A gentle hand, sticky with blood, touched his face. “Tal. It will be well. Trust me.”
He swallowed. Shook his head. It was his last effort at denial, though, and just as useless as all the attempts before. He opened his eyes. “I don’t have a choice,” he admitted roughly.
Nyx’s lips curved. She patted him on the cheek. “I’ll need your help to walk.”
“I’ll carry you.”
“I’d rather look heroic and noble…limping my way off the field of battle like one of the old legends.”
“You mean you’d rather die of blood loss before you even reach the train,” he snapped back, and then flinched—both because he remembered he’d been the one to injure her so gravely, and because a comparatively peaceful death by blood loss might be preferable to what she was about to face.
She heaved a sigh. “Always so serious,” she muttered. “Fine. Carry me. But set me down when we get to the surface. I’ll at least look noble…when anyone else can see.”
He looked away. “The Destroyer is not impressed by nobility.”
Nyx leaned into him, and he wrapped his arms around her, lifting her carefully off the ground. They passed the side tunnel where the townspeople were still hidden. The group stared out at the pair, eyes even wider than before.
Nyx lifted her head off her brother’s shoulder to address the survivors. “If you get away, go to the mountain ward. The township closest to the pass,” she told them in a low tone. “Ask for Helenia of the Saints and tell her I sent you. She’ll see you resettled.”
The townspeople were silent for a moment, then a rustle went through them like trees rattling their branches in a winter breeze. One man at the front slowly lifted his hand. It formed a fist with his thumb turned toward himself, as if he were holding a hammer, about to drive it downward onto red-hot metal fresh from a forge fire. It was a salute. One by one, the other townspeople copied it.
Nyx returned the sign, though her fist shook with the effort. Tal turned his gaze forward again as an ache clenched deep in his chest. The survivors were honoring his sister. They knew where he was taking her.
He walked in silence after that. When they’d reached the surface and were staring at the train before them, he picked up Nyx’s dagger—which had been left where it had landed in the street—and tried to give it back to her, so she would at least have some small measure of self-defense. His oath wouldn’t allow it, though, and locked over his muscles to make him throw the weapon further into the ashes of the city. He stared after it, hopelessness and hatred twisting around his chest like a bone viper.
“What’s this?” came a low, dangerous voice from behind him.
He turned around. The Destroyer was framed by the train’s doorway. Petite as she was, her anger filled up the space like another presence, like a storm about to break. Her mercurial eyes snapped and crackled with fury as she stared at Nyx—who was, despite her orders, still alive.
Tal, despairing, fought back the urge to throw himself in front of his sister. The Destroyer couldn’t know that they were connected. She would use it against both of them. She wouldn’t be able to tell simply by looking at the pair that they were siblings—they’d had different mothers, and looked almost nothing alike—but any attempt by Tal to defend Nyx would only make things far worse than they already were.
He gritted his teeth. “The Saint demanded her right to a trial,” he managed. “I have brought her back to you.”
Against his will. Against everything he’d ever hoped for or believed.
He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut again. He wanted to scream. He wanted to—he wanted to pray. He teetered on the urge like a man on a cliff before desperation finally tipped him over its edge. Please, he begged his god silently. Please. I’ve given you so much. Don’t take her too.
Nyx was leaning heavily against Tal’s side, staring at the Destroyer, her expression mingling insolence and disgust as only a big sister could. “Take me back to the Alloyed Palace with you,” she commanded, as if she were the lady and the Destroyer her prisoner.
The Destroyer bared her teeth. She held up a hand that glowed red with heat, giving Nyx a long moment to understand what she would do with it, and then reached out and clamped her fingers around Nyx’s injured arm. An awful sizzling filled the air. A thin trail of smoke rose up, curling its way through the ash that drifted down around them. The tendons in Nyx’s neck went taut as she tried, and then failed, to hold back a shout of pain. Every muscle in Tal’s body tightened in response.
…and to never harm you myself. He’d never regretted more that the Destroyer had made him add that clause to his oath. He wanted to run her through with his blades. Wanted to incinerate her, the way she’d incinerated so many townspeople yesterday. He wanted her to feel the way he did now: helpless, afraid, alone.
“You wish to face your trial? Very well,” the Destroyer said, her anger vanished like mist, leaving no trace besides a distant, satisfied iciness in her voice as she shouted for the guards. “Take her to the cells,” she ordered when they arrived, thrusting Nyx at them. “And give the order to set off, if it pleases my sister. I am past done with this place.” Then she turned on her heel and strode away.
Tal was left with nothing to do but follow. The light fabric of the Destroyer’s robe wafted around her as she walked ahead of him, revealing dots of
