Burnt Devotion (31 page)

Any other time, I would chalk it up to him “being a Drak,” but I couldn’t, not this time, not after everything that had happened, not after everything he had done.

He had told us the sight had already happened, and although that hadn’t necessarily made the city safer, he had brought us into this trap without recourse.

He had said he had made a terrible mistake. This was it.

Sain’s voice was an ignition switch, and I reacted, turning to face him with a snap that flared my magic, sparks of fire flying from my fingers as if in warning. However, Sain did not cower beneath me this time. He stood tall, much taller than me, and puffed out his chest as if he was an animal going to battle.

I guessed, in a way, he thought he was.

Let him try.

I would tear him limb from limb.

“
What
is not the way of the Drak, Sain?” I spat, my voice dripping like bile as I faced him. My patience had evaporated before we had even left the cave less than an hour before.

“We do not reveal what was seen in sight, unless it is asked of us.” His voice was that pompous calm again, the same tone he had used on Joclyn only days before.

I was beginning to understand why she had reacted the way she had. I didn’t think I had ever been spoken to in such a derogatory way. Even when we had run from this city weeks before, he had been kind as he directed me. But this? This reeked of some underlying pompousness that I must have been allergic to.

I was breaking out in hives.

It was the only way I could explain my reaction, the way my skin prickled.

“I am asking.”

It seemed like a simple enough response, but Sain only smiled, the same underlying slime shining through for a moment before it was gone, washed away with the echoes of murder we were surrounded by.

“You did not touch the water, Wynifred.” His voice shook with the same fear I saw in his face, his shoulders sagging more as he began to sink to the ground.

I knew enough about the rules of the Drak and the poison they called food to know what he was talking about. It still didn’t make sense. Not with what he had always done for Ilyan, not with the way his face was twisted and contorted in such a desperate way.

Why wouldn’t he tell me?

The supposed betrayal only ground on me more, my agitation prickling as I stood before him, desperately hoping there was another explanation, but not expecting there to be.

“Do you really think that matters anymore?” I was louder than I should have been, and I knew it at once. The human sounding shrieks of a Vilỳs sounded right outside the boarded up window, and I jumped, the scratching of claws coming only moments later as my voice drew them right to us.

I looked toward the sound at the same time Sain and Dramin did, our eyes wide for a moment as we waited to see if the ancient shield Ilyan had placed on this house would hold.

I didn’t dare breath as I waited, staring at the dim light that came through the cracks in the wood planking. Waiting.

My heart was beating so fast my chest hurt with the pressure, and the tension that was wound through my body only made it worse. Normally, I would tell a joke or make some 70s band reference to ease the pressure, but nothing was coming.

I wasn’t sure Vilỳs would like Styx, anyway.

“It doesn’t matter,” I answered my own question as I looked back at him, the terrifying sounds of the rat that flew outside the window growing louder, helping to drive my point home. “We just came through a massacre, Sain. Ryland is damned, Thom’s down for the count, your own son was injured, and you are spouting ‘rules of the Drak’?”

His reasoning seemed all the more ridiculous the more I spoke, a fact that he seemed very aware of. His eyes grew wider with each word, his body shaking before me as though he had been struck down by some ten second flu, the symptoms leaving as soon as they came.

I had been letting my fear and panic get the best of me, something that was becoming strikingly obvious was not going to work here.

Not with Sain’s stubborn Drak-ness, another thing that was only becoming more and more irritating the more I got to know him.

Stupid Drak.

I fought the need to roll my eyes and scooted closer to him, unsurprised when he flinched away.

“What do you know Sain?” I barely spoke louder than the rats outside the window, careful to keep my voice calm, although I am not sure exactly how well it worked.

“I know nothing.”

“Bullshit.” I knew I needed to stay calm, but it obviously wasn’t going to work with him. Maybe, if I threw him out the window or dangled him in front of the little monsters, he would talk.

I pinched the bridge of my nose in agitation, hating how quickly the old tendencies came to mind.

I hated more that I could make it work.

I wondered if I could get the same result by making him listen to Bruce Springsteen.

“You obviously know something, Sain. You did something wrong, remember? You saw this and then lied to us that it had already happened, why?”

I didn’t dare look away from him, no matter how much the fear in his eyes was paralyzing me. I watched and waited, silently pleading he would give me the answer I so desperately wanted.

I was foolish to think he would break that easily.

“We need to get out of here.”

The forced calm I had been trying so desperately to cling to snapped in half like a popsicle stick. My magic pulsed, and I could smell the smoke, even if I had no idea what I had set on fire. I really didn’t care anymore.

I let it burn for a moment before extinguishing the old dresser, leaving the pleasant smell to linger in the air, something the Vilỳs liked, as well, and their attempts to find a way in became more vigorous.

“Excuse me?” I was sure my voice had hit an octave that wasn’t natural, but I really didn’t care anymore. “Answer the question, Sain.”

“It’s not safe.” The suggestion was not only ridiculous, but an obvious side-step. The knowledge only beat against me more.

“Nowhere is safe!” Another rat bird joined the first as I roared, and both Sain and Dramin flinched. I looked to Dramin, part of me desperately hoping he would back me up, but he only looked at me with the same plea I had seen before, his body sagging farther against the wall as he tried to stay upright.

Fine. I would do this on my own.

“Ilyan told us to come here. He will be here. We aren’t going anywhere.” I was firm.

Why couldn’t he answer the freaking question?

“We need to leave,” he repeated the same phrase like someone had skipped back a chapter. The inflection and everything was the same. Everything except my reaction.

My anger turned into a smolder, a flame that licked against my insides. It was like the anger of before that threatened to explode at any time, yet this one would burn. I wasn’t going to let this go on anymore. I wouldn’t.

“Answer the question, Sain. What did you do? What did you see?”

“We need to leave.”

When it came again, I reacted, lunging toward him before he had a chance to move away, my tiny hands wrapping around his arms and holding him in place. My sheer strength kept him there, millimeters from me, as I locked my magic inside of myself, afraid of what it would do to him. I was sure, by the pain in his face, that he could feel the heat against his skin. He could feel the warning.

Let it burn him.

I needed my answer.

“Knock it off, Sain,” I growled, fully aware my voice was feral from behind the clench in my jaw. “We can’t go anywhere. Even if you saw something, we are still stuck in this tiny room full of invalids. I can’t wake Ryland up without risking him bringing the whole building down; Dramin can barely move, let alone walk; and Thom … Thom. What did you do, Sain?

“We need—”

“No!” I snapped, cutting him off with a crack that mixed with the screams from outside, the rats that still clawed at the window. He flinched from the outburst, and I was certain I had accidently pushed some magic into him, but I really didn’t care anymore. “No more. You need to tell me. I can see in your eyes that something happened. I don’t care about your asinine rules. I respect them, but if you keep this up, more people are going to get hurt. Someone is going to die. This time, you have to tell me. I’m not going back out into that massacre with this many useless bodies unless you talk. So talk.”

Sain stared at me unblinking, his body frozen where I held him before me. The dim light of the room wavered around us as we stood, surrounded by screams and the scratches, in a room that was as much like a prison as the one we had met in.

A prison that had forged a bond, a trust, that I don’t think anything could break, even though I was starting to question it. The Eagles broke up for a reason, after all.

“Talk, Sain.” My voice was soft, a fact he noticed right away, his body relaxing under mine as my hands dropped. He looked to his son as if seeking approval, though his face was full of a plea for forgiveness.

“The sights are broken, Wynifred,” he whispered the same thing he had said before, but this time, it rippled through me with a much deeper understanding. “I have seen things since the earth was nothing but a barren waste and men and magic existed in peace. Millennia of sight. And only now do things break. Things that I have seen centuries before are now nothing but a Zlomený. Things seen are now broken with lies. I saw the city under attack, yet it was not. Nothing is certain anymore.”

He looked away from me to Dramin, his eyes hooded with guilt as I waited, listening to the fading sounds of battle that still waged outside.

A shiver moved over my spine, the fear of the uncertain feeling rawer than I think it ever had.

My life had always been influenced by the Drak. For hundreds of years, Sain had guided my movements as Edmund’s assassin, and even after he had gone, we still relied on the sights he had left us with. Prophecies that one after another had come true. Infallible truths that we had followed. Even with Ilyan, we followed his sight, knowing, without question, what would happen.

Now, there was question.

Now, there was fault.

“What happened to Thom, Sain?” I hadn’t meant to ask the question, but it had slipped out, anyway. My heart tightened with the pressure of what had happened to him, needing to know. Part of me whispered that, if he finally told me, perhaps I could rouse him, and then maybe we could get out of here as Sain had suggested.

“I had a sight while we walked through the city, and it told me of the dangers of this place. Of where we were heading…” I tensed as he paused, the incessant claws of the Vilỳs sounding louder for some reason, while a distant scream sat heavy on my chest. The danger Sain spoke of seemed far too close. “I tried to tell him to stop, to convince him to find Ilyan, but he refused. He began to yell, and the shield dropped only moments before the Vilỳs tore the sky apart.”

I could only nod. I had seen this. I had seen Thom yell, which was so out of character for him that even the memory made me uncomfortable.

“They were everywhere…” His voice was hollow as his eyes drifted out of focus, his memory pulling him back as mine did. The faint sounds of screams that still echoed from outside made it easy to remember, to feel the fear that still hadn’t really left. “I tried to fight them off. Thom tried to fight them off. But then he was hit with an attack from behind us. From you, from Ryland, from Joclyn? I don’t know. But he fell to the ground. It took all my strength to escape those things and drag them both here. I had to keep them safe. He’s my best friend. My son.” His voice drifted away as his body sagged into itself, his shoulders hunching over as he slunk down next to his son with guilt running through him.

I wanted to tell him he was okay, that at least he had gotten them here, but I was sure whatever failure he was feeling was rooted much deeper than that.

Besides, something else was digging into me, something I wasn’t necessarily sure I agreed with. I was trying my hardest to convince myself that I must have seen it wrong.

Sain had said Thom had been hit with an attack from either Ryland or I or someone near us. However, I hadn’t been shooting out attacks, and even though Ryland had, by the time he had started to do so, Sain and the others had already been gone.

I wanted to say I was remembering wrong, that they were still there, but I had seen the empty street moments before Ryland had gone bonkers. I remembered the dread of not being able to feel their magic, of not knowing where they had gone.

I stared at Sain blankly as I tried to push the questions from my mind, only to have Joclyn’s voice fill my head—the deep conspiratorial whisper as she confided in me about her father and how she didn’t trust him.

She had stood in that hallway and looked at me, begging for me to understand her. At the time, I couldn’t. I had been locked in that prison with him. I had escaped the city with him. He had saved me. How could I not trust someone who had gone so far for me? She just didn’t like her father was all.

Then why was it grating on me right now?

“What did you do wrong?” I asked the question slowly, knowing he still hadn’t answered me, my mind still fighting against the ill-placed doubt as I sought for understanding.