“I grew up believing in the Unforged God,” he told her, still watching the landscape. “Both my father and my mother—and my stepmother for that matter—were believers, and I was proud to follow their lead. But for me it was more than just believing he existed. I…I thought he loved me. I thought he was watching over me, guiding me into some grand destiny. I thought he’d chosen me. I thought I was important, because I was important to him.” The words were ashes in his mouth: a cloying, bitter truth. “But instead of leading me to my destiny, he led me to the Destroyer.”
Elodie was quiet for a moment. “Ah,” she said at last. “That is a tragedy, then, and not even an entertaining one. Maybe we could travel in silence after all.”
He let out an exhale. “Thank you,” he said, and this time he almost meant it.
She hesitated, then peered back over her shoulder. “I know you aren’t one to enjoy my company—or perhaps human company in general, it’s hard to tell—but I want you to know I’m glad I found you in the wreckage. It would have been…hard for me, had I been out here on my own.”
“I’m sure you would have managed.” He couldn’t picture the Destroyer being anything but indestructible, even as he strove to prove that image false.
“No, that’s not what I mean. I would have survived. In fact,” she said, her voice taking on a teasing tone once again, “I probably would have moved a lot faster without the need to drag your carcass behind me.”
“I shall endeavor to lose some weight to ease your labors,” he replied dryly.
“We could always amputate that leg. That would displace perhaps a good fifth of your weight. More if you lose a lot of blood in the process.”
“But the blood might attract predators,” he pointed out.
“That is a consideration.” She nodded decisively. “We shall save that option for a last resort, then.”
“That’s good to hear,” he said, weaving together every bit of control he possessed to reinforce the illusion of the new and unknown girl before him.
There was a moment of silence. “In any case,” she said, her voice stiff and awkward now, “what I meant was—I’m glad I saved you. Not because I wouldn’t survive this alone, but because it…it makes me more hopeful, to survive it with you. I’m not sure I would feel that way with anyone else.”
Tal fumbled for a response. “Oh.”
“Now that’s said, we should be quiet, as you suggested,” she said hastily, walking a bit faster as if she might be able to outrun the embarrassment he could clearly hear in her voice. “We don’t want to scare off any wildlife that we could turn into a meal.”
“Yes,” he said, at a loss for how else to reply.
Silence fell thick around them like a new snow. After a few minutes, it softened the edges of his unease, and he managed to turn his mind to other matters. Or rather, one key matter, the one that he’d been avoiding for an entire day but could avoid no longer.
The prison car had been three lengths away from the dining car. Judging by the debris he’d seen, the explosion had destroyed perhaps two cars, three at the very most. Which meant Nyx may have survived.
Except the door to her cell had been open. She’d been badly injured, but if she was anything she was determined, and she might have tried to go after him. If she had gotten to the next car over before the explosion, her chances would have been reduced. But, he reminded himself, with the feeling of treading a rut worn deep in his mind, her body hadn’t been among the dead. That made it more probable that she had survived.
Although of course, if she had survived the explosion, she would almost certainly not survive what came next.
Tal turned his face away, despairing. The empress had spoken of emergency transport magics. Tal didn’t have authorization to know all the details of the royal train’s enchantments, but he knew enough to put the pieces together with what he’d overheard from the now-dead Head of Transport. The train had a special, last-resort magic Smithed into it that could return it almost instantly to the Alloyed Palace in case of an emergency. Such an enchantment would take a massive amount of power and wreck all of the train’s other Smithings, including the ones that ran its engines—although it unfortunately would not affect any oaths that had been sworn to the metal there. It meant the train couldn’t return to check for survivors, not for weeks. It also meant that if Nyx was alive, then she was likely now at the palace, utterly helpless.
The other prisoners would tell the metallurgists what had happened. Nyx was already slated for a mockery of a trial for her attempt to assassinate the Destroyer; what worse punishment would they mete out for the one whose machinations had killed many nobles, potentially including the empress herself and, as far as they would know, the Destroyer too?
Tal closed his eyes. In his chest, something hitched, like a frayed bowstring pulled too tight to last.
“Nyx,” he whispered, too quiet to be heard over the shush of metal on snow, “please be safe.”
THE SKY WAS A PRETENDER. Swept clean of clouds, it shone a delicate gauzy blue hung with the low diadem of the dawning sun, as if there had never been such a thing as a storm. But Nyx had seen too many lying dawns to believe the sky today, just as she had seen too many Skyteeth blizzards to underestimate the one that had greeted her last night, when she had awoken half-buried in a snowbank.
The sky hadn’t been pretending then. It had fomented openly, chunks of slate-gray scraping through the maw of the Skyteeth, breaking open to rain snow and death onto the peaks. Nyx had
