Because of the delays with Griz and Kaden joining our caravan, we didn’t reach the valley floor until dusk. Kaden had been walking for five hours now with his hands tied behind his back. I saw the fatigue in his steps, but strangely, instead of sympathy, my own anger and fears resurfaced. How many months had I been in that same position, a half-starved prisoner, humiliated and afraid, uncertain if I’d live another day? He hadn’t suffered half as much as I had. Yet. The unsettling difference was, he had come looking for this trouble. Why was he really here?
We rode down the main avenue, surrounded by the eerie boxy giants. Many of the ancient walls and roofs were still intact. There was a quick scramble to choose a suitable shelter, which meant one that could be defended—just in case.
Rafe and Tavish conferred, and a ruin was decided upon. We all gathered armfuls of what loose and dried branches we could find and filed into the cavernous dwelling, taking the horses with us. It probably could have held an entire regiment.
As soon as a fire was roaring, I prepared a poultice, helping myself to whatever was in Kaden’s saddlebag. Tavish sharpened his knife and work began on Griz. Our shelter rose several stories, and thick slabs of stone that had fallen from higher places littered the floor around us. Griz was laid out on one of them. As weak as he was and, now it seemed, slightly delirious, it took all four of them to hold him down while Tavish cleaned the wound.
Kaden was ordered to sit in an open area far from the gear and fire. I sat nearby on a large block of rock, guarding him, a sword across my lap. A strange feeling knotted inside me, like a meal that wasn’t eaten properly, rushed and uncomfortable. I noted his arms, still bound behind his back. A sour taste rose in my throat.
He was the prisoner now, like the prisoner he had made me. All his actions I had sloughed off and forgotten, because I knew that in some twisted way he had also saved my life, were suddenly as fresh and hurtful as if they had happened yesterday. I felt the rope cutting into my wrists and the suffocating terror of trying to breathe beneath a black hood he had pulled over my head. I felt the shame of crying as my face was ground into the sand. My emotions weren’t blinding and explosive, as they had been back then, but were now tight and contained, like an animal pacing behind the cage of my ribs.
Kaden met my stare, his eyes revealing nothing; cold, calm, dead. I wanted to see terror in them. Fear. Just as he had surely seen it in mine when I discovered he wasn’t the pelt trader he had claimed to be but an assassin sent to kill me.
“How does it feel?” I asked.
He acted as if he didn’t know what I was talking about. I tried to goad his fear to the surface. “How does it feel to have your hands tied behind your back? To be dragged across the wilderness, not knowing what will happen to you?” I forced a long and luxurious smile as if I was enjoying the turn of our fortunes. “How does it feel to be a prisoner, Kaden?”
“I’m not fond of it, if that’s what you want to hear.”
My eyes stung. I wanted far more than that. “What I want is to watch you beg for your release. To desperately bargain for your life like I had to.”
He sighed.
“That’s all I get? A sigh?”
“I know that you suffered, Lia, but I did what I thought was right at the time. I can’t take back what I’ve done. I can only try to make amends.”
I choked on the word. I knew bitterly the cost of trying to make amends, and how pathetically they could fall short. When Greta died, I thought it was all my fault as I tried to make amends, but now I realized I hadn’t even known the rules of the game I’d been drawn into, nor all the players—like the traitors back in Civica. My amends would have changed nothing. The lies went on and on. Just like Kaden’s lies.
“You lied to me about the footbridge,” I said. “It was there all along.”
“Yes. Four miles north of the Brightmist gate. It’s not there anymore. We cut it down.”
Four miles? We could have gotten there on foot.
I leaned back on the rock. “So what cunning story did you spin to get them to spare your lives? I’m sure it was an excellent one. You’re the master of deceit, after all.”
He studied me, his brown eyes as dark and deep as night. “No,” he said. “Not anymore. I think that title has fallen to you.”
I looked away. It was a title I would gladly embrace if it could get me what I needed. I stared at the firelight dancing across the steel of the sword, both edges equally sharp and gleaming. “I did what I had to do.”
“All those things you told me? Only what you had to do?”
I stood, the sword still in my hand. I wasn’t going to get wrangled down a path of guilt. “Who sent you, Kaden?” I demanded. “Why are you here? Was it Malich?”
A disgusted smirk twisted his lip.
“Say it,” I said.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, Lia, we were outnumbered that day on the terrace. We barely escaped with our lives. Faiwel died. So did the other guards who fought by our sides. Griz and I managed to fight our way down to a portal on the lowest level, and we sealed the door behind us. From there we hid in various abandoned passages for three days. When they couldn’t find us, they assumed we had escaped on another raft.”
“And just how would you know what they assumed? Or that there was a squad sent after us?”
“One of the passages we hid in was next to Sanctum Hall. We heard the Komizar shouting orders, one o
f which was to find you.”
My knees turned to water. I stared at Kaden, the cavern suddenly spinning with shadows. “But he’s dead.”