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  He lifted his head and looked at the mooncat. The cat gazed back, assessing. All was silent, Elodie’s scream hanging shattered in the air, serene peaks looming above, icy lake stretching below. She saw the thoughts of Tal and the thoughts of the mooncat.

  Tal was injured. Couldn’t stand, couldn’t walk. He would go down fighting—but he would go down.

  The mooncat lunged.

  Rather than rolling away again, Tal dove forward. He twisted agilely in midair and drove a sword upward. The blade came away wet. Blood steamed on the snow and glowed in the cat’s fur, garnets on ivory. The creature roared. The mountains seemed to shake with it.

  Elodie was racing across the ice, heedless of the way it crackled and snapped under her sharp footfalls. A desperate hope thrilled in her chest. Tal had injured the cat. He was a skilled fighter. He stood a chance.

  But he’d overextended himself with his lunge and was now panting, struggling to shove himself up on his elbows, one sword trapped beneath him. The cat leapt—powerful back legs taut as springs, front claws extended, teeth bared. Tal stopped struggling and looked up. He regarded his coming death, head thrown back, neck bared, eyes bright. Elodie saw the moment a dark sort of peace settled over him.

  He would die. He could not escape it. He would no longer try.

  The cat landed with its paws in the snow on either side of Tal’s chest. It leaned down. Its teeth shone cruelly in the sunlight as its jaws snapped shut around Tal’s legs.

  Tal’s hands spasmed. He dropped both swords. His back arched and his palms drove downward into the snow as if to brace himself, and then he screamed.

  The sound pried hot fingers into Elodie’s chest. It cracked her open. And what spilled out was a memory.

  She had heard this scream before. No—she had imagined this scream before. She had imagined what it would do to her. What it was doing to her now. It was why she had never put Tal to the question. It was why she had never willfully hurt him, except in the way it always hurt him to be with her.

  The thought snapped into place like a broken bone being set. She cried out with it, tripped and fell hard on her knees. Her palms scraped over a sharp ridge of cracked ice. She lifted trembling hands and looked at them. Blood, red and slow, dripped from her fingers.

  Wrong, repeated an instinct in her, and this time she could almost remember why.

  Tal screamed again, his voice raw and breaking, as if the sound had been hooked on a line and dragged out of him. Elodie’s head jerked up. The mooncat was stalking away across the snow, dragging Tal with it. Tal’s eyes were shut, his brittle peace shattered, his face twisted in a rictus of pain.

  Elodie launched herself after them. Tal’s fallen swords lay akimbo on the bloody snow ahead of her. She swept one up. She pushed herself into a sprint, every ounce of her strength focused on thrusting her sword into the mooncat’s skull. She wanted to see more of its blood on the snow, all of it, a new lake to baptize the wilderness.

  The mooncat spotted her and growled a low warning, and she screamed back at it, not realizing that her cry contained words until she heard them echoing in her own ears:

  “He is not yours! He is mine!”

  If you truly think you can protect yourself so well, whispered another memory as it locked painfully into place, then will you finally get rid of that one?

  No, she’d answered, a prickly, possessive fear flitting over her, though she hadn’t allowed it to show in her expression then. He’s mine.

  She leapt. She was a weapon aimed true; the mooncat was reluctant to let go of Tal to defend itself against such a small attacker, and her blade sliced a gash through its brow and into its left eye. It shrieked in pain and anger, dropping Tal and jumping backwards to paw at its face. The force of the blow drove the hilt into the heel of Elodie’s hand and she reflexively pulled her fingers away, dropping the short sword.

  Tal was laid out in the snow at her feet. She knelt at his side, sweeping her arms under him, about to…try to carry him somewhere, maybe the sled, she wasn’t sure yet—and then he opened his eyes and saw her. And it wasn’t relief that came into his eyes. It was something broken and bitter, something grown too far from the sun.

  Voice rough with pain, he said, “You will never let me go, will you?”

  She didn’t understand the words, but she was afraid that she would soon if her memories kept surfacing, and she discovered that she didn’t want to. “Shut up and let me save you,” she snapped, trying to heave him up without jostling him too much. He closed his eyes and turned his face away, his breath coming in shallow gasps, his skin pale and stained silver with blood.

  She froze.

  Tal didn’t have silver blood. He couldn’t. So why was the color seeping over him, smearing across the snow, dripping in rivulets down her arms where she held him?

  She pulled one of her hands out from underneath him. He sagged back to the snow. Her fingers crept to his legs, to the new wounds that the cat had rent in his skin. His trousers were torn, flayed, as was the flesh beneath. Disbelieving, she dipped a finger into one of the tears, barely feeling him shudder beneath her touch. When she withdrew her hand, her finger was stained with forbidden silver blood.

  Tal was a silver Smith. Tal was a silver Smith, and he had hidden it from her for the last two years, because the color of his blood was a death sentence.

  Two years, she thought again. Not a day. She had known Tal for two years.

  She lifted her gaze. Tal’s eyes were open again and he was looking at her. Hopelessness and an odd, mercurial relief tightened the corners of his mouth. He expected her to…what? She could almost feel the thought, the supposition, the memory of what her old self might have done.

  Behind her, the mooncat roared. It ceased scraping at its ruined eye and turned its head fully around so it could locate her.

  Hurriedly, Elodie shoved her hands under Tal’s shoulders and yanked him backwards, pulling him across the snow. There would be time to figure out her memories and the mystery of Tal’s blood later. First, she had to save both him and herself.

  The cat was wary now, its good eye trained on her as its bad eye wept blood and fluids. Its tail lashed against its back legs. It stalked forward, teeth bared, intent. It would no longer underestimate her.

  Ice groaned beneath Elodie’s boots. She had reached the frozen lake again. An idea blinked into being, the only way they might stand a chance at survival. She swallowed hard and then stopped, setting Tal down and bracing herself. Then she took a slow, careful step away from him.

  The mooncat’s gaze followed her. Good.

  “Elodie,” Tal coughed, rolling on his side to watch her. The sound of her name from his lips, thoughtlessly spoken without bitterness, made her mad heartbeat slow a fraction. “What—what are you…”

  “You were right,” she said in a low tone, not taking her eyes off the cat. “I will not let you go.”

  She took another step. A piece of ice snapped beneath her heel and splashed into the water; she’d reached her little fishing hole. The place where her body warmth had been slowly melting the ice, weakening it.

  She stopped.

  The cat paused. It paced around her in a half-circle, keeping its good eye toward her, cautious of her now—but she had no weapon, no natural strength. She was an easy kill. She flung her arms out and bared her own teeth. “Come and get me,” she shouted. The ice caught her words and flung them out into the peaks, into the sky, into the champagne-and-coral clouds: transcendent, merciless. The echo rattled another memory loose within her.

  I swear to protect you, and to not allow harm to come to you, and never to harm you myself. A younger voice, one full of emotion that he’d not yet learned to hide.

  The mooncat snarled and pounced. Elodie did not close her eyes. She was many things, but a coward was not one of them.

  No one has ever accused me of being soft, whispered her own voice, corrosive as it settled back into her heart.

  The mooncat struck. It jaws latched on
to her shoulder. Its front feet landed next, driving her downward, but even its big, broad paws could not distribute such a blow evenly over the weakened ice.

  I am not unguarded. Old words: a precious safety net, the only thing she could trust.

  Elodie’s breath was a stuttered gasp. There was no room to register her past as it burrowed back into her bones. The pain had come now, and it was a wave of fire burying fangs in her shoulder, and two rows of claws piercing her back.

  She would scream. She owed Tal that much.

  The thought was true, but she couldn’t yet recall why. Still, she inhaled a jagged breath and let it out in a wail—just as the ice beneath her cracked and gave way.

  The cat’s weight drove them both instantly into the freezing deep. Her cry cut off. The water was cold enough to feel like an inferno on her skin. The shock of it made her inhale. She choked on a lungful of water.

  It was dark, but there was a dim light above her—sunlight through ice. It was mostly blocked by a writhing ivory mass. The cat was lashing out, snapping off more plates of ice as it desperately tried to free itself, widening the hole in the process. One of its back legs smashed into her with enough force to break a rib and force all the remaining breath from her body. She went reeling away into the murk.

  Air. She needed air. She needed air now.

  She curled in the water, found the dim sunlight, and twisted toward it. She reached not the hole, not the air, but the cap of unbroken ice. There was a shadow on the other side of it. She could almost make out a face. She could almost make out the sound of her name. She tried to call Tal’s.

  What is he to you? Just another guard dog, just another toy for you to break and discard? How dare you call him yours?

  She pounded on the ice. The water slowed her blows, rendered them ineffective. There was nothing she could do. Nowhere for her to go but to her death.

  She could make out the shouting now. It was Tal. He wasn’t calling her name; he was crying out in pain.

  Because of his oath. It was trying to force him to save her, and he was trying to fight it. It would hurt him. But not for long.

  Instead of leading me to my destiny, he led me to the Destroyer.

  She flattened her palms against the ice. Her memories were slipping back in, one by one, and she still didn’t have enough to wholly make sense of the puzzle that was her. But oh, she remembered why her blood was wrong, and she remembered what color it should be, and she knew what she could do now to save herself.

  She called up her fire, concentrating on the palms of her hands. She didn’t need much magic. Only a little bit. Enough to melt the ice. And, if she was lucky, enough to warm herself before she died of exposure.

  Nothing happened.

  Tendrils of watery red snaked away from her injured palms into the icy water. Her power was gone. It had been gone ever since the explosion—the explosion caused by her poisoning—and without it, she was doomed.

  It should be impossible. Magic lived in the metallic blood of its bearers. Even if the poison had weakened her, stolen her strength, it could not have changed her so wholly. But changed she was, and she could no longer fathom how she might save herself.

  Tal’s shadow was still above her. She fixed her eyes on it. At least she wasn’t alone. She had been alone all her life. She didn’t want to die alone, too.

  The need for air finally became too great. It pried her mouth open and forced her to inhale. Water shoved itself down her throat, a cruel and painful invasion, a leaden weight in her lungs. Her body jerked violently. She began to drown.

  You are nothing but the Destroyer to me and to everyone I care about.

  Elodie discovered, to her chagrin, that she was a coward after all. She was alone and freezing and dying and scared, scared, scared. Darkness like ink bled over her vision, stealing even Tal’s shadow from her. Her sodden lungs forced her to inhale again, and her body jerked and burned with it.

  What little strength she’d had evaporated. Her body stilled. Her hands floated away from the icy surface. She began to sink. Her flesh would bloat and rot and then her bones would drift down to the lakebed, food for the sungills that had evaded her.

  Mark my words: one day soon, you will face a reckoning.

  The Destroyer remembered everything.

  And then she died.

  TAL’S SWORDS WERE TOO FAR AWAY. He could not break the ice with his bare hands. He had lost too much blood already, was shivering uncontrollably with the shock and the cold, was battered by the memory of Elodie’s fingers glazed in his silver blood and her possessive cry as she’d launched herself at his attacker. He could not save her. And yet his oath drove him to do the impossible anyway.

  His hands curled into fists against the ice as he cried out. The pain was a blur, a lace of agony laid over his whole body until he could not tell the pain of his wounds from the pain of the oath. Between his fists, through the ice, the Destroyer was a blur of light on dark. Her palms were pale smudges laid flat. He couldn’t see her expression.

  The oath bore down on him. Helpless against it, he drove a fist into the ice. It didn’t even crack beneath the blow, but the oath forced him to do it again, and again, until his knuckles were another point in the map of pain that was his body. Somewhere nearby, the mooncat howled and splashed as it finally latched onto a solid piece of ice and hauled itself out of the lake. Its fur was a double-coat, insulated enough to trap warm air in its layers and keep its hide dry; it would not freeze to death. The creature shook itself and water droplets arced through the air, a thousand rainbows. It snarled one last time and then loped away down the valley, giving up its meal as too costly.

  Tal paused in his blows, shuddering, every breath a gasp that cost him far too much effort. That was when he remembered the knife in his boot: the ornamental dagger that Elodie had taken from a corpse, which she had given him to skin the rabbit, and which he’d never given back because he wanted to see her helpless. A feeling crashed over him now at the realization that he still had it, something akin to relief, but there was no time to register it. He snatched the little weapon from his boot, lifted it high, and brought it down hard on the ice.

  It was a thoughtless blow, one that could have ended with him being dumped into the freezing water along with Elodie, but he was too used to saving her without thought for his own safety. It was sheer luck that the ice cracked away from him, toward the hole a dozen yards away where its structure had already been weakened. He stabbed downward again, then swung himself sideways to kick through the spider-webbed ice, crying out at how the movement jarred his old and new injuries.

  The ice broke into shards. The hole was just wide enough for him to reach through. He managed to pause long enough to peel his coat and shirt off—if he got them wet, he would surely die of exposure even before his injuries or the rust phage had the chance to do the trick—and then laid flat on his stomach atop the ice and reached into the water to find the Destroyer.

  She was sinking. Her form was a blur, her hair blocking her face. One of her hands trailed upward, thin red blood leaking from it, mingling with Tal’s as he grabbed her forearm and pulled her upward with all his strength. She came in a wash of icy water, limp and yielding, her waist and legs still in the hole. The ice crackled ominously at its edge. He wrapped his arms around her torso—soft, freezing, drenched—and braced himself, then pulled one more time with all the strength he had left.

  It wasn’t until she was lying prone on the ice, head in his lap, hair soaked with red and silver blood and glacier-clear water, that he realized she was already dead.

  Time seemed to crystallize. It spread out from them, webbing the sky, the lake, the ice, the peaks, until everything was veined white with impossibility.

  Earlier, he had thought that his pain was so great and so muddled that he could not tell which part of it sprung from his injuries and which from his oath. Now, too late, he realized that none of it sprang from his oath at all. He was sitting immobile, staring down at the bod
y of the girl he’d sworn to protect, and his oath was not grinding down on his bones or driving him to action. It was…gone.

  It was gone, and he was free.

  And it felt wrong.

  The wrongness spread itself within him. Its wings opened, feathers whispering over his soul. This was not how it was supposed to go. This was not what his god had promised him. And he thought he had no longer wanted what his god had promised—for him to save the Destroyer, and save the empire through her—but he realized with a terrible suddenness that he did, he did, and it was too late.

  He closed his eyes. Tipped his face to the sky, and despaired. The moment he’d fantasized about for two years had finally come to pass, and all he could think about was the way she’d cried without making a sound when she had failed to build a fire. The fierce, innocent triumph in her smile when she’d held up the rabbit she’d won from the stoat. The defiance in her cry as she’d launched herself at the mooncat for his sake.

  He had done this. He had led the Destroyer into the wilderness in the hopes that this, or something like it, would occur, and even as he had, he hadn’t quite believed it truly could happen. Even as he’d struggled to break through the ice and save her a moment ago, he’d imagined her saving herself: a column of fire and steam geysering against the mountains as she rose from the lake like an avenging goddess. But instead, the way she’d died had been wholly human. More like the way he’d thought he would die—saving someone else, with no care taken for his own life.

  He tilted his head down and looked at the Destroyer. At Elodie. She was splayed brokenly over his lap, her lips blue, frost creeping over them already. She was gone. Her heartbeat had ceased and his obligation to her had died along with it. Whatever wrongness he felt now, he could do nothing about it. It was over.

  Except it wasn’t. He had grown up in the Skyteeth, in the harsh winters full of alpine blizzards and homemade ice skates and fishing holes carved into frozen ponds. He had been taught from his childhood how to rescue someone who fell through the ice. Even minutes after death, his stepmother had taught him, a person could be saved. She had demonstrated how to breathe air into someone else’s lungs. Had warned him that wet clothes had to be immediately removed lest they steal all the remaining body heat. She’d told him that even if these efforts succeeded, the rescued person would likely need further attentions immediately—a warm fire, blankets or furs, potential medical treatment for frostbite or hypothermia—or they could perish again in very little time.