CHAPTER 5

Amara

I was on my feet before my mind caught up to my body.

That's the thing three lifetimes builds into you. You move first. You understand after.

Reed was on his side in the dirt at the edge of the firelight, and there was an arrow in him, and it had come out of the dark so fast and so quiet that the fire was still burning the same as it had a breath ago... small, steady, indifferent... as if nothing in the whole world had changed.

Everything had changed.

The quiet brother was already moving. Toward the trees, not away from them... straight at the black space the arrow had come out of... and that one choice told me everything I needed to know about what kind of man he was. Bram went the other way, wide and low, weapon out, cutting off a second angle without a single word passing between them.

Zane reached Reed first.

He dropped to his knees in the dirt, and the easy thing in him... the joke always half-built on his mouth, the lightness he wore like a second skin... was just gone. Stripped clean off him. What was underneath was younger and rawer than anything he'd let me see, and his hands moved over Reed.

"Reed," he said. "Reed. Hey. Look at me. Look at me, you idiot, come on."

Reed didn't look at him.

Eight months, Reed had said. Eight months with this lot. He'd shaken my hand an hour ago and called it the best bad decision he'd ever made, and now he was just a shape in the dirt and the fire didn't care and the forest didn't care and the only ones who did were three men who had clearly cared a great deal for a very long time.

Zane's hands found the shaft of the arrow, the fletching, and then the coating on the wood... a color that had no business being there, an oily sheen the firelight slid off instead of catching. He went very still.

He stared at it a long moment.

"Wolfsbane," he said.

He didn't say it to any of us.

I knew what it meant. I'd learned it in a life that doesn't exist anymore.

The arrow had been meant for the camp. But It had found Reed.

The forest went a different kind of quiet after that.

"They're still out there," Bram said, low. He hadn't lowered his weapon. His eyes were on the dark, not on Reed, because Reed was past anything Bram could do and the living were not. "More than one. East and north. They're not moving."

"Why aren't they moving?" Zane's voice had gone flat. Dangerous-flat.

"Because they're not the point," I said.

They both looked at me.

I stood in the firelight with the heat at my back and felt something move through me that I knew from my second life. Not fear. This was fear's older, colder cousin... the certainty that the thing you have been running from your whole life has stopped being a thing in the distance and become a thing at the edge of the trees.

"The arrow wasn't the attack," I said. "It was the starter."

I did not freeze. I want that written down, across all my lives. I bent and took up a branch from beside the fire. It was a poor weapon. It was the weapon I had. I have never once stood in the middle of a thing and waited for it to happen to me, and I was not about to learn the habit tonight, not for any of them.

The quiet brother came back from the tree line. Empty-handed. Whoever had loosed that arrow was gone, or had never meant to be caught. He looked at Reed. He looked at his brother. Something passed between the two of them that needed no words.

And then, past the edge of the firelight, a horse stepped out of the dark.

He came the way weather comes... not rushing, not hiding, simply arriving, because the dark was his and he had decided it was time.

I knew his face before he'd fully cleared the trees.

Not from a story. Not from a warning whispered over a low table in some border town. I knew Corvus the way you know a thing that has ended you. Twice. I knew the line of his shoulders and the set of his mouth and the particular way the air seemed to shift around him to make room... the way air shifts around anything that has never once in its life been told no and lived to regret it.

He let the horse carry him to the edge of the light, and there he stopped. He looked the camp over. He looked at the fire. He looked at Reed in the dirt, and at Zane on his knees beside him with the wolfsbane shaft still gripped white-knuckled in one fist.

Something passed over Corvus's face then that was worse than cruelty. It was nothing at all.

Zane rose to his feet, slow.

"You killed him," he said.

"I sent a message," Corvus said. His voice was low and unhurried, and that was the part I hadn't braced for. "He stepped into it."

"He was twenty-two years old."

"I know how old he was." Corvus said. Then he turned his head, and he looked past Zane, and past the fire, and he found me.

And he smiled... slow, almost gentle... the smile of a man who has arrived exactly where he meant to, exactly when he meant to, and finds everything in its proper place.

"There she is," he said.

Three lives I have lived. Three lives, and the same voice waiting at the end of every one of them.

I tightened my hand on a branch that would not save me. I made myself look back at him. And in the dark behind us, on three sides at once, I heard the trees begin to move.