topics of interest which we can discuss at length. Maybe you could teach me other survival skills beyond building a fire while we travel.”

  “Or we could be silent and rest.”

  She gave an exasperated sigh. “Come now. I’m hauling you across a mountain range. The least you can do is teach me something useful, or else entertain me with your story while I labor.”

  “My story is not entertaining.”

  “Is it a tragedy then?” she teased. “I happen to find tragedies entertaining. Try me.”

  “Elodie,” he grated out.

  She dropped the teasing tone. “Tal. We have seen each other cry—though if you tell anyone I cried, I swear I will find a way to visit some terrible retribution upon you which I reserve the right to define later—and we have been through a great trauma together. Whether you prefer my company or not, we are stuck with each other until we either reach that township, or die in the attempt. It might be good to try to be friends in the meantime, to keep our spirits up. Right?”

  Friends. She wanted to be friends. He took a deep breath. He could do this; he had done much worse. “You are right. I’m…sorry.”

  “You don’t have to share all the sordid details of your past if you don’t want to. But I’m afraid I don’t have much in the way of my own stories to regale you with. Also, it’s not exactly easy to talk while pulling this thing.” Her arms were trembling already with the strain, but she didn’t slow down, only kept floundering through the deep, newly-fallen snow.

  He turned his gaze to the landscape because it was easier than looking at her. The snowbanks glittered with the cold blue light of the coming dawn, making the world look pristine and promising. He took a breath to speak, and allowed himself—only briefly—to believe that the person pulling the sled was indeed a girl named Elodie who had no shared past with him, who had saved his life because she cared rather than because it was in her own self-interest. Maybe he could even allow himself to believe this Elodie was a girl he could have been friends with, in another life.

  “I grew up believing in the Unforged God,” he told her, still watching the landscape. “Both my father and my mother—and my stepmother for that matter—were believers, and I was proud to follow their lead. But for me it was more than just believing he existed. I…I thought he loved me. I thought he was watching over me, guiding me into some grand destiny. I thought he’d chosen me. I thought I was important, because I was important to him.” The words were ashes in his mouth: a cloying, bitter truth. “But instead of leading me to my destiny, he led me to the Destroyer.”

  Elodie was quiet for a moment. “Ah,” she said at last. “That is a tragedy, then, and not even an entertaining one. Maybe we could travel in silence after all.”

  He let out an exhale. “Thank you,” he said, and this time he almost meant it.

  She hesitated, then peered back over her shoulder. “I know you aren’t one to enjoy my company—or perhaps human company in general, it’s hard to tell—but I want you to know I’m glad I found you in the wreckage. It would have been…hard for me, had I been out here on my own.”

  “I’m sure you would have managed.” He couldn’t picture the Destroyer being anything but indestructible, even as he strove to prove that image false.

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I would have survived. In fact,” she said, her voice taking on a teasing tone once again, “I probably would have moved a lot faster without the need to drag your carcass behind me.”

  “I shall endeavor to lose some weight to ease your labors,” he replied dryly.

  “We could always amputate that leg. That would displace perhaps a good fifth of your weight. More if you lose a lot of blood in the process.”

  “But the blood might attract predators,” he pointed out.

  “That is a consideration.” She nodded decisively. “We shall save that option for a last resort, then.”

  “That’s good to hear,” he said, weaving together every bit of control he possessed to reinforce the illusion of the new and unknown girl before him.

  There was a moment of silence. “In any case,” she said, her voice stiff and awkward now, “what I meant was—I’m glad I saved you. Not because I wouldn’t survive this alone, but because it…it makes me more hopeful, to survive it with you. I’m not sure I would feel that way with anyone else.”

  Tal fumbled for a response. “Oh.”

  “Now that’s said, we should be quiet, as you suggested,” she said hastily, walking a bit faster as if she might be able to outrun the embarrassment he could clearly hear in her voice. “We don’t want to scare off any wildlife that we could turn into a meal.”

  “Yes,” he said, at a loss for how else to reply.

  Silence fell thick around them like a new snow. After a few minutes, it softened the edges of his unease, and he managed to turn his mind to other matters. Or rather, one key matter, the one that he’d been avoiding for an entire day but could avoid no longer.

  The prison car had been three lengths away from the dining car. Judging by the debris he’d seen, the explosion had destroyed perhaps two cars, three at the very most. Which meant Nyx may have survived.

  Except the door to her cell had been open. She’d been badly injured, but if she was anything she was determined, and she might have tried to go after him. If she had gotten to the next car over before the explosion, her chances would have been reduced. But, he reminded himself, with the feeling of treading a rut worn deep in his mind, her body hadn’t been among the dead. That made it more probable that she had survived.

  Although of course, if she had survived the explosion, she would almost certainly not survive what came next.

  Tal turned his face away, despairing. The empress had spoken of emergency transport magics. Tal didn’t have authorization to know all the details of the royal train’s enchantments, but he knew enough to put the pieces together with what he’d overheard from the now-dead Head of Transport. The train had a special, last-resort magic Smithed into it that could return it almost instantly to the Alloyed Palace in case of an emergency. Such an enchantment would take a massive amount of power and wreck all of the train’s other Smithings, including the ones that ran its engines—although it unfortunately would not affect any oaths that had been sworn to the metal there. It meant the train couldn’t return to check for survivors, not for weeks. It also meant that if Nyx was alive, then she was likely now at the palace, utterly helpless.

  The other prisoners would tell the metallurgists what had happened. Nyx was already slated for a mockery of a trial for her attempt to assassinate the Destroyer; what worse punishment would they mete out for the one whose machinations had killed many nobles, potentially including the empress herself and, as far as they would know, the Destroyer too?

  Tal closed his eyes. In his chest, something hitched, like a frayed bowstring pulled too tight to last.

  “Nyx,” he whispered, too quiet to be heard over the shush of metal on snow, “please be safe.”

  THE SKY WAS A PRETENDER. Swept clean of clouds, it shone a delicate gauzy blue hung with the low diadem of the dawning sun, as if there had never been such a thing as a storm. But Nyx had seen too many lying dawns to believe the sky today, just as she had seen too many Skyteeth blizzards to underestimate the one that had greeted her last night, when she had awoken half-buried in a snowbank.

  The sky hadn’t been pretending then. It had fomented openly, chunks of slate-gray scraping through the maw of the Skyteeth, breaking open to rain snow and death onto the peaks. Nyx had been so sure it would kill her. She could still taste the despair and fury at the back of her throat, could still remember her vow to curse the Destroyer with her dying breath.

  “I know that look,” came a wry voice from behind her. “You’re thinking
violent and poetic thoughts again, aren’t you?”

  An involuntary smile crept over Nyx’s mouth. She twisted in her nest of blankets to look up at Helenia, who stood at her back on the runners of the dogsled. The other girl was swaddled in furs—nearly as many as she’d piled atop Nyx—leaving only her bright, kind brown eyes showing above her thick foxtail scarf. Her dark brown skin was spangled with freckles, and her hair was tucked neatly into her hood. Nyx wished it was warm enough for her to let it down. She loved the way Helenia’s hair looked when it was loose: a gorgeous, bouncy cascade of tight black ringlets.

  Nyx answered her question. “I’m always thinking violent and poetic thoughts.”

  Helenia quirked a brow. “Except when you’re thinking about me.”

  Nyx battled her smile, and lost. “Only poetic, then,” she agreed, and laid her head against the rail where Helenia’s hands gripped the wood.

  It felt like a miracle that she was here. Here, with the girl she loved, covered by warm blankets that smelled of home while she recovered from her injuries. Helenia had found her last night, had dug her nearly-frozen body out of the snow with the pocked aluminum shovel she’d brought along just in case it might come in handy. It might have been more romantic if she’d clawed Nyx from the snow with her bare hands, perhaps weeping over her prone body in the process, but Helenia was far too practical for such things. Nyx had found that trait exasperating in the past. Now, though, she was pathetically grateful—especially because Helenia had also thought to steal a small vat of the Saints’ carefully-guarded healing tincture supply. She had probably charmed it right out of the guards’ hands, with her shimmering, tearful gaze and her quavering voice full of faith and hope and goodness. Nyx had fallen under its sway herself too many times to count.

  The most admirable—if somewhat insulting—part of Helenia’s singlehanded rescue mission, though, was that it had been preemptive. To have reached Nyx as quickly as she did, Helenia would have had to already be following her. Which meant their tearful goodbye in the township had been a sham, since she must have already had her own sled packed and her hauler dogs primed to go. Nyx was both annoyed by and more attracted than ever to her scheming girlfriend.

  Only one part of the rescue had bothered Nyx: Helenia had used every last drop of the stolen healing tincture on her, saving none for Tal or any other survivors they might yet find.

  You are here, Helenia had said last night, and they are not, and you are my beloved, and they are not, and so you are going to drink every last ounce of this medicine and if you complain I will bash you over the head with the carafe and then you will drink it.

  It was an unwise person who said no to Helenia. Nyx was not unwise, and so she had meekly obeyed. And now she was recovered, and heading home to recoup and report the Saints’ losses before they set out to find any more rebels who had survived the explosion.

  Well. The other Saints would be searching for rebels. Nyx would be looking for her mother and for Tal and them alone. Tal, she knew, had to be alive, because the Destroyer was alive. Nyx felt the latter truth deep in the hidden recesses of her soul, thanks to the oath she’d sworn on the iron bars of her cell. No part of her oath was yet fulfilled; no part of it had yet released her. The Destroyer had not perished in the explosion.

  Nyx fingered her dagger—her own silver dagger, the one that had been a gift from her brother. Helenia had happened upon it in the burned mining town and recovered it for her. Nyx was glad, because whenever she’d dreamed of driving a blade into the Destroyer’s heart over the last two years, it was always this particular blade that she’d pictured.

  A yelp from ahead broke Nyx from her contemplations. The lead dog, a bushy blue-gray hauler named Kenna, was limping. Red flecks of blood gleamed on the snow, and on the edge of a twisted piece of metal that stabbed up from it.

  “Ease!” Helenia called, shifting her weight to brake the sled. The five-dog team slowed reluctantly, pink tongues lolling from grinning mouths. Kenna, who sat down and held her hurt paw in the air, looked apologetic as Helenia approached to check her over.

  While Helenia crooned to her hauler, Nyx leaned over to peer at the metal poking out of the snow. A charred wooden plank was attached to one side of it with a thick bolt. It was a piece of a train track—one that had been snapped off and warped by some unimaginable force.

  A feeling like electricity swept over Nyx. She threw off her furs and stood. She whirled in a circle, searching, and found what she’d been looking for. The peak across from them sported a crater, freshly-fallen snow gathering in the bottom of it, with train tracks running along either side.

  “This is where it happened,” she whispered.

  She had only dim recollections of the explosion. Her mind had been drenched in too much pain to fully hold the moment. She remembered Tal leaving, carrying the Destroyer, and then some sort of odd bluish enchantment had begun rattling the whole of the train. Then came the fire. It had bellowed like a wounded animal, carving a gaping hole through the front half of the prison car and knocking Nyx unconscious in the process. At some point she must have been thrown through the hole and onto the mountainside some distance further down the tracks from where the explosion itself had happened.

  Had her mother survived? Saasha had been in the rear half of the car, so the explosion wouldn’t have gotten her…but neither would she have been able to escape through the hole as Nyx unintentionally had.

  Tal, though—Tal would have been right in the epicenter.

  Helenia glanced up from Kenna’s paw. “What did you say?”

  Nyx bent down, shoved the furs on the sled aside and yanked the snow shovel out without answering. She thrust it into the frost and immediately hit something hard that had a slight give to it. When she pulled the shovel out, its edge glittered with red-brown crystals. Frozen blood.

  It couldn’t be Tal. His blood was not this color.

  She still had to be sure.

  She tossed the shovel aside and dropped to the ground, scooping handfuls of snow out with her bare hands, revealing the body beneath the frost like a sculptor carving away stone to expose the art hidden inside. But this was a grisly art indeed: a man in servant’s clothing, his open mouth packed with ice, one of his hands still clutching an empty, heat-warped tray like a shield.

  Nyx didn’t spare a prayer on him. She had never been the praying type, and anyway, though it might make her a heathen, she cared little for this dead but anonymous servant. Once she had uncovered enough of his corpse to be certain he wasn’t her brother, she left him and snatched up the shovel again to dig in another spot.

  A hand on her arm, made thick by a knitted green mitten, restrained her. Nyx whirled. “Don’t—” she started, but Helenia wrapped her in a hug that smothered the rest of her sentence, which she probably would have regretted saying anyway.

  “Be still a moment and let me help,” Helenia murmured, releasing her. Though it made Nyx’s skin crawl to stand in one place while her brother’s body might lay buried in the snow nearby, she trusted Helenia and waited.

  The other girl waded through the snow back to the row of dogs. Most of them were lying down now, taking the opportunity to rest and save their strength as they had been trained, but one was straining at his harness and whining. It was Maluk, a grizzled old veteran with gray-peppered fur and eyes that had begun to go bluish. Despite his age, Helenia had kept him on the team because he was canny, with an innate sense of where the ice was too thin to bear the sled’s weight and where to find the wily mountain goats whose meat fed their township during long winters. Now, he had caught a scent that made him lay his ears back and stare at the approaching Helenia with begging eyes, and once she unclipped his harness from the lead, he leapt over the snow like a cannon shot and began digging.

  Maluk had been raised by Tal, Nyx remembered. She hadn’t seen the old dog this intent on anything since he’d left.

  Breathless, she followed Maluk. Every other footstep broke through the thin, new crust
of frost to sink deep into the fresh snow beneath, but she gave no care to the bite of cold on her shins. By the time Nyx had reached the dog’s side, the hole was as deep as he was. She stood back a bit and waited, arms folded so she wouldn’t be tempted to shove him aside and finish the hole herself. Helenia caught up and wrapped an arm—and a fur she’d grabbed from the sled—around Nyx’s shoulders. Together they held a tense, silent vigil until Maluk leapt out of the hole and went to his owner with a low whine. His muzzle shone oddly. It was, Nyx realized, crusted with silvery crystals.

  She lunged forward. She dropped to her knees at the edge of the hole. She peered in. Her breath stuttered, a haze of steam that she wished would cloud her vision entirely. Her shadow fell long and blue-black over a grim scene: a patch of snow stained silver.

  “His body isn’t here,” Helenia said. Her voice was loud and clear enough to cut through Nyx’s paralysis. “If it was, Maluk would’ve dug it up. It’s only blood.”

  Only blood. Only blood.

  “He was here,” Nyx said, her words choked as she carefully scooped out the snow around the blood, widening the hole to search for more evidence of what had happened. “He was injured.” Because of me. Because I failed him.

  Her questing fingers caught on a tuft of fabric. She pulled on it and it unfurled into the snow, smooth as butter: a twist of burgundy silk. It was ragged, torn, barely a scrap—but oh, Nyx remembered what it had looked like when it was whole.

  A wine-red cape pooled on a filthy floor. A torn corner where it snagged on a nail. My name is Elodie. And now you may thank me in truth, because unlike torture, my name is a gift I have given no assassin before.

  Nyx didn’t realize she was shaking until Helenia dropped another, heavier fur over her shoulders. Nyx tugged the warmth closer around her and managed a strangled laugh; her girlfriend, only nineteen and already a mother hen.

  “What is it? What does it mean?” Helenia asked, picking up the silky slip of fabric.