I nod at Conall and hold my breath. After one heartbeat, two, he nods back.
24
WEEKS PASS. EVERY morning I spend a few horrific minutes wondering if today is the day Angra will send for me, but he doesn’t, and the soldiers lump me with the workers bound for the wall. I work without water until sundown, gulp down cold stew, and collapse in the cage. And every day, through the working, through the waiting, I ask myself the same question, over and over.
What can I do to help us?
I keep this question to myself, tucked carefully in the back of my mind so no one else can get punished for plotting an escape. But every answer I come up with is flimsy and weak. Take down one of the guards—to what end? Shove a few of the soldiers on the ramps to their deaths—and get pulled down myself? There has to be something.
My muscles never get used to the up and down of the ramps, and my legs convulse each night until I pass into restless fits of dreams, dark and scattered flashes that make no sense. Sir and Noam arguing in the Rania Plains, golden prairie grass lashing around them as storm clouds roil above. Mather standing over a dead Spring soldier, eyes on the locket as he holds it out like he wants to drop it into the earth. And Theron caught in a place as black as night, tearing with bloody fingers at shadowy beasts.
Will I ever know what happened to them? Will I ever get to pay my respects to Sir, to stand over his grave and say a final good-bye?
My other dreams, the ones Hannah showed me, are the ones I cling to. The history of magic, the true reason for making the Royal Conduits. Even the flash I saw when I touched Angra, of him meeting Hannah in Winter’s fields, whispering of a deal being struck. There’s something in all this, some solution Hannah was trying to get me to piece together, but all I can come up with are more unanswerable questions.
She said the Decay used people as its conduit. Dark magic chose its host. If dark magic could choose its host—then what about our magic? Where did Winter’s magic go when Angra broke our locket? Did it choose to go somewhere else? Those are questions no one dared asked for sixteen years, because it hurt to consider any alternative—or to think that the magic was gone. So we just plastered on fake smiles and assured each other that it was waiting for us to reunite our conduit’s halves, waiting for us to reconstruct its host.
But what if it went somewhere else? Found another host?
Or what if it’s really gone?
Those questions are too long-term for me, though. I need something to help me now—so I carry the dreams around with me, poking at them from every angle as I traipse up and down the ramps. It all has to fit together.
But I have no idea how.
At night, Nessa tells me about her life. She’s my age, sixteen. Her father was a cobbler who made the best shoes in Jannuari, and her mother was one of Hannah’s seamstresses. So fierce was her parents’ dedication to Winter that when Angra attacked, they ordered Conall, seventeen at the time, to protect Garrigan, twelve, and newborn Nessa while they went to help the fight. They died that night, and both Conall and Garrigan have spent the past sixteen years fighting to stay alive for her.
Nessa talks about these memories as if they’re hers, the same way I would repeat stories to myself until I was positive I had been in Hannah’s court too, and could remember a kingdom locked in snow.
“How do you know all this?” I ask Nessa one night when I can’t take it anymore. When staring at her becomes too unbearable, like looking in a mirror of what my life should have been. Raised in a work camp, forced to build Abril as soon as she was old enough to stand. Surrounded by the remains of a family and the even more scattered pieces of a kingdom, every shattered soul clinging to memories that aren’t Nessa’s or mine.
“My brothers, and the memory cave,” she tells me simply. Like it’s enough to hear passed-down stories and read about our history from hastily scribbled lines on jagged walls of rock. Like those minuscule bits of information are enough for her, just to have something.
Nessa dives back into her story, about a gown her mother made. It had been intended to be a simple state gown, but the stitching was so intricate that Hannah had opted to wear it for her wedding to Duncan, Mather’s father. Nessa lays the words out before me in a carefully woven tapestry of a past that doesn’t belong to either of us. That will someday.
I lean against the wall, knees to my chest. I can’t help but think she’s right—any small bit of information is enough. But we deserve more than that.
And I’m tired of waiting for someday.
Someday we will be more than words in the dark.
That night stays with me through the next few days as I trek up and down the ramps. The swirling memory cave, the words etched in stone, and Nessa’s hopeful sigh.