He ignored the remark. “Your family has had enough heartbreak. I can’t sit here and send you off to Meru after…after Marcus’s death. We love you and want you safe, here, with us.”
“I must go.” And Marcus’s death was precisely the reason.
“This isn’t the time to be selfish.”
“I’m doing this to see that the men who killed my brother are brought to justice.”
“Men?”
“Man,” Eira corrected quickly. Fritz didn’t know about the organization behind all of this. The fact filled Eira with a strange sense of power and duty. “I have to go.”
“What do you honestly think you can do?” Her uncle looked down on her, even still.
“Whatever I can.”
“Your parents have lost one child. They need you. I need you. I’m sorry for the transgressions you feel I’ve committed against you. I’m not perfect, none of us are, but we’re trying.” The ghost of the surrogate father she’d once known him as passed over him. The sight of it nearly broke a part of her heart somehow still intact. But Eira banished it with a silent reminder of everything he’d done the past few months—every time he had held her back or stepped in her way. “Don’t leave now, please.”
Eira gripped the armrests of her chair tighter. But her magic stayed under her control. Not one speck of frost stuck to the velvet upholstery.
She had a million quips she wanted to say and a thousand objections. She’d had a lot of time to try and figure out what was best for her and her family. But the one thing she kept coming back to was that she couldn’t face her parents. Not yet. Not with her brother’s blood on her hands and his killer out there.
And especially not after they had abandoned her.
“I’m sorry, but I have to.” Eira stood. “My mind is made up; I will go to Meru.” The Court of Shadows is waiting for me.
29
Eira didn’t go to instruction, workshops, or the clinic for the next three days. As long as the pin was on her breast, she was still a candidate and that meant she didn’t have any obligations. It didn’t matter that the fifth trial was canceled and she was the only Waterrunner left. She wasn’t going to anything she didn’t want to and no one dared to tell her otherwise.
She spent most of her time with Alyss in the back corner of the library. Alyss alternated between reading her romance novels or sculpting, oftentimes both. Eira always knew when Alyss was scared or nervous. She busied her hands and buried herself in other worlds and other people who existed neatly in a few hundred bound pages.
Eira retreated in a different way. She might have spent time reading before. But now, when she sat at the window seat of the library, she practiced listening. She stretched out her magic silently, invisibly, and targeted various objects around her.
Whispers heeded her command now. But Eira silently trained anyway. There would be a day Deneya would come—here in Solaris, on Meru, or wherever else destiny took Eira. The Court of Shadows seemed like something that didn’t understand or respect borders. It was a living, breathing entity in Eira’s mind, one from which she didn’t want to escape. She wanted to be a part of it.
Whenever the court came to call on her, tonight, tomorrow, a year from now, she would be ready. She would help bring Ferro and anyone else who stood with him to justice.
She and Alyss were left mostly alone, the other apprentices in the Tower avoiding them in wide arcs. Rumors had continued to spread that Eira had somehow had a hand—despite what the Imperial investigation had turned up—in the deaths of her fellow competitors.
This cocoon of solitude made it all the more jarring when Cullen and Noelle approached them. Wordlessly, Cullen handed Alyss a letter and then gave one to Eira. He held out his hand, waiting, as she looked from the letter to the man she hadn’t laid eyes on in a week.
A treacherous corner of her heart wanted to feel something toward him. She wanted to reach up and wrap her arms around his neck and clutch him to her. She wanted to mourn once more with him, held safely in the security he seemed to provide. She wanted him to brush her hair from her face and tell her everything would be all right.
But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t let herself.
“I know what this letter says. It’s not a trap this time,” he said softly, misreading her hesitation.
“I suppose it is like that night, isn’t it?” Eira murmured. She reached out and took the letter from Cullen. The last letter she’d taken from him had been the night of Adam’s cruelty and the start of a wedge between them. But Eira already expected the missive she held now was the beginning of them being bound together, like it or not.
Eira unfolded the parchment, recognizing her uncle’s script.
“‘Congratulations,’” she read, skimming the few lines of text he’d written.
“Doesn’t seem like much of a congratulations after all that’s happened, does it?” Alyss muttered, looking to Eira with somewhat haunted eyes. “The other Groundbreakers wouldn’t back down. Since there wasn’t a fifth trial, the minister and royals chose me based on my past scores.”
“Welcome to the team,” Noelle said, “fellow competitors.”
Eira looked between the three people around her and then back to her letter. “I suppose we should start packing.”
* * *
The next morning, Eira was up well before the sun. She moved through the silent halls of the Tower, ending up in the hidden room she’d spent so many hours in. Eira watched the dawn break through the small window and wondered how many times Adela had stood in the same spot she was now.
This room had been Adela’s, Eira had long come to terms with. That meant the journals she had studied from could be the writings of her birth mother. Or, Eira
