She knew before she even saw her visitor’s dirty, blood-streaked face that the news was dire. How could she not? Nothing good came knocking in the wee and wild hours of the morning. She knew before he pushed his way inside, his energy a dark calm, crackling with sparks of frenetic urgency.

“Where’s Nick?” he asked.

Mara didn’t answer. She had a question of her own to ask–one she could hardly conjure for fear of what she already knew. She swallowed the thickness in her throat and stepped back to make room for him in the foyer. “Where’s Davy?”

Eli entered the small mudroom and immediately turned to shut the heavy oak door and flip the locks, drop the bar into place. When he turned back, the bleak sorrow in his eyes hit her like a hammer to the chest.

“No,” she gasped, knees buckling. He caught her, the worn leather of his gloves chafing her elbow, the back of her arm. “Where is Davy?” she moaned as he lowered her to the small bench just inside the door.

“He’s gone, Mara. I’m sorry. Where is Nick?”

“How…” No. No, he was wrong. Davy could not be gone. Not her husband. Her fierce, powerful husband. So little time had passed since he left the house. Hours. And mere hours weren’t enough to claim a soul like Davy’s. It would take years. Decades. He couldn’t just be gone. “Is he—”

“Mara.” Eli crouched before her and took her hands. Kind, earth-brown eyes met hers and a preternatural calm washed over her. Shock, she thought. I am in shock. “Mara, he’s dead. I am so sorry, but we don’t have time yet for you to grieve. Is Nick in his room?”

She found herself nodding. Calm. So calm.

“I’ll get him. You have a bag packed?”

She did. He must know. They all kept bags packed, should the Order discover them. But it was a measure of posterity, really. The Order didn’t even know the rebels had infiltrated their ranks, let alone who they were. Did they? Depths.

“Mara, do you have a bag packed?”

She started a little and met his eye. Nodded.

“Good. Go get your pack. Change into walking clothes. Grab whatever keepsakes you want to bring. You have ten minutes.”

“Why? Eli, how…”

“I’ll explain everything later. There’s no time now. Go pack.”

Her legs lifted her from the bench and her feet carried her up the stairs, Eli at her heels. At the top of the stairs she went left into the master suite while he went right into Nick’s room.

She changed quickly into the clothes she wore to forage in the chill of dawn—loose pants, soft shirt, leather coat, scarf, high leather boots. Her rucksack was under the bed where she knew it would be. She pulled it out and set it on the foot of the bed. It was only half full—packed with spare clothing, toilet items, and other essentials, sleeping roll strapped to the bottom. She went to her bedside drawer and pulled out her Codex, spelled to resemble an ordinary journal, and a thin envelope containing family portraits and letters from Davy. Looping around the bed, she pulled open Davy’s bedside drawer and stared at the mayhem within. She was always pestering him about the little messes he squirreled away in her otherwise tidy home.

She felt nothing as she dug through the jumble for his one treasured item—a small bloodletting dagger she’d given him when they married—and tucked it, along with her own items, into her rucksack.

There was little else she needed from the bedroom. Everything of value was in her workplace in the cellar, so she slung the bag over her shoulder and slipped across the hall to Nick’s room. Eli had lit an oil lamp and was working her son’s small limbs into a thick sweater. Nick was groggy, striking eyes so like his father’s still clouded with sleep. “Do you need help?” she asked.

Eli shook his head as he tugged the sweater into place and handed her the small drawstring bag she kept packed for her son. She accepted it, retrieving Nick’s baby blanket from his crib and shoving it into the bag. “I need some things from the cellar,” she told him. “Will you gather what we need from the kitchen?”

He nodded. A man of few words, was Eli. So unlike her husband, who always knew just what to say and how best to say it. To be loved by him was to be surrounded by music, his affection like the early-morning trill of songbirds, the crashing melody of an orchestra, the lonely cascade of a piano in the evening.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Depths, how could he be gone? Just gone?

“Mara,” Eli said. One word. No music. The calm returned, wrapping around her shoulders like a shawl.

She nodded and hurried downstairs to the kitchen, hauling the rug out of the way to reveal the trapdoor to the cellar. It was a poor disguise, but she’d never needed a better one. The true protection lay in Davy’s magic, in her own, woven together and draped in protective swaths over every corner of their home.

Hauling the trapdoor open, she hurried down the steps to her workspace, feeling only a vague, intellectual sadness as she lit the lantern by the stairs and took in her sanctuary. Bookshelves covered the entire wall opposite the staircase, precious references ferried in secret to her from across the continent, a few from over the seas. The other walls had shelves as well, some with books but most with jars and bottles, potions and spells she’d brewed over the years. All meticulously organized by purpose and potency. She could find what she needed in here with her eyes closed.

Ignoring the shelves, the books, she went to the wide desk in the corner and pulled open the top drawer. She took out the little dagger she used for bloodwork, her predictive runes, and the jar of black salt Davy had brought her from the wastelands. From the next drawer down she retrieved the small wooden box containing her most precious seeds. Goldleaf. Holy Weed. Rubifel. Poison Cherry. Wildewort. Loquash. Vilios.

Precious. Irreplaceable.

She slipped the box into her rucksack, tucking it against the back so that she’d feel its edges between her shoulder blades. A discomfort, but a comforting one.

There was some room to spare, so she pulled out one of her spare shirts and used it to wrap up a few potion bottles, just in case. Rejuvenatives, stimulants, calming draughts, all with silly names scrawled in wax pen on the bottles–Rough Morning, Gods’ Spit, Depths Draught. Davy’s doing, of course. He had a penchant for foolishness that belied his serious work.

Last, the small tin of contraceptive tablets that had no name because no client ever asked directly for them. The girls’ need was sensed, not spoken. Haggard faces, empty eyes, hands clenched in skirts or pressed over stomachs. The stink of fear and shame.

“One tablet per month,” was all she ever had to say, measuring out sometimes a year’s worth, sometimes more if the girl looked particularly frail or frightened, unlikely to conjure the strength for another visit to the local underground physik.

Her heart stuttered in protest as she hefted her bag and turned toward the stairs, but she didn’t linger for one final goodbye to her cherished space. After all, she told her heart, Davy was gone. What use was there in wasting precious, aching beats on inanimate space when the very lifeblood that pumped through it had gone cold?

She ascended the stairs in measured steps and found Eli in the kitchen. He knelt in the door to the pantry with an open bag—Davy’s rucksack, she realized—open in front of him. Nick sat on the counter, tousled hair sticking out from beneath a knit cap, and she and her son both watched as Eli shoved items into the bag. Bread, cheese, apples, water flasks, jerky.

“Where are we going?” she asked, looping an arm around Nick and tucking him into her side. He rested his head on her shoulder and stuck a thumb in his mouth. Two was too old to be sucking his thumb, she and Davy both agreed. She ought to tug it gently from his mouth, but instead she only pressed a kiss to the side of his head.

“I can’t tell you just yet,” Eli answered, closing the bag and swinging it onto his back. In the light of the lamp he’d lit, she finally got a good look at him. Blood smeared his face and drew his hair into sharp spikes, and the leather chest plate of his Order uniform was marred with deep gouges, one sleeve torn and bloody.

However Davy had died, it had been violent.

“Are you alright?” the physik in her asked, though the question tasted bitter in her mouth. She barely knew Eli. She didn’t care about him or for him. He was Davy’s friend. Davy’s colleague. Davy’s confidante. Not hers. And however alright or not alright he was, he was healthier than Davy. More whole. More here.

“I’m fine.” He tightened the straps of the pack without looking her in the eye. “You’re ready?”

“Please tell me where we’re going.”

“The Hive.”

The Hive? That wasn’t a destination.

“And after that?”

He scooped Nick off the counter. “I can’t tell you right now.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Can’t. You’re ready?”

Mara looked at Nick. Still half-asleep, he’d relaxed into Eli’s hold, arms forming a trusting loop around his neck. So out of character for her son. He was in a phase right now. Even the Swifts weren’t allowed to hold him. Just her and Davy.

Just her.

“Eli, I—”

“Mara. Look at me.” Against her better judgment, she did as he asked. “Do you have everything you need?”

“Yes.” Her lips were numb, her tongue thick.

“Okay. It’s time to go. Stay behind me. Keep quiet. Tell me if you get tired. We have a long way to go. If anything happens to me, go first to the Hive. Ask for Beth.”

“The Hive,” she echoed, questions rising out of the recesses of her brain and bouncing off her skull, trapped.

“Ask for Beth.”

“Beth,” she repeated.

Without further instruction, he turned toward the back of the house and she followed, her feet obedient, her heart rebellious, straining to stay in the home she’d built with her husband—their little den of honesty and love amid a warren of secrets and cruelty.

But even if she stayed, the love had gone with Davy, out into the night, never to return.

So out into the night she followed it.