“I heard everyone.” Rielle took the box from the boy with a smile. “Thank you for cheering for me. It makes all the difference in the world and helps me not feel so afraid. And, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’ve yet learned your name.”

“It’s Simon,” said the boy, beaming. He was practically dancing on his toes, quivering with excitement. “My name is Simon.”

30

   Eliana

“Hello from home, my love. We celebrated Eliana’s twelfth birthday this evening. As I write this, she and Remy are lying on the floor by the fire, bellies full of cake. Eliana is reading aloud from Remy’s notebook while he draws a picture of her. His stories really are quite good for a five-year-old. I’ve enclosed three for you to read. Though we miss you terribly, we are all doing quite well. Eliana stays with me most days, helping me with my mending. She is good with her hands, maybe even better than me.”

—Letter from Rozen Ferracora to her husband, Ioseph

May 17, Year 1012 of the Third Age

Eliana awoke with a gasp, her hair clinging to her neck and shoulders.

So much for that bath.

“El?” Lying beside her on their shared cot, Remy came awake at once. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she mumbled, covering her face with one shaking hand. “Nightmare.”

Which was true. Since Red Crown’s attack on the Empire’s outpost, the same dream had plagued her. It began with the cries of the trapped prisoners. She searched through the smoking ruins for them, shoving past heaps of rubble and digging through piles of ash that grew every time she touched them, until she was swimming through the ash, choking on it, while the prisoners’ screams grew ever louder.

Then their screams would change.

They would call out her name.

It was then that she would finally find someone—a hand, cold and stiff from death, reaching out of the ash.

She would pull and pull on the hand, even though she knew what she would find on the other end. But she couldn’t stop. She did not deserve to be spared. So she dislodged the person from the sea of ash—and the dream would end as she stared into her mother’s death-stricken face.

“What can I do?” Remy scooted closer. “Do you want me to tell you a story?”

“I think I need a walk.” The room Camille had given them for the duration of their stay was luxurious, but the air inside it was too still, too close. Eliana felt like a heavy blanket had been wrapped around her and was winding tighter and closer with every passing moment, binding her limbs to her sides.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She dropped a hasty kiss on Remy’s brow, stumbled out of bed and toward the door.

“I love you,” came Remy’s small, uncertain voice.

“And I love you,” Eliana said and left him for the hallway.

Camille’s apartments were vast, a labyrinth of bedrooms, parlors, and bathing chambers lined with Astavari artwork she had obtained through the underground markets. If Eliana had had to go far, she might have given up eventually, collapsed in a heap of dream-panic until someone found her in the morning.

She was glad, then, that Navi’s room was so close.

Knocking softly on the door, she tried to collect her thoughts. What would she say? And what right did she have to complain to Navi of nightmares after everything she’d done?

I should leave, Eliana thought, still shivering from the lingering awfulness of the dream.

The door opened to reveal Navi, sleep-rumpled and wide-eyed with worry.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” Eliana began. “I’ve no right to ask you for anything.”

Navi clucked her tongue. “We’re friends now, aren’t we? And you look terrible.”

Navi guided Eliana inside her candlelit room, then sat on her bed and watched as Eliana furiously paced.

“You’ve had a nightmare,” Navi said.

Eliana nodded, her throat tight with tears. “The prisoners at the outpost… I heard them screaming for me. I searched and searched, but I couldn’t find them, and then I found…my mother. She was dead.” She paused. “They were all dead.”

“Haven’t you had such nightmares of your victims before?”

The simplicity of the question cut Eliana like one of her own knives. “No. I never allowed it to bother me. I couldn’t, or I would never have been able to finish a job. And then where would we all be?”

“None of your family seems very safe right now as it is,” Navi pointed out. “Despite everything you’ve done for them.”

Eliana laughed. “You’re right. All my work, and Mother’s still gone, and Father’s still dead, and Remy and I are at the mercy of people I used to hunt. And Harkan…” We can’t know for certain. He could still be alive.

She dragged a hand through her hair. “What’s the point, then, of any of it?”

Harkan had asked a similar question, the day of Quill’s execution: God help us. El, what are we doing? It felt to Eliana as though years and years had passed between that day and this one. She felt every one of them digging hotly into her shoulders like grasping fingers.

Navi was quiet for a long time. “Perhaps if nothing else, what’s happened has taught you that there is more to life—and even to war—than simply staying alive. Perhaps this is the point.” She rose and pressed a gentle palm to Eliana’s chest. “That you are beginning to awaken and remember your humanity.”

Eliana shoved Navi away with a harsh laugh. “That assumes too much of me.”

“You are very unkind to yourself.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

Navi inclined her head. “Perhaps.”

“I am unkind to the bone. It’s all I’m capable of.”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t think you do either.”

“I have to believe it! Otherwise—”

Eliana fell silent. A terrible hissing panic simmered just underneath her skin. Her breaths came fast and shallow.

“Eliana.” Navi took her hands. “Please, sit. Breathe.”

But Eliana moved away from her. “It sounds silly, but…I have always imagined a monster dwelling inside me instead of a heart. And that’s why it was so easy for me to kill, to hunt.” She backed against the far wall. She angrily wiped her eyes, glared up at the ceiling. “That monster is the reason why I liked being the Dread. I told myself that. I started to believe it too.”