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  Nyx shook her head. “She could have hurt him, or threatened him to try to get something from us. You should have taken more care. Tal raised him from a pup, he’s part of the family.”

  Helenia took the polished-tin mirror off its stand and handed it to Nyx. “I felt she wouldn’t hurt him. The girl is many things, but I don’t think she’s cruel.” Nyx inhaled sharply at that outrageous statement and started to respond, but Helenia raised a hand to forestall her. “I apologize, I misspoke. What she did to both of you was unspeakably cruel. I only meant…I’m not sure. I feel as though something is disjointed, or perhaps new, in her. She doesn’t quite match what I expected, given the descriptions of her that I’ve heard. In any case, I’m sure it’ll all come out in the trial, but first we have to get her there.”

  Nyx held up the mirror to examine herself. Helenia had done an excellent job. Her head was smooth now, her face sharper and more angular without the softening effect of her braids. Her eyes looked darker than she remembered, her mouth less kind—though it had never been overly kind to begin with—and slanted with a new hardness. She felt, suddenly and unexpectedly, like herself.

  She set down the mirror and stood up. “I’m ready,” she told her girlfriend. “Let’s go.”

  TAL DID NOT WATCH WHEN THEY RETRIEVED ELODIE FROM HER CELL. When the huddle of silent, on-edge rebels carried her prone body past his room, they kept her head wrapped up in a wolf skin. He didn’t see her face.

  One of her hands fell, though. The rebels jostled her as they maneuvered down the tiny hallway and nearly dropped her. They caught her in time, shifted their grip and eyed each other with an apprehension so loud it was nearly audible, but none of them folded her arm back where it had been. It slid along the floorboards, her evenly-trimmed fingernails whispering against the doorframe, her slender pianist’s fingers curled slightly toward her palms.

  Nyx rose from the bed and kicked the door shut.

  Tal exhaled. Nyx slung an arm around him, a gesture that seemed comforting and sisterly, but the lean muscles in her shoulder were tight. She was ready to restrain him in case he leapt up to defend Elodie. He could tell her she wouldn’t need to, but then he would have to tell her why, and he would have to give the reasoning behind what he had done—and that he couldn’t do, because so much of it remained unfathomable even to himself. There were too many things he couldn’t explain. He couldn’t tell them that it was his fault Elodie was alive again. He couldn’t tell them why the thought of her death at the hands of the Saints jury made him feel both desperately afraid and darkly, ravenously hopeful. He couldn’t tell them that in his head, she was no longer the Destroyer, but Elodie.

  He couldn’t tell them what he’d dreamt about while he was asleep: Elodie’s hands light on his chest, and him shivering beneath her touch. He couldn’t tell them that he’d asked her to stop not because he couldn’t stand the feel of her skin against his, but because he had liked it, because it had made all of him lean in to her like she was the sun he orbited around—and that, he couldn’t stand.

  He was finally free of her, and yet more of him belonged to her now than ever before.

  They waited in silence while the sleds were readied and Elodie’s limp form secured upon one. Then Nyx produced the key to his manacle and walked with him to the outside of the small building. There were four sleds all in a row, nearly two dozen dogs barking and tugging, excited for what they sensed would be a long run. Their anticipation was a sharp contrast to the uneasy countenance of the rebels, the way the mushers shifted their weight on the foot boards, the way their eyes went from Tal to the unmoving, body-shaped bundle on the last sled in the line. Tal ignored them all as Nyx clamped the other end of the manacle to the first sled’s handle. She touched his shoulder when she was done, a gentle gesture entirely at odds with the scathing look she then turned on her comrades. They shifted and murmured and turned away, finding other things to be busy with as the caravan prepared to leave.

  And then they were off. The dogs galloped cheerfully through the mountain pass, the serrated peaks jutting to either side as the sled runners hissed cleanly against the packed snow. That night they camped in a creaky, ramshackle waystation, a small cabin whose doors were left unlocked for travelers. There wasn’t nearly enough room for all of them, but Nyx and Helenia both insisted that he be among the ones who slept inside near the little fire.

  He didn’t dream of Elodie’s hands on him. He didn’t wonder whether anyone was giving her water or waking her from her nightmares. What he did know was that she would be well-guarded, and that was all he would allow himself to be concerned with.

  Maluk woke from his laudanum-induced sleep the next morning. When the door of the cabin creaked open before first light, the old dog bounded in and buried Tal beneath his furry body, jaw lolling in a canine grin. Tal smiled and sat up. When he ran a hand down the dog’s back, he felt the spot of crinkled fur where Elodie had gripped and refused to let go. “You too, old boy?” Tal murmured, and then got up with a sigh to make ready for the day.

  His leg ached as he dressed himself. The broken bone had healed, the open wound vanished into a thin pink scar, but spots of rust phage still speckled his shin and sank tendrils into his blood. He was dying, probably: something else he didn’t allow himself to think about.

  The caravan ran hard all through the day. By lunchtime, the early mountain winter had retreated like a tide, leaving behind pools of spring: a reedy ash tree straining valiantly toward the sun, a clump of blue-green clover waiting in vain for the arrival of bees, stubborn white snowdrop flowers watered by glacial melt. When the ground beneath the sleds’ runners changed from packed snow to mud and bumpy rocks, they stopped briefly to retrofit wheels to the sleds and then pushed on. But it was far harder for the dogs to pull in such conditions, and they were already tired from the long run the day before—so when the caravan reached the ruins of an old temple at the foot of the Skyteeth, the Saints agreed to stop for an early dinner and to make camp so the dogs and mushers could rest.

  The wide clearing that housed the temple was a natural cathedral of its own. Towering sycamores and mote trees bowed over it, and the light that filtered through their leaves was still and green and holy. Buoyant bits of fluff—mote tree seeds—skimmed and drifted through the air, falling gently on the dogs and Saints like a benediction. From beyond the clearing came the thoughtful rippling of moving water: a tributary of the Entengre flowing toward one of the lakes at the bottom of the mountain range.

  Tal looked at it all, and hated it.

  He hated the peace of it, the invitation to reflect, the gentleness that contrasted so sharply with what his god had required of him. He hated the unassuming temple that seemed to meld with the forest, half-in and half-out of the clearing, its blocks run through with veins of copper and nickel and zinc; he hated how it was similar to the smaller and newer chapel in his old township, the one that he’d prayed at so fervently when he hadn’t understood what lay in store for him. But most of all he hated the presence he could sense here. His god was waiting for him, had perhaps been waiting for him for a long time, and Tal could no longer put off the confrontation that had been two years in the making.

  Helenia, who was standing beside him as she supervised the unpacking of the food stores, noticed the direction of his gaze. She looked to the temple and was still for a long moment, a sad sort of peace sliding over her expression, before she touched Tal’s hand. “I feel the need to pray. Would you like to come with me?” she said kindly, because of course he would not be allowed to go anywhere without his manacles, without a guard.

  Nyx overheard from the sled behind them. She straightened with a frown. “Hel,” she said uneasily, looking from her brother to her girlfriend.

  “Not to worry,” Tal said with an attempt at a smile. “I think it will be fine. Elodie is perfectly safe and asleep, I have no urge to leap to her defense at the moment.”

  He caught his mistake too late. Helenia and Nyx traded a glance hea
vy with some silent conversation. “Elodie?” Nyx replied.

  “The Destroyer,” he amended.

  Helenia squeezed his shoulder and unlocked the manacle that had been on the sled’s handrail, clamping it instead around his free wrist. “I’m not worried. It’s just a bit of prayer, and you’ve no weapons and a dozen Saints between you and your oath.”

  Nyx watched them go, worry creeping over her features, her gaze fixed on Helenia. Tal wondered when her childhood crush on Hel had deepened to such an obvious love, and regretted that he might be a complication between them now. But there was little else he could say to reassure her, so he simply tried to seem as docile as possible while Helenia led him toward the temple. He didn’t look at all at the last sled in the caravan, where four Saints were gathered watchfully around Elodie’s sleeping form.

  They walked through the temple’s shadowed entryway. The outside world grew muffled and more distant than it quite should’ve, as if this building could offer a refuge beyond merely the stones that made up its four walls. It smelled of earth and metal and the white-flowering vines that grew here even in the darkness. The floor was cool, packed dirt, a rich loam that bore no footprints. Hewn pews stretched to either side of them as if they’d risen straight from the bedrock. Directly ahead was the bowl of a low altar. It was empty, except it wasn’t, because what the Unforged God required was not coins and trinkets but souls. It was Tal’s whole self lying in that shallow clay bowl in front of the pews: his past, his imagined future, his relationships, all sacrificed in the name of faith. He’d given everything to his god. All of himself. And what had he received in return, except pain and confusion and cruelty, and now an impending death?

  “Do you ever hate him?” he asked Helenia in a low voice.

  She snorted. “Oh, of course.”

  He blinked, surprise pulling him from his thoughts as he turned to look at her. Her gaze was soft and fixed on the altar, a rueful smile curling at the edge of her mouth. “When Nyx first told me how she planned to free you, I cursed his name. I railed at him for a good few months, actually. Stopped attending prayer services, stopped bothering to argue with Saasha about scripture interpretations…stopped everything, really.”

  “I thought you were a true believer.” As I used to be, he thought.

  She nudged him with a shoulder. “I don’t know about ‘true,’ but I do consider myself a believer.”

  “Even when you cursed his name?”

  “I still curse his name every once in a while. I doubt I’ll be over it anytime soon. But anger is not the absence of belief.”

  Tal said nothing for a while. He did not sit on the pew, nor did he go to the altar. His god was waiting for him there. “He lied to me,” he said at last, softly.

  Helenia tilted her head. “About what?”

  For the first time in two years, Tal quoted scripture: “‘I shall say ‘go,’ and you will go, and none shall stand against my victory fulfilled in you. I am the great Smith and you are the tool of my forge, and the purpose to which I will bend you is to mend that which is broken.’”

  It was the text he had come back to, again and again, during the months he’d had the repeated vision of pledging himself to the Destroyer. He had seen the scripture everywhere he looked. He’d eventually taken it as a sign from the Unforged God, a personal promise penned in an ancient text just for him. How naïve he’d been, how full of faith and arrogance. And oh, how he’d paid for it.

  “That’s Saint Yvetta’s translation,” Helenia remarked. “Did you know the word she translated as ‘victory’ is actually the same word she translated as ‘purpose’ in the next sentence? From my studies of the original language, I believe both iterations should be translated as ‘purpose.’” She glanced over at him and grimaced. “Not, I suppose, that it would make you feel any better. I’m sorry. Sometimes I get carried away when I’m talking about the holy texts. You should hear me and Saasha get into it, we sound like a shed full of cats yowling at each other.”

  Tal glanced at her, willing to be distracted. “What do you yowl at each other about?”

  For the first time, Helenia’s voice took on an uncharacteristically bitter tone. “Oh, I natter on about historical context and underlying themes and the biases of the authors, and she howls about ‘scripture being plain as day’ and ‘the inerrancy of the holy texts.’ She thinks I am a corrupting influence on your sister.”

  “Nyx is fully capable of corrupting herself.”

  “Truer words were never spoken.” Helenia sighed, her head dipping. “I do worry for Nyx. She can be so single-minded, and Saasha raised her on those gruesome texts of the ancient Saints’ martyrdoms, on vengeance and victory as the scriptures’ ultimate aim. Saasha completely glosses over the deeper message of how violence is a self-perpetuating cycle. She willfully misses the beautiful core of redemption that the whole of all the texts are rooted in. Nyx doesn’t take any of it very seriously, of course—she doesn’t really consider herself a believer—but her mother’s influence has seeped in. I fear it has affirmed, and even deepened, her…” Helenia searched for the words.

  “Natural inclination to violence?” Tal supplied.

  “Yes. That. When Nyx does read the texts, she always gravitates to the tales of retribution, of victory coming only through terrible sacrifice. It’s as if she’s only willing to see the things that support what she already believes and wants, rather than—”

  “—considering the historical context and underlying themes and biases of the authors,” Tal finished for her.

  Helenia made a rueful face and turned away. “I’m sorry. I tend to get worked up when I talk about these things. Please, ignore me. You wanted to come here for your own purposes, not to listen to me preach about scriptural interpretation.”

  “Please don’t denigrate yourself. I have always enjoyed listening to you preach,” Tal said. “And I am concerned about Nyx as well.” He hesitated. “Did you…are you aware that she…”

  “Swore a metal oath?” Helenia closed her eyes, her face settling into lines of pain. “Yes. She told me.”

  Tal was helpless, as he had been helpless against his own oath—only this was worse, because this was his sister, and she had sworn it for his sake. Just as she had poisoned herself for his sake, had undergone torture for his sake, had nearly allowed herself to be murdered by the Destroyer for his sake.

  And then, when he’d begged her at the frozen lake, she’d agreed to spare the Destroyer’s life. Once again, for him. And in return he had lied to her, betrayed her, and betrayed himself.

  Elodie’s cool fingers against his chest, counting his scars. Him shivering under her touch. Dreaming about it afterwards. It was wrong, and he had never been more ashamed. How dare he protect Elodie—the Destroyer, he reminded himself fiercely—over the only kin he had left? He could not pretend he had no choice now, because for the first time in years he did have a choice. And now he needed to make it.

  He inhaled. Steeled himself. Then, looking straight ahead at the altar, he said, “One part of her oath is already fulfilled.”

  He felt the whole of Helenia’s attention swivel to him. “What do you mean? Which part? She swore—”

  Tal had to be the one to say it. He was the one who deserved to hear the words coming from his own mouth, to bear the hurt of them. “To see the Empire fall, the Destroyer’s reign ended, and her dead.” All of him quaked. All of him feared. His god moved within him and the weight of a new vision began to pull at his consciousness, but Tal thrust the feeling away with all the strength he had.

  “She was dead,” he told Helenia. “The Destroyer was dead. She lured the mooncat away from me and onto the ice, and it drove her into the lake with it. She drowned. She was gone by the time I pulled her out. And then…” His face was wet; he was crying. “And then I saved her. I brought her back.”

  Helenia stared at him. She shook her head, frowning in puzzlement. “Your oath must have compelled you.”

  “No. My oath w
as gone. It is gone. I am no longer sworn to protect her, but God help me, Helenia, I still want to. Elodie was like nothing I ever expected. She’s…she’s funny. She cried in front of me, Hel, and she hid it, she didn’t make a sound, and I could tell it was something she’d done many times before. She’s ferocious in this…this terrible, innocent way. I don’t know what to do with her. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t understand what I have done or how I feel, except to think that I might be able to love her, and I cannot, I cannot, let that be the reason why I have saved the Destroyer.”

  He had finally spoken the truth that had been growing within him, eating through his soul like acid for the last two days. He cared for Elodie. For a murderess. He had watched her burn thousands at her sister’s command. The Destroyer had looked on as Tal had stymied and slain assassin after assassin, as his hands grew red with the blood of his fellow believers—of anyone who dared to rise up against the Empress’s favorite weapon. And now, all he could think about was the dread he felt at the thought of her trial and execution, and how he no longer hoped for her death at all.

  The wrenching shame, the drowning horror of it, overwhelmed him then. It drove him to move, lest he fall to his knees and disintegrate beneath its weight. He strode toward the altar. It was reddish brown and slightly misshapen, obviously very old. When he was near enough to see into its bowl, he realized it was not empty after all; a bone viper was curled there in a nest of leaves and dried white flowers.

  These snakes were lethally venomous. They were also vulnerable. They had no scales and skin so thin it was nearly see-through, and so had taken to protecting themselves by using a special secretion to glue the bones of their victims to their backs. A living thing, clad in an armor of death until no one could see what was beneath.