flying patrol routes, that she got a chance to take out the lockbox again and review Ilithya’s list. Dinner had been hours ago, and their camp was quiet and cloaked in darkness.
While Vayle was a rocky village, stacked and piled and built tightly together, Rushlea was, by comparison, vast. It sprawled across the rolling landscape, with two central squares that held bustling markets, but in the wake of the empire’s attack and resultant destruction, the village was as subdued as Vayle had been, with a similar decrease in travelers and trade.
The Rider camp was on the outskirts of the village—near the refugee housing, but still separate—in a clearing surrounded on all sides by soaring cliff faces and massive chunks of stone.
Veronyka unearthed the lockbox from Xephyra’s saddlebag and settled into a grassy hollow to read. It had been a while since she’d looked at the list, and as Xephyra drew close, lending her glow, Veronyka’s heart sank at how little information there was on the crinkled and well-worn page.
Doriyan had been a part of Avalkyra Ashfire’s patrol and had fought with her from the Stellan Uprising all the way until the end of the Blood War. There were some notes about “resistance” that were written in Ilithya’s handwriting, and Veronyka wondered again if Val had used shadow magic to command her patrol. If she had, Doriyan and the others might have been less agreeable once she’d died and there was no one to force their hands.
Disappointingly, he’d disappeared after the Last Battle, and there’d been no sign of him since. The only reason they thought he might be in Rushlea was because he was born here. That wasn’t much to go on, and given what Alexiya had said about him being in hiding from other Phoenix Riders as well as the empire, Veronyka’s hope of finding him plummeted. She’d have to keep an eye out during her next patrol and maybe ask around about any surviving war vets.
Leaning back against her bondmate, Veronyka sighed and glanced at the lockbox. Besides the list of Rider exiles, she hadn’t looked at the contents since she’d discovered her birth certificate. As she did with shadow magic, blocking the existence of the box’s contents from her mind felt like the only way to keep herself together. There was no point in dwelling on things she couldn’t change and decisions she didn’t know how to make, and so denial had become Veronyka’s best friend. And since denying herself meant denying Val, it felt like the right—sometimes the only—thing to do.
But if Val was one of the Phoenix Riders that had been spotted, if she was involved in the attacks anyway… maybe there were answers to be found within the lockbox. The exiled Riders list had proved fruitful. Maybe there were things she was overlooking. And with Tristan gone… there was no safer time to delve into the box’s contents.
With a deep breath, Veronyka stared inside.
It was as confusing to her as it had been the first time she’d opened it—a mishmash of information that her maiora had deemed important but that Veronyka had failed to understand the importance of. But now that she knew the truth of who she was, maybe she would find new meaning. Much of what was inside included details about the Ashfire family.
Veronyka’s family.
Had Ilithya kept this box for Veronyka’s sake? Was it less a spymaster’s carefully gleaned intelligence and more a box of random memories and keepsakes trying to preserve the history of the Ashfires, when the empire was trying so desperately to erase it from existence?
Ilithya was in Aura Nova at the end of the war—that was surely how she’d managed to find Veronyka as a baby—but the details of her spy work were a mystery. Veronyka did find an autopsy report with Ilithya’s name on it, which meant she must have been working as a healer inside the palace. The Nest was large, though, with dozens of healers in its employ. Had Ilithya had much contact with Pheronia? And how had she managed to find Veronyka? The residents of the Nest must not have known Pheronia was pregnant or they’d have turned the empire inside out searching for her—so where did Pheronia give birth? And who had betrayed Veronyka’s identity to Ilithya?
She pushed the thoughts aside. It was still difficult for her to reconcile Ilithya the spy with Ilithya her maiora, and Veronyka didn’t like to dwell on the idea that she had been just a job to