Daivad, who usually had little trouble sleeping (at least when his house was free of crying girls), tossed and turned that night. It was a hot night, and the breeze through his bedroom did little to balance that, but the real reason he couldn’t sleep was that message and everything he’d heard in it.
He’d visited Toll once, just a few months before he finally deserted at Haven. Seeing all those broken bodies, those walking corpses hauling load upon load of a metal that made itself the heaviest material known to the Mothers with the way it murdered magic—that was one thing. The ever-expanding, yet eternally-full pit where they dumped the bodies of both miners and guards when they inevitably could go on no more was something else.
While he was there, he’d seen a prisoner break his leg. He’d listened as the guards discussed, decided the prisoner was useless to them now. Daivad had expected them to put the man out of his misery, but it was easier, they explained, to simply drop him in the pit and let him die on his own—with that broken leg, he’d never be able to climb out. He would die in agony, surrounded by the stinking corpses of thousands of people just like him.
Daivad’s visit to Toll had been blessedly short, but the entire time he was there, only one thought played over and over in his head. That he had to get out, or he was going to end up in that same pit, smothered by bloated, rotting bodies, unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to scream. For months after that, he’d had nightmares of just that. He’d wake up paralyzed, with the scent of decomposing flesh in his nostrils. It was only after Haven that he’d pulled himself free of the nightmare’s grasp.
What he would give to once again be pouting about missing the train robbery instead of imagining Richard throwing Nyxabella in that fucking pit.
The moment the first bit of morning light filtered through the leaves, Daivad began to pack.
“What are you doing?” Pait asked from his doorway, her short, auburn hair sticking up all over the place and her eyes puffy with sleep. When he just slung his bag over his shoulder instead of answering, she pressed him, her voice edging slightly higher, “They said you can’t go.”
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“I’m not.” He tried to push past her, but she used all of her small frame to fill the doorway.
“Sweet shit.”
“I’m not,” he growled, towering over her in a silent reminder that he could flatten her with just a shift of his weight.
“Name that bag’s purpose, then.”
“To hold my shit.”
She made a little exasperated sound. “Where are you going? For—for how long?”
“I never had a mother, kid, I don’t need one now.” He gripped her by her upper arms and lifted her off her bare feet to set her aside so he could pass.
“Why won’t you name it?” She trailed him to the front doorway.
“Why do you care?”
“Is this the way the Traitor Prince works?” she asked. “He arrives and wrecks lives, and then … abandons them the moment boredom itches him?”
He rounded on her on the front landing, ready to use a tongue sharpened by irritation and lack of sleep—but then he caught the spoiled scent of anxiety coming off her. Her little heartbeat skittered and her brown eyes were as wide as he’d ever seen them. Daivad took a rumbling breath and tamed his tongue.
“I’m abandoning no one. Five days at most and I’ll be standing right here again. And so will you, annoying the shit out of me.”
Ever so slightly, she settled. “So name your destination, then.”
He sighed. “The others will worry. Without reason.”
“Then I’ll spare them the knowledge and the worry too,” she said immediately.
Fuck it. “Broken Earth.”
To his surprise, Pait didn’t put up much more of a fight past the expected “You can’t go there, that’s where the queen lives” argument. But what really surprised him was that, after he’d fetched some jerky from the kitchen (dodging Doll’s ladle) and a few items from infirmary storage, when Daivad whistled for Maxea, the Wolf trotted forward with Pait already on her back. And on Pait’s back was her own bag and bedroll.
Before he could even open his mouth to argue, she said, “If you don’t let me come, I’m telling the whole camp where you’re going. Starting with Kadie.”