can hear how my voice wavers.
He sighs, and it is so weary that my own abused body does the same. He reaches up above, along the cave wall, and retrieves a dark piece of stone. He takes his knife back from my belt. Before I can protest, he strikes flint and steel until the sparks catch on a torch hooked into a steel loop embedded in the rock. For once, the sudden spring of fire doesn’t make me jump. He hands the knife back, and then walks deeper into the cave without waiting for me.
We keep wading into the tunnel in silence, accompanied only by the trickle of water rising at our heels and the snap of the fire in his hand.
When we arrive at the place Castian promised, I breathe a little easier. The cave widens all around. There’s a small iridescent pool of water surrounded by sharp rock formations, like we’re inside the mouth of a giant shark.
Castian finally comes to a stop at a smooth groove in the cave where there’s a cot, weapons, and crates of food. I don’t know what’s worse, my hunger or my exhaustion.
“Sit,” he says. “I’ll take the floor.”
I don’t argue. I pull off the stolen doublet, and even the smallest movement hurts. I sit on the cot with my back against the wall. Castian slides to the floor beside me. This is worse than the Gray. Worse than remembrance, because it isn’t like I’m in someone else’s life. I am very much here and very much not.
He tosses an apple and a waterskin to me. I drink from it hungrily, and I’m glad he has one for himself because I don’t know how I would tear myself away from this.
“Easy, you’ll make yourself sick.”
“I’ve spent my entire life on the run,” I say, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “I know how to drink water.”
He shrugs. “Thank you for coming back for me.”
“Castian,” I say. “Castian. Are you really Castian?”
He brushes his hair away from his face. It makes him look younger. Just a boy trying very hard to be a cruel man.
“I am Castian, son of Fernando the Righteous, Prince of Andalucía, commander of the five fleets, rightful heir to the kingdom of Puerto Leones.” He turns his face to avoid my eye and drinks. “And I’m an Illusionári.”
“You remembered me. From when we were kids,” I say.
I think of the boy who begged me to leave the palace. That same memory is stomped on by the prince I met in the woods, on the executioner’s block before a sea of his own people. I can still feel how the bile rose to my throat as I ran faster and harder than I ever had before across those rooftops.
Too late, I was too late. I breathe short and fast, ball my hands into fists to stop my wretched body from betraying me by trembling.
“Did you kill Dez?” The words nearly choke me.
The beginning of a sad smile quirks at his lips but dies just as quickly. One of his eyes is swollen more than before and ringed with black. It makes it harder to meet his gaze without wanting to feel pity for him.
“This might pain you to hear, as you’ve wanted nothing more than to murder me ever since we saw each other again, but I’ve never killed anyone.”
I’m either too tired to make sense of his words or he’s taking advantage of my exhausted state to get away with a lie. “What?”
“I should say, I’ve never executed anyone innocent, and that includes Moria.”
I shake my head. “No. I saw you. I saw you with my own—”
He hits his head against the wall behind us. “I’m an Illusionári, Nati.”
“Don’t call me that,” I whisper.
“I create illusions. The way Margo created that smoke.”
“Your power can’t be that strong,” I counter, because I can’t believe it. I can’t. But I have seen it in my newly surfaced memories. The way Méndez’s memory of the prince faded into color because he was talking to an illusion of Castian. The way Cebrián saw him make dice vanish and reappear, just like when we were kids.
And yet, it’s strange hearing it come from his lips. It is even stranger having to accept that he is telling the truth.
Now he actually smiles, all straight teeth and cunning blue eyes. “What is my crown made out of?”
“Gold.” The metal catalyst that strengthens Illusionári. “That was you at the Sun Festival. When I felt