steel that has made better men soil themselves.
“Just a splash,” Esteban grumbles to Sayida, but narrows his eyes at me when he tosses the flask to her hands.
“Ignore him,” Sayida whispers in my ear. “It won’t hurt too badly, but you can bite down on your belt if you’d like.”
“I think we have different definitions of ‘won’t hurt too badly,’ ” I say. “But I’ll be all right.”
She giggles when I glower at the slim flask of aguadulce. The drink might be made from the sugar cane stalks plentiful in the southern provincia, but there is nothing sweet about the clear liquor. Once Dez poured it over an open cut on my leg before digging out a thick shard of glass that was lodged in there. I couldn’t walk for weeks, and I couldn’t stomach the smell of aguadulce for even longer.
Sayida gives me a warm smile. “What happened? I’ve never seen you react to a flame that way.”
Sayida never has to use her Persuári gifts to influence my mood. There’s something about her that makes me want to spill my secrets, even the things I can’t always voice to Dez.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “I remembered something from when I was a child.”
Her thick eyebrows arch with surprise. “That’s good, isn’t it? You haven’t been able to access the Gray since you were rescued from the palace, right?”
I hold my hair back and stare at the grass while she cleans and dries the wound. “I’ve been working with Illan to try and recall more from my time with the king’s justice to use to our advantage, but nothing has worked. He thinks that I compartmentalized my memories so my mind wouldn’t crumble. That I created the Gray to hold all my memories from that time. The other elders believe that the Gray is a side effect. A punishment, really, for the Robári who create Hollows. It’s what I deserve, I suppose.”
“Don’t say that, Ren.” Sayida frowns and presses a dry cloth to the flask of aguadulce. I brace for the burn of alcohol. “We all have darkness in our pasts. The goddess says we all deserve forgiveness.”
“I shouldn’t be forgiven just because I hardly remember the first nine years of my life.”
“And look at all you’ve done since,” she whispers, then covers my wound.
My vision flares red and I swallow my scream, if only because I don’t want Margo and Esteban to think me weak.
“Hold still now.” Sayida waits for me to stop wincing, then threads the needle. I shut my eyes and hold my breath as the metal pierces skin. The silk string follows through and tugs.
I breathe hard and fast. My temples pulse with a dull ache. I have to keep the Gray under control. The elders believe that perhaps there’s something there that could help turn the tide of the Moria rebellion against the king. But deep down, I wonder if the reason I couldn’t access the memories with Illan’s training is because I didn’t want anything resurfacing.
Unlike the Whispers, I spent part of my childhood in the palace, not as a captive—as a guest of the king and the justice. A kind of pet, really. Ten years ago, the justice began to seek out Robári children all throughout the kingdom to be used as weapons. And though there must have been a few others like me—Robári are rare, not extinct—I don’t remember them. Maybe they were old enough to refuse the work the justice demanded, and were executed for their belligerence. But I didn’t refuse.
I did as I was told.
Justice Méndez had singled me out. He would sit me in one of the palace’s many parlor rooms and bring trays of delicacies for me to choose from. He told me that my ability to pull memories from people was the most powerful he’d ever seen. I didn’t know then that I couldn’t give the memories back. That I could steal one too many. That when I was finished—when I emptied people of all their memories—I was leaving behind only a shadow of a person. A Hollow.
I didn’t know I was the justice’s greatest asset in the beginnings of the King’s Wrath, when thousands of my kind—including my parents, I later found out—were massacred. The crime was using our magics against the king and people of Puerto Leones.
“There,” Sayida says when she’s finished, applying an herb salve that cools my burning skin. Admiring her work, she smiles. “That should hold you over until we get back to