Dawn broke, and I found my palm curled around the hilt of my knife anyway. I drew it out as I sat up, staring down at the sleeping priestess.
The smooth column of her neck seemed to glow in the early-morning sun leaking through the tent flaps.
I weighed the knife in my hand.
I wasn’t sure I’d been born with the ability to forgive. Not for terrors inflicted on those I loved. For myself, I didn’t care—not nearly as much. But there was some fundamental pillar of steel in me that could not bend or break in this. Could not stomach the idea of letting these people get away with what they’d done.
Ianthe’s eyes opened, the teal as limpid as her discarded circlet. They went right to the knife in my hand. Then to my face.
“You can’t be too careful while sharing a camp with enemies,” I said.
I could have sworn something like fear shone in her eyes. “Hybern is not our enemy,” she said a tad breathlessly.
From her paleness as I left the tent, I knew my answering smile had done its job well.
Lucien and Tamlin showed the twins where the crack in the wall lay.
And as they had done with the first two, they spent hours surveying it, the surrounding land.
I kept close this time, watching them, my presence now deemed relatively unthreatening if not a nuisance. We’d played our little power games, established I could bite if I wished, but we’d tolerate each other.
“Here,” Brannagh murmured to Dagdan, jerking her chin to the invisible divider. The only markings were the different trees: on our side, they were the bright, fresh green of spring. On the other, they were dark, broad, curling slightly with heat—the height of summer.
“The first one was better,” Dagdan countered.
I sat atop a small boulder, peeling an apple with a paring knife.
“Closer to the western coast, too,” he added to his twin.
“This is closer to the continent—to the strait.”
I sliced deep into the flesh of the apple, carving out a hunk of white meat.
“Yes, but we’d have more access to the High Lord’s supplies.”
Said High Lord was currently off with Jurian, hunting for food more filling than the sandwiches we’d packed. Ianthe had gone to a nearby spring to pray, and I had no idea whatsoever where Lucien or the sentries were.
Good. Easier for me as I shoved the apple slice into my mouth and said around it, “I say go for this one.”
They twisted toward me, Brannagh sneering and Dagdan’s brows high. “What do you know of any of it?” Brannagh demanded.
I shrugged, cutting another piece of apple. “You two talk louder than you realize.”
Shared accusatory glares between them. Proud, arrogant, cruel. I’d been taking their measure this fortnight. “Unless you want to risk the other courts having time to rally and intercepting you before you can cross to the strait, I’d pick this one.”
Brannagh rolled her eyes.
I went on, rambling and bored, “But what do I know? You two have squatted on a little island for five hundred years. Clearly you know more about Prythian and moving armies than me.”
Brannagh hissed, “This is not about armies, so I will trust you to keep that mouth shut until we have use for you.”
I snorted. “You mean to tell me all of this nonsense hasn’t been to find a place to break through the wall and use the Cauldron to also transport the mass of your armies here?”
She laughed, swinging her dark curtain of hair over a shoulder. “The Cauldron is not for transporting grunt armies. It is for remaking worlds. It is for bringing down this hideous wall and reclaiming what we were.”
I merely crossed my legs. “I’d think that with an army of ten thousand you wouldn’t need any magical objects to do your dirty work.”
“Our army is ten times that, girl,” Brannagh sneered. “And twice that number if you count our allies in Vallahan, Montesere, and Rask.”
Two hundred thousand. Mother save us.
“You’ve certainly been busy all these years.” I surveyed them, utterly nonplussed. “Why not strike when Amarantha had the island?”
“The king had not yet found the Cauldron, despite years of searching. It served his purposes to let her be an experiment for how we might break these people. And served as good motivation for our allies on the continent to join us, knowing what would await them.”
I finished off my apple and chucked the core into the woods. They watched it fly like two hounds tracking a pheasant.
“So they’re all going to converge here? I’m supposed to play hostess to so many soldiers?”
“Our own force will take care of Prythian before uniting with the others. Our commanders are preparing for it as we speak.”
“You must think you stand a shot at losing if you’re bothering to use the Cauldron to help you win.”
“The Cauldron is victory. It will wipe this world clean again.”
I lifted my brows in irreverent cynicism. “And you need this exact spot to unleash it?”
“This exact spot,” Dagdan said, a hand on the hilt of his sword, “exists because a person or object of mighty power passed through it. The Cauldron will study the work they’ve already done—and magnify it until the wall collapses entirely. It is a careful, complex process, and one I doubt your mortal mind can grasp.”
“Probably. Though this mortal mind did manage to solve Amarantha’s riddle—and destroy her.”
Brannagh merely turned back to the wall. “Why do you think Hybern let her live for so long in these lands? Better to have someone else do his dirty work.”
I had what I needed.
Tamlin and Jurian were still off hunting, the royals were preoccupied, and I’d sent the sentries to fetch me more water, claiming that some of my bruises still ached and I wanted to make a poultice for them.
They’d looked positively murderous at that. Not at me—but at who had given me those bruises. Who had picked Ianthe over them—and Hybern over their honor and people.
I’d brought three packs, but I’d only need one. The one I’d carefully repacked with Alis’s new supplies, now tucked beside everything I’d anticipated needing to get clear of them and go. The one I’d brought with me on every trip out to the wall, just in case. And now …
I had numbers, I had a purpose, I had a specific location, and the names of foreign territories.
But more than that, I had a people who had lost faith in their High Priestess. I had sentries who were beginning to rebel against their High Lord. And as a result of those things, I had Hybern royals doubting the strength of their allies here. I’d primed this court to fall. Not from outside forces—but its own internal warring.
And I had to be clear of it before it happened. Before the last sliver of my plan fell into place.
The party would return without me. And to maintain that illusion of strength, Tamlin and Ianthe would lie about it—where I’d gone.
And perhaps a day or two after that, one of these sentries would reveal the news, a carefully sprung trap that I’d coiled into his mind like one of my snares.
I’d fled for my life—after being nearly killed by the Hybern prince and princess. I’d planted images in his head of my brutalized body, the markings consistent with what Dagdan and Brannagh had already revealed to be their style. He’d describe them in detail—describe how he helped me get away before it was too late. How I ran for my life when Tamlin and Ianthe refused to intervene, to risk their alliance with Hybern.
And when the sentry revealed the truth, no longer able to stomach keeping quiet when he saw how my sorry fate was concealed by Tamlin and Ianthe, just as Tamlin had sided with Ianthe the day he’d flogged that sentry …
When he described what Hybern had done to me, their Cursebreaker, their newly anointed Cauldron-blessed, before I’d fled for my life …
There would be no further alliance. For there would be no sentry or denizen of this court who would stand with Tamlin or Ianthe after this. After me.
I ducked into my tent to grab my pack, my steps light and swift. Listening, barely breathing, I scanned the camp, the woods.