“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought it would be a simple trip. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”
Abi looked at me for a moment, then focused his attention on the long table in front of us. He opened his mouth as if to say something, closed it, then unclenched his hands and spread his fingers.
“People didn’t get hurt. They died,” he said in a voice so low I nearly missed it. “And you were shot.”
All that was true, not that we’d had a lot of choice in what happened to the heretics. They’d chosen their own fate when they came after us. If we hadn’t fought back, we’d be dead instead of them. I had to make Abi understand that none of this was his fault.
“We did what we had to,” I whispered. “If they—”
“We could’ve left,” Eric said from Abi’s left side. “Now we’ve all got what happened hanging over our heads. Not to mention that angry vampire.”
The pained looks on their faces told me that my friends weren’t angry. They didn’t know how to process what we’d experienced.
Eric had fought dozens, maybe hundreds, of opponents over the years. As a member of the Guardians, he’d battled the warped monstrosities who tried to destroy the Flame’s temples and shrines. But he’d never killed another human. For all his bravado and eagerness to jump into a brawl, Eric wasn’t prepared for the realities of battle. Yesterday’s fight had cost him his innocence, and there was no way for me to give that back to him.
Abi was the most moral person I knew. He hadn’t drawn any blood yesterday, but that didn’t stop the guilt from piling up inside him. In my friend’s eyes, his hands were stained just as red as mine or Eric’s. The sorrow in his face cut me like a knife.
“We had to.” Clem leaned past me to deliver the words. “If they’d deciphered the runes, they might have figured out where to find the other pieces of the Heart. Things would have gotten a lot worse. Not just for us, for everyone.”
“Or maybe they wouldn’t have figured out anything,” Eric grumbled. “Those runes were the key to the puzzle to reach the Heart, but they didn’t point to Hoghilag.”
“We didn’t know that at the cave,” Clem insisted.
Krieger raised his voice as his instruction came to a close. He drew a circle around the diagram he’d created, then announced it was time to practice the scrivening. The rest of the class reached under the tables to grab the supplies they needed from the storage shelves. My friends and I went through the motions with our fellow students, but our minds were elsewhere.
I didn’t want to have this conversation in the middle of class. It was too fraught with emotion and too important to whisper back and forth like this. But my friends were hurting in ways I couldn’t imagine. They wouldn’t have started this discussion if they weren’t already on the edge. They needed something from me.
But I had no idea what I could say or do to help them.
“I know this is harder than any of us ever thought it would be.” The emotions rising inside me made it difficult to keep my voice low. “But there’s no one else to do it. And if we don’t—”
“Maybe no one needs a new Grand Design,” Eric said. “Let the Guardians deal with the heretics. People can learn to do without the oracles. We’ll walk away from all of this. I saw what that would be like in the cave.”
A cold jolt shot through me. The only thing I’d seen yesterday was violence and that strange vision of Maps.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“We all glimpsed the future,” Clem confessed. “Our destiny. I was a Consul.”
My heart jumped into my throat at that title. Empyreal society was ruled by the Consul Triad. They were the most influential men and women in the world. Even the sages couldn’t defy their edicts.
“I was the champion,” Eric whispered. “Or, I will be if I survive this.”
I looked to Abi for an explanation of what he’d seen, but he turned his eyes away from mine without a word. My friends had seen a future where all their dreams came true. If that was real, then this quest risked more than just their lives. Rewriting the Grand Design meant unraveling their destinies.
There wasn’t anything I could say to them that would compete with that. I fidgeted with the scrivening tile and stylus I’d taken out of storage, turning the square of metal this way and that while I searched for an escape from this mess.
My friends were honorable and true. A little guilt would keep them in the quest. The cost, though, would be terrible. They’d feel betrayed and cheated, and they’d be right. It seemed cruel to ask them to help me change their futures, even if it would save the world.
The tile reflected my black gaze back at me as I struggled with the pain in my heart. I’d forgotten that my friends weren’t like me. I’d fought and killed spirits, monsters, and men, I’d warred with my mother, and I’d rejected my clan. Those experiences had changed me, for both good and ill. I was harder than anyone my age should ever be, and I’d accepted darkness into my life as the price for survival.
To me, this year had been more of the same.
To my friends, the battle yesterday had been a nightmare. They didn’t like or want the changes that fight had inflicted on them. As much as I wanted Eric, Abi, and Clem beside me on this quest, it was wrong of me to ask them
