How far would she go? Dualayn had been driven beyond any moral limits to restore Bravine. The White Lady said she was just like Dualayn. That he was someone who understood her pain.
“I want to do something, Ōbhin,” she said. “I want to stop the Brotherhood, Dje’awsa, the White Lady. All of them. I don’t want them meddling in my country. My city. I want to bring some form of justice to them all.”
Ōbhin nodded. “Ideas?”
“No,” she admitted. Then her brow furrowed. “Refractor Charlis. He’s working in Parliament to keep things from fracturing worse. Deffona is his secretary. He’s a good man, and she’ll want to help us. Maybe he will, too. We’re going to stop them, Ōbhin. All of them.”
Ōbhin smiled. “There are those thorns of yours.”
Avena smiled.
They could discuss plans later. She had to pass her water and leave this place. She never wanted to enter Dualayn’s manor again. All her happy memories were sullied by this room they were in. This was where Chames had died, killed by his own father.
Where Ōbhin’s friend had been turned into a monster with no identity.
She and Ōbhin left the foul room behind, her brain carried in his strong grip. They traveled upstairs and closed the door to Dualayn’s lab. They would pack up and leave, find a new place to live in Kash, and then figure out how to save it from the corruption festering in the midden heaps.
Everyone was waiting outside of it. Miguil and Dajouth, Cerdyn and plump Layni. Joayne and Jilly stood by each other, one wilted and the other blazing. The poor cook looked befuddled as Hajina whispered to her and held her hand.
Everyone was here but her father.
After everyone had hugged her, Cerdyn said, “Fingers left this letter for you, Avena.”
A pit formed in her stomach. Even before she’d unfolded the parchment, she knew he’d fled. That guilt had driven him away once again. She trembled as she read the scrawled words begging for her forgiveness.
She would be patient with her father. She would save him, too.
The last thing he’d written was the address to a banker in Kash. “I’ve been telling everyone I’m sending my pay to my wife, but I’ve been depositing it in a trust for you. You’re the only one who can access it. It’s yours. Make something with it. The best I can give you. I ain’t worthy to be your dad.”
“But you are,” she whispered as she pressed the letter to her chest and fought the tears.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Thirtieth Day of Patience, 755 EU
The summer heat roiled around them as Ōbhin and Avena walked down the overgrown lane of the farm where she’d grown up. It lay on the outskirts of the village of Upper Kash, a few hours’ travel on foot north of the city. From the banker who held the trust her father had created, she’d also been given the deed to this land. Her father had signed it to her before he’d vanished.
Ōbhin had never suspected Fingers’s true identity.
The farmhouse’s roof had collapsed in many spots years ago. Plants poked up through the rotting floorboards. Streaks of mud from flooding caused by heavy rains rippled across the interior. Avena wandered lost through it while Ōbhin looked around for the perfect place to hide her brain.
If they were going to take on the Brotherhood, they would have to be careful. They couldn’t leave the most vulnerable part of her where it could be easily found. With Fingers’s money, they had bought a small house in the Breezy Hills. Avena was popular in that neighborhood thanks to her habit of giving away her pay to the street urchins. Jilly, Joayne, Cerdyn, Dajouth, Layni, and Hajina had all chosen to help Avena in her plan on bringing justice to those who had wronged them.
Dualayn. The Brotherhood. Even the White Lady.
Ōbhin would help in any way he could.
Avena drifted from a room. Her expression flicked from fond remembrance to grief. She would pause to touch a wall or a piece of rotten furniture before letting out a heavy sigh. He left her to her exploration as he pried up the soot-crusted hearthstones, his purple gloves digging them up one by one. He didn’t mind the black stains left behind.
He’d come by them honestly.
Beneath the hearth, he excavated a hole with a shovel, piling the old dirt in a small mound until he’d dug it big enough. The soil looked dry. He set the crate inside, her jar packed in sand. The jewelchines in there would keep her brain alive for eternity, or so Dualayn claimed.
Avena came up alongside him when he rose. She stared down in the hole then pulled out his old, black gloves from her satchel. His new ones were made of fine cow leather, dyed the purple of a defender. Avena herself had stitched on the circles, each the color of flame, on the backs.
“I’m home,” she whispered to Ōbhin before she tossed his gloves on top of the box.
“You sure you want to put those stained things in there with your brain?” Ōbhin asked, staring at his shame. Thanks to Avena, he had finally pried them off. She’d restored his pride. His life. She’d upheld the promise she’d made to him in an alley behind a seedy tavern.
“Even stained, they protected me.” His promised, as the Lothonians called their betrothed, slipped her arm around his waist. She leaned her head against his shoulder. “It’s comforting knowing they’re watching over the most important part of me.”
When they left here, Ōbhin and Avena’s war against the Brotherhood would begin. So he savored this quiet
