Snow Like Ashes(72)

I fight the urge to curl in a ball and never leave this place. It’s safe here, there’s no Decay, no evil, and my chest aches with everything that awaits me outside of this dream.

“You will understand how to use all this when you are ready,” Hannah says, and I jump. I thought this was a memory of her, not actually her, but she swings her tear-rimmed eyes to me as I release a sob that burns my throat. “It’s you now, Meira. Wake up.”

Warm, flickering gold throbs beyond my eyelids, and I squint in the rays of sun passing above me, columns of dancing light under a clear blue sky. The wind churns the scent of dead grass and dried earth, so pungent that I instantly know where I am—the Rania Plains.

It’s you now.

I close my eyes, biting back the sobs that come as Hannah’s dream plays through my head. Why did she show me all of that? Why me?

Because Sir is dead and Mather is gone. I’m the only one left, the one about to face an evil created thousands of years ago, so long ago that not even myths remain from that time.

I bite back another sob, drawing in deep, slow breaths. I can’t worry about that now; I have to focus on figuring out where I am. Step by step, breath by breath, I open my eyes and survey the world around me.

I’m in a cage. Wooden bars keep me trapped as a great, lumbering ox pulls me on. Men trail alongside, their breastplates showing Spring’s black sun. I’m Herod’s prisoner. Gregg’s story comes hurtling back to me, every detail crisp and clear from when he returned to camp so many years ago, a battered soldier who had just watched his wife die. The way the words tumbled out of his mouth like he didn’t even know he was saying them, just kept coming and coming, telling us every detail about how Herod killed Crystalla….

Nausea rolls and I turn over, barely making it to the edge of the cage before my stomach pushes out everything I’ve eaten in the past few days. I cling to the bars, heaving and fighting down tears as an all-too-familiar shadow crosses over me.

“Good morning, Meira. It’s Lady Meira now, though, isn’t it? I haven’t gotten a chance to congratulate you on your engagement. A Season managing to snag the wealthy Cordellan prince. I didn’t know Rhythms were stooping to charity now.”

I focus on the grass rolling beneath the cage’s wooden wheels, on the smells of earthy dead plants and sour vomit. Not on Herod’s booted feet, keeping pace beside me, his fingers curled around one of the bars.

“I’m moving up in the world.” I heave again, coughing out air. At least there’s nothing left for me to vomit. My ribs, silent during my need to puke, scream at me now until I roll onto my back. Even that doesn’t entirely appease them. I need medicine, a splint better than my padding and armor. I doubt I’ll get any of that here.

Herod laughs. “How quickly the mighty fall.”

I close my eyes, the sunlight casting red and gold on the inside of my eyelids. I will not give Herod the satisfaction of seeing me break. I will be strong.

People had conduits once to make them strong. I saw them, conduits like stones and pendants and sticks. I shove the dream away, refusing to let it poison me with more worry, but something catches me and won’t let go.

People had conduits like stones.

The stone in my pocket, the one that Mather gave me, that he wanted to believe was magic when he was a child. A piece of lapis lazuli that Winter mined. It could be …

This is insane.

But … I have nothing left to lose for trying, do I?

I shut my eyes tighter, focusing on the lapis lazuli ball, on whatever might be inside it. I imagine the stone’s strength flowing into my body, twirling through the cavity of my chest, and filling my ribs with vitality and health.

Nothing happens.

I do it again, gritting my teeth, begging the blue thing to do something, please, to help me in some way—heal just one rib, just one—

Something jabs my side. Hard. I gasp in the sudden shock of pain and swallow down a wave of nausea, my focus shattered by the hilt of Herod’s sword.

“You’ve slept enough,” he says. “Angra will want you conscious when we arrive.”

I shut my mouth tightly once my stomach calms, body curled away from Herod and ribs well beyond the point of screaming pain. Stars poke my vision, threatening me with a long, slow sleep, and I try to hold my chest in a way that would make the pain stop. There’s no relief. No help from magic. The snuffing out of that one flicker of hope makes me feel even more hollow, but I can’t think about that. I have to stay awake. I have to know what dangers lie ahead.

Like magic more powerful and potent than we ever knew, a great, destructive force contained in one man. If it went into Angra’s ancestor … has it passed down, generation to generation, like the Royal Conduits themselves? Why hasn’t it spread throughout the world again?