His hands clenched and unclenched. His breathing was jagged with rage. He wanted to smash something. Wanted to throw things, break things. He couldn’t; nothing on this train belonged to him, and he would join the prisoners in the cells if he intentionally broke something that belonged to the lords and ladies.
And, he realized suddenly as an eerie, otherworldly calm slid over him, he couldn’t risk ending up in the cells. Because there was something he needed to do while he was free.
The train shuddered, a great beast waking from hibernation as the Destroyer’s order was relayed. Magic hummed through the intricate patterns inlaid on the cars’ metal wheels. The ash-swathed town outside the windows slowly gave way to a wintry landscape: stark gray trees draped in a delicate lace of freshly fallen snow, the polished-black eyes of a wary fox gleaming in the shadows, the looming Skyteeth mountains whose icy peaks shone with glaciers. Tal ignored it all.
His footsteps were muffled on the thick, luxurious rug as they made their way to the Destroyer’s room, which held the cot where he spent so much time suppressing his nightly visions until they morphed into regular nightmares. Today, when the Destroyer allowed him to rest, he wasn’t going to suppress them.
Today, he would make his god give him the answers he needed.
He was going to find a way out of his oath. He was going to free his sister. And then, he was going to kill the Destroyer.
ONCE, THERE WAS A GIRL WHO WAS AFRAID.
It was not an unreasonable sentiment. She’d lived through more than a dozen assassination attempts in the last year alone, after all—at least one of which had been strategized by a member of her own family. Under such circumstances, a healthy dose of paranoia was mere self-preservation. But every once in a while, when she allowed herself to feel around the jagged edges of her corroded soul, she wondered whether she would have so much cause to fear if her blood flowed crimson rather than quicksilver.
These were the thoughts that came to the Destroyer as she strode down the corridors of her sister’s train, cloaked in a nightgown and in her own icy, billowing dread.
Her gait was commanding, her expression as gracefully cruel as ever as she stepped from one car to the next, but inside, she writhed. That assassin—that girl, barely older than the Destroyer herself—had gotten far too close. She remembered what it was like to taste the wind from the assassin’s blade, remembered the sound of steel meeting steel like temple bells pealing through the town where no bells should have ever rung again. Most of all, she remembered the awful, seething vulnerability that had caught in her chest, in the exact spot where the girl’s blade would have struck.
She planted a hand on the door to her chambers and pushed it open, leaving a slender handprint charred into the lacquered wood. It sizzled and smoked but it couldn’t satisfy her. Her heart rapped out a rhythm so strong it was almost painful, and she burned with the need to pace, to scream out her anger, to punish someone so she could prove that she was not and would never be the vulnerable one. She really did need to go to Albinus for her treatment as soon as she could. His medicine was the only thing that could help her at times like this, the only thing that could make her feel in control again, untouchable, encased in the shield of her power.
She envied her sister. Sarai wore the Iron Crown, a relic of the ancient emperors. It housed one of the strongest enchantments in existence, one that had taken the power of dozens of great Smiths to forge. It was the secret to the power of the entire metallurgic class; wearing it, Sarai must never feel vulnerable.
Footsteps sounded behind her, paced so precisely they could be set to music. The sound paused as someone closed the chamber door behind them. Tal. She didn’t look at him, but the harsh rhythm of her heart abated ever so slightly at the reminder of his presence.
He was with her. He could be trusted to protect her, as no one else could.
She pulled open the door to her wardrobe and selected an outfit without looking, then slid out of her nightgown and robe. Glacial mountain air crept around the edges of the car’s velvet curtains and exhaled over her bare skin, raising goosebumps. She didn’t look at Tal and he paid no attention to her. No man in his right senses, especially not one bound to her by a metal vow, would look at her with a gaze of desire rather than one of fear. And that was fine with her; desire protected no one, while fear was the most useful tool in her arsenal.
She pulled her chosen outfit on. It turned out to be a blouse woven from fine, soft, wine-red wool, with a sweeping cape dangling from one epauleted shoulder. She pulled on the black trousers that went with it and then laced up her sturdy heeled boots. She began to close the wardrobe door, but paused as she caught a glimpse of her reflection.
Her black hair tumbled wildly around her shoulders, still unkempt from the night of lost sleep. She’d been having a nightmare. Bits of the dream drifted back to the surface of her mind: a shadowed, towering bear of a man looming over her, and her own weak, warbling attempt at a scream as her mouth filled with blood. Not a nightmare, then, but a memory.
Her eyes tightened. She looked away from her reflection, and spotted Tal’s. He stood at a loose attention behind her. His brown hair was unkempt, too. It fell over his face in strands, cutting his expression into slivers. Tight jaw, a dark slash of brows etched above stormy green eyes. He was angry
