Winter, White and Wicked - Shannon Dittemore Page 0,117

see Kyn, his arms bare, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on mine.

I’m sorry, he mouths. But he doesn’t need to. My ribs are taut with his apology, my spine as rigid as his.

I nod and turn away again, falling into step with Mars.

“How far can I go?” I ask. “I don’t want Kyn to suffer.”

“It’s a good question,” Mars says. “A question I don’t have the answer to. Though, after you’d fled the mines at North Bend, it was nearly half an hour before Kyn’s wounds started reopening.”

“So, we’re fine. We have miles.”

“It would seem.”

We walk in silence for a while, the ebb in my stomach fading as Kyn falls farther and farther behind. My anger at Lenore, the injustice of her disappointment settles like a heavy pack on my shoulders.

“Would you like an explanation?” Mars asks.

“Yes,” I say, burrowing into my coat. “And quickly. Winter has another storm brewing.”

“Where would you like me to start?”

“When did you know about me? About my . . .” I wave a hand.

“Not until Miss Trestman,” he says. “I knew the Desolation had split, of course, years before, knew the Desolation Shiv had their theories, knew Shyne harbored the strangest of the ideas, but I didn’t put the pieces together until Miss Trestman told me what she suspected about you.”

“Which was?”

“That it was your presence that kept Drypp alive all those months.”

My gaze snaps to his. “You knew about the Abaki attack?”

“I did. Miss Trestman said her grandfather was almost dead when you got him home, but he recovered—miraculously even. She said that whenever you went on a run, Drypp’s wounds would fester and open up again. It wasn’t until you took a job that kept you away for longer that he finally passed into death.”

By the time I’d returned from a run to the northwestern wing, Drypp’s body had been burned and his ashes spread. It’s the way things are on Layce. To move on quickly.

There is no yesterday . . .

“Lenore never said.”

“She was using it to bargain with, I think. She regrets the deception.”

I choke. “I’ve known Lenore a lot longer than you have, and she doesn’t regret a thing right now. Trust me.”

One side of his mouth lifts. “Be that as it may, she had no coin to secure my services on behalf of her father. She thought she could use the information about you to barter with.”

“You freed her father from the Stack?”

“Not yet,” he says. “But I will.”

All these things I didn’t know about Lenore; I let the pride of thinking sharing a home was the same as sharing a life. They tried to tell me, Kyn and Mars. Hyla. They all tried to tell me that Lenore had made up her own mind about the Majority. It’s maddening, the realization that two girls, raised so closely, seeing the same wrongs, walking the same paths, can come to entirely different understandings about the injustices around them. One chooses to fight and the other to flee. How does that happen?

“But why do you need me? Why the deception? I’m not so hardheaded that I wouldn’t have listened. You didn’t have to lie—”

“Would you have listened, Miss Quine? Would you have believed that you were the lost child of the Kerce queen? That a few words from your mouth would be enough to send Winter from Shiv Island?”

Winter rumbles and rain drops from the sky. I’ve no hood. Not since the Cages.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I would have listened, but Winter has always been my everything. My friend. My freedom. My source of income.” I don’t say my savior. I don’t want to think about Bristol Mapes anymore.

“Exactly,” Mars says. “When Miss Trestman told me how you felt about your Kerce tutor, I realized you needed to see Winter’s nature before you would understand. The mountainfolk on Shiv Island hold Winter in such high regard, and you especially. It would take more than a magic display by a Kerce smuggler to convince you. You needed the Shiv Road, Miss Quine. Otherwise, you would not have believed.”

I don’t think he’s wrong. But I can’t believe that makes him right.

“So that’s your story? You let me believe you needed my rig to get me here? So I could what? Travel to Paradyia? It makes no sense.”

“The medallion,” Mars says, with a little nod. “The one around your neck. It belonged to your mother, Maree Vale.”

“The markings are Paradyian.”

“Because she was Paradyian, born and raised. The sister of the