The door to the prison car was next. He pulled it open. A rectangle of light stretched out before him, feeble and blue against the shadows that seethed through the car’s interior. Then the door shut behind him and the light was gone.
He breathed in the darkness. Let it coat his lungs, his mind, his soul. And then he turned and searched for the Destroyer.
She was on the ground. Struggling to raise herself up on her elbows, to drag herself further into the hallway and out of the cell. Flames burned madly all around her, a whirlwind of fire that tightened, loosened, dissipated and formed again. Her magic was unstable. He had only seen this sort of thing happen to her twice before, though then it hadn’t been poison but exhaustion that had spurred it on. The first time, the empress had hurried her to the Lord of Copper—who was also their cousin and the royal physician—before her condition worsened. The second time, she’d burned down a wing of the Alloyed Palace before losing consciousness. That was how he’d gotten the scar on his collarbone.
His oath took control again, commandeering his body to make him kneel at the Destroyer’s side as her fire blinked out. His hands curled on her shoulders, just barely gently enough to not be considered “harming,” and flipped her onto her back so that he could pick her up.
She inhaled sharply at the touch—she hadn’t seen him enter—and jerked away. Her eyes snapped up, wild and…
Afraid?
The sight hypnotized him. Fear paled her cheeks and drew her jaw in all sharp angles, shrank her pupils until the mercurial silver of her irises seemed to swallow them. Her breath came in short gasps. A sadistic pinprick of satisfaction lanced through Tal’s wildly beating heart; he had wished to see her afraid, and here it was, painted before him in clear shades of terror. But as soon as the satisfaction came, shame slipped in to dilute it. A person was cowering before him, and he was glad. That was not how he was built.
He shoved both the shame and the satisfaction away in disgust, and scooped up the Destroyer.
She cried out and flung a hand instinctively at the sudden movement. Tal turned his face away and braced for fire, but nothing came.
He looked back at her. She was blinking, her pupils adjusting. “Tal,” she said, and the word quavered with a profound and wholly unfamiliar relief.
A shuffling noise sounded from the cell behind them. Tal braced himself once again, tore his gaze from the Destroyer’s, and then, finally, turned to look at his sister. Emotion crept through him, a slurry of horror and guilt and a terrible, terrible fear. He had avoided looking for Nyx until now because he was afraid the oath would make him kill her. He had waited until the Destroyer was in his arms, hoping that his oath would then prioritize getting her to the healer over killing her would-be assassin.
He’d already seen Nyx in his vision, he knew what to expect, but he was still unprepared for the sight of her so damaged. Her skin was only burned in a few places. The Destroyer knew how to do that—how to turn her fire inward through an entry point, to bring pain without doing untoward outward damage. But it was the uncharacteristic despair in her expression, and the ominous rattling of her breaths, that nearly brought Tal to his knees.
They stared at each other for a moment. “I’ll…I’ll come back for you. I’ll save you,” Tal promised, though he knew he had no business swearing any such thing. He would swear it on metal, though, if it could ensure it came true.
Nyx exhaled a garbled laugh. “Supposed to be…me saving you, little brother.” She reached for him then, as if she was helpless to do anything else. Her fingers grazed the hem of his pants. In the gesture, he saw the ghost of the girl she’d once been: a snarling terror on the sparring grounds at eleven years old, gripping the dagger he’d gifted her in those same hands.
Before she could touch him, Tal took a step away. He ground his teeth. “You shouldn’t have come, Nyx. Not for me. I’m lost already.” The oath jerked him another step toward the door.
Nyx stared back at him, then her gaze fell, and her eyes met the Destroyer’s. Something passed between the two girls in that instant, and a change came over Nyx: some alchemy of ferocity and fatalism that scored away her despair, leaving only hardness in its wake. She curled both hands around the iron bars of her cell. “Destroyer,” she said, low and brutal and certain, “I swear on this metal that I will see your empire fall, and your reign ended, and you dead. Do you hear me, Elodie?”
“NO!” Tal shouted, but he was too late. He saw the moment the metal accepted his sister’s oath. She shuddered as it sank in.
“Nyx—” Tal said urgently, but before he could get out more than that the Destroyer sagged in his arms, her eyes rolling back. Her whole body jerked. Fire lashed out in tendrils all over her. He was moving toward the exit before he registered taking a step. He tried to turn back around to get one last glimpse of Nyx, but he was too late again; the Destroyer’s fire blocked everything behind him out. It charred the edges of the doorframe as they passed through it and snapped like whips against the floor, but somehow, none of it burned him. The flames arced around him instead as if
