[Harpe]

Dreams were nice. But Harpe would die.

She told little one-eye to call the chariots. That was the last thing she remembered a lifetime ago. The sickly scent she could not smell. The snap of small bones between her teeth. The sticky tack of a souring meal. She told little one-eye to drag her to hell. She told little one-eye to take her where it was dark. Where it was warm. She told little one-eye that she had nowhere else to go. This was it. This was the end. There was nothing left to back up against, nothing but that curling iron fence. This was it.

Dreams were nice.

She dreamed that she found Blade on a mountain. She dreamed that he smiled at her and called her by her name. He was happy to have her by his side. He had been lonely on the peak and nothing pleased him more than his daughter come to find him. She traveled the world in search and she finally found what she was looking for amongst the clouds. A father.

She dreamed of the girl she hated. She was a hideous, scarred thing, tattered and barely held together. What was it that kept her on her feet, she wondered, as Brushfire led them on rings, round and round. What brought her back to this place? What made her stay? She never understood. She never would.

She dreamed of a soft caress. She dreamed of her mother’s love, distant but fierce, throttling her and haunting her on the eve of misfortune, on the days that came after. Dagger held them at arm’s length, but then there wasn’t a ‘them’ anymore. Suddenly, it was one daughter. Her mother learned how to love.

She dreamed of the girl she killed. It didn’t have to be that way. She never lunges, this time. She’d only wanted to come home. That’s it. She only wanted to come home, and the daughter that lived had SOMETHING TO PROVE. Is it always like this, she asked her mother, sick to her stomach. No, her mother responded. No.

She dreamed of her grandfather who pulled her from freezing river with malice in his eyes. It was time to grow up, Harpe. It was time to move forward or die. Which path do you choose?

She dreamed of her sister. Of her brothers. They had been a family once, whatever family meant in the shade of that old, decaying forest. They had not lasted long. No, they had not lasted long at all. The smell of them stuck, though. She could smell it in the woods, decay, she knows it. She didn’t know she loved them until they were gone. You’re the favored daughter, did you know that?

She dreamed of her grandmother stringing entrails, garish decorations hanging and dripping from tree to tree. It was a holiday, of course. Remember that you’re the one that lived. Remember and never forget. We’ll celebrate it again next year. Hope to see you there.

She dreamed of little one-eye. They were all that was left when the nation came crumbling down. Everyone else was dead. He brought her a rat. He told her to stay. He told her to go. She wanted him to come with her. What was left but ghosts in the hollows? There was nothing. It was all gone. It was ALL GONE. Even she is nothing but bones anymore, couldn’t he see, couldn’t he—

She wakes to the fog, pungent mushroom growing by her nose. Dreams were nice. She wants to go back to sleep. Dreams were nice. The world around her felt like a blanket, warm, dark, soft. It would be easy to roll over. To forget. To remember. She doesn’t know what’s real and what’s make-believe, not anymore—and it wouldn’t matter, because dreams were nice. Even the ones that weren’t.

The fungi sing her a lullaby, and she smiles, drifting once more into the oblivion on the other side. Next she wakes, it is to digging. She ignores it. It doesn’t matter. It’s so muted, so far away, and the fog is gentle and comforting. She falls back to slumber—or perhaps she does not. Waking and sleeping felt the same anymore, like endless cycle of sunrise and sunset. They were all just days and nights, and she found she could hardly tell the difference.

”I think you have to choose,” the mushroom tells her. She smiles and shakes her head. It was easier to fall back asleep and pretend not to have heard.

”Hello,” it calls again, but not quite, it’s different, but she is far gone and can hardly bring herself to care. She tilts her head up, all sunken eyes and bony cheeks, and smiles with her teeth at the figure swimming before her. It’s indistinct and familiar, he always was a wiry thing. Long legs and big ears—she calls him by name—“Isaiah.”

Then, she forgets again.

Next she wakes, they are traveling, her and little two-eyes. Wait. That wasn’t right. She’s forgetting again. It doesn’t matter, does it? She barely remembered she could walk at all, and in truth, it felt more like the memory of walking than anything else. She feels herself asking, softly, from far away, from the bottom of someplace warm and dark, “Where are we going?”

”Away.”

[Gideon]

Everything burned.

Alteron burned.

He had lost count of the scratches, the little scrapes and cuts buried within his ragged coat that bled, still, or coagulated and clotted into clumps and mats, or chased him like pinpricks and flybites at every step of his heavy-footed flight. He had stopped processing the ache in his bones, the fire in his muscles from where he had been pressed to the damp earth and held. He did not pause to think of his shame, smoldering, or his anger, lurking like stoked coals. What remained of the once-Sovereign burned, in pain or outrage or wounded pride all the same, and he imagined the dying jungle burning in his wake, stinking of rotting flesh and singed hair, shrieking out like the Dragon had shown him – like only flames could do to a body, like only fire could make a man sing – when he had been just a boy. Gideon walked more than he ran, now, and his lungs burned, too.

And what else had he learned among Alteron’s ruins, in front of the Dragon’s fire and with only cold stone for a bassinet—? He had not cried then, when she had laid the burning stick to the slave’s flesh, and commanded each of her children – and not him, never him – to do the same in turn. He had not shouted when Alteron’s clockwork core had shifted against him. He had not snivelled when the jungle went all quiet and still and forgot him. He had not screamed, as they desired of him, when they stripped him of his crown and put tooth and claw to his skin. Gideon had learned that from her, too, and he made good on those lessons now, cutting straight as an arrow through the territory’s tense and fetid undergrowth with his teeth clenched tight and his mind nearly blank. Shock had a way of doing that, he knew, and he recognized this distantly. There would be time later to feel; there would be endless evenings to lock this, too, among the catacombs of his heart, and to fold only the same blank facade over his narrow face each dawn.

No good could come of pausing to process. There was no moment spared for thoughts of what’s next, or for despair at the loss of his home and his family and his birthright, as he still believed – no pause for planning, or for heartache. Anya was somewhere in the darkness around him, and that would be enough to guide him forward. Gideon was, even now, a prince, as Mother had raised him and not Azuhel, as Anya had taught him and not the Dragon, and no matter the opinions of the pack he left cackling in his footsteps like hyenas, mad and proud. He swallowed, and he marched on.

Maybe Father would have chosen to die before fleeing – Father, who did not exist, who did not love him, who had chosen to raise an army to return and reclaim his home—

Maybe he had just been running, too.

The border smelled of piss and death. Gideon smelled her before he saw her, all half buried skin and bone as she is, little more than a carcass left for scavengers that he might have missed her entirely if not for how she reeked of dying, not quite dead, and that one little patch of white on her still stood out starkly from the muck and the mire. She groaned at him – a name, perhaps – and he stilled, one paw raised, considering. He blinked, twice. He did not know her, and this was no place for an injured girl.

“Come,” he offered after a moment, moving forward again. She was hard to move, and delirious, but even Alteron had not snuffed that last flicker of compassion from him. She walked as though sleeping, and when she looked blindly at him, he did not bother to ask her name.

When she spoke again, the ground had changed. There was sun overhead – more sun than Gideon thought he had seen in his entire life, more sky than he thought could have ever existed – and the grasses of the meadow they wandered in had been untouched for so long they were shoulder-high and climbing. Away, he murmured to her question, and then regretted his short tone. Was she even aware enough to hear the weariness in his voice, the irritation he could not disguise? Would she even recognize if he told her a place, a destination, like he had any idea? Anywhere but back, he wanted to say. Or, I’ve never seen so many flowers. His thoughts felt jarring and intrusive and incongruous. He wanted to stop walking. He wanted to never stop walking.

“We should find you water,” Gideon replied instead, fixing the she-wolf with a sidelong glance. Water was tangible. A goal. Clear. Where are we going was indistinct and uncomfortable. “Come with me. Are you in there?” Perhaps he should have left her at the border. Perhaps it would have been kinder, if there was nothing left of the girl she might have been in that head of hers at all. “Do you have a name?”