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With Taisha’s help, they did not need to stay at common inns—nor would it have been a good idea to leave so visible a trail for the Tachonis. So it was that they camped in a low hollow in the woods, guarded by ancient cedar trees and cushioned by many years of fragrant needles. Their campfire burned low, this late into the second watch.
Sir Julien had laid down between Aranessa and the darkness, his curled back almost close enough to touch. Grateful as she was, his protection was no help to her while she dreamed. And even in the long, weary night that came after their escape from Dol-Makjar, she did dream.
Over and over again, she fell back into that dark house, all life and hope extinguished. The terrible strength of the ghouls, their stench. Their spell-wrought silence. Over and over again, she saw Occtis raise his hands—to cast a spell, to physically defend himself, or to show he had no weapon, she wasn’t sure. Over and over she watched him slammed to the table, quiet, so quiet.
The first few times, she managed to struggle out of the nightmare without waking anyone, horror thick in her throat. But she would look up, and see the night sky still close and dark and cloudy, and she would try to go back to sleep.
Where the Tachonis were waiting.
Despite all of the horror of that night, it was everything that happened after the Silence dropped that haunted her. The thin whistle of Occtis’ breath, the wild roll of his eyes as he sought to keep his brother in view. Aranessa had never understood true despair until she heard the soft, unheeded cries that Occtis made with his brother’s fist in his still-living chest.
She wrenched awake again, tears caught in the back of her throat. Julien murmured wordlessly, caught in his own private pain. Aranessa shifted, thinking to wake him—selfishly, because she needed his sour, sharp-eyed grief—but instead, the fire flared for a moment as someone added a handful of kindling. And it was Occtis on watch, so they must have passed into the witching hours.
Quietly, she rose and went to sit beside him. The twigs and needles of the kindling burned away, returning the embers to their banked glow. Vaelus sat cross-legged at the edge of the clearing, preternaturally still, visible only by the reflection of fire from her veil. Taisha lay sprawled on the far side of the fire, her head closest to Occtis and her feet half buried in the loam. She alone slept gently, her breathing soft and unhurried.
“Everything okay?” Occtis whispered.
Aranessa wrapped her arms around herself, trying very hard not to stare at him. He was here, in the dark woods with them. They had not left him in that house, nor in whatever foul corner of the Tenebral Reaches his family would have consigned him to. He was here.
But he was not alive. Even sitting close to him, she could feel only the faint chill of sitting next to a stone or other object. There was a corner of her mind that could not stop noticing the stillness of his chest, the silence. He didn’t blink as often as he should. He was wearing one of Hal’s shirts, too large in the shoulders but too short in the arms—the sleeves rode up several inches above his wrists. He had discarded his beautiful gloves, and she found herself thinking that, had he been born a Royce, they would have been musician’s hands.
“Just a dream,” she muttered, much too late. Occtis hummed thoughtfully, and looked back out over the camp. The silence stretched. Aranessa watched Julien’s shoulders twitch, and wondered again if she should wake him.
“Kinda glad I don’t have to deal with that.” Occtis pulled his knees up to his chest, mimicking her pose. Watching her watch Julien. “Dreaming, I mean.”
“You…don’t?”
“I mean, I don’t think I need sleep, so.” He shrugged, his shoulders almost up to his ears. When she’d seen him at the funeral, she’d thought of him as gangly. But now the only impression she could find was skeletal.
“Would you—” Aranessa bit her tongue on the rest of her request. Was she really so pathetic? She, the greatest diplomat of her House? (Perhaps the only one left of her House. But she mustn’t think about that.)
“What?” Occtis nudged her knee with his own. He was such a serious young man. She shouldn’t burden him any further.
Aranessa swallowed past the lump in her throat. “Just—if it won’t disturb the others—tell me about your time at the Pentevral?” She was embarrassingly grateful that her voice did not break, nor trip over her sorry excuse for staying awake.
“Um. I—sorry, just…” Occtis turned to look at her, and his eyes caught the gleam of the fire in a way no human thing would. Aranessa did not flinch, but held herself together, tightly. “Why?” he asked, because he knew she didn’t care about the Pentevral. Didn’t care about what he’d studied there. Not the way Vaelus did, with her immortal intensity.
Of all the things she owed him, truth was high on the list. “I—forgive me. We barely spoke three words together before the attack, and…” There was no polite way to say it. “I know more of your death than I do of your life. I can’t stop hearing your cries in my nightmares, and—Lords and Ladies forgive me, it’s your death. I don’t mean to, to, to claim that it’s harder on me than on you. I’m sorry. Occtis, forgive me.” She rose, then, meaning to go back to Julien’s side. Foolish, the whole conversation. Foolish, and humiliating, and presumptuous.
Occtis caught the edge of her sleeve with one cold, heavy hand. Aranessa froze, as much to keep still her instinctive flinch as anything else. “It’s alright,” he whispered. Such an earnest young man. She hoped he couldn’t see how afraid she was of him. “Aranessa. I get it. You were the only other person in that room. It’d be traumatizing for anyone.”
“You shouldn’t have to comfort me,” she muttered, squeezing his hand in both of hers. Occtis tugged her back down, and she sat, tailor-style, on the needled ground. She felt very young, and very lost, and could not meet his gaze.
“Well, whenever I end up having a screaming breakdown, you can call in the favor.” Occtis smiled, a humorless death’s-head of a grin. Despite that, Aranessa found it in herself to smile back. “Seriously though, I—I think it just hasn’t hit me yet. Everything is so strange. I keep moving, because we have to, and I keep talking, because it seems like I should. But everything is just…strange. I keep thinking that this has to be the dream, and soon I’ll wake up back in Dol-Makjar.”
“Sometimes I think that too,” Aranessa said. She rubbed her arms absently, looking only at the embers of their fire. “I wish for that most of all.” Her voice broke at the end, another small betrayal from an instrument she’d thought under her control.
“If it helps…” Occtis drew a loose circle in the dirt with one of the kindling sticks. He added a few lines, confident and practiced, and turned it into a basic pentacle. “I can tell you about how I made Pin?”
Both of them jumped when Vaelus moved. She went from stillness to fluid motion without pause, standing from her place at the edge of the clearing and walking noiselessly to join them at the fireside. She sat again, just on the other side of the log Occtis was using, and looked between the two humans expectantly. “I would also like to hear this tale,” she said, making clear she’d also overheard everything that had gone before.
Aranessa flushed. But she had been quiet—Julien and Taisha still slept. And Vaelus hadn’t said anything (yet) about the highborn lady slowing them down. It was just Occtis she was interested in, Occtis and Pin and however they were now bound to the Stone she guarded.
“Alright…” Occtis said slowly, turning to include Vaelus in the conversation. “That’s…fine. Familiars are a first-year project, okay, and the professor was really strict about what components you could use…”