took the opportunity to find his pack among the supplies and attend to his own injury—something he hadn’t allowed himself to do when he was so anxious about Kade. He smeared some salve on his shoulder, the medicine numbing and cool and allowing him to rotate the joint a bit—though movement caused dull pain to spread in a wave across his neck and back. Hauling Kade hadn’t done him any favors, though Sev would do it a thousand times over.
Luckily, the camp was still in disarray when he arrived at the cook fires, the smoke from the distant burning village drifting through the silence like fog. Soldiers were clustered in small groups under the hazy early-morning sun, eating their breakfasts or speaking in low, quiet voices. Many more were sleeping, sprawled under the scarce trees or clusters of bushes for shade from the sun, or, in the case of Captain Dillon, snoring loudly inside his command tent.
Sev got it from one of the other soldiers that they were staying for the day so they could recuperate and await any possible retaliation from the Phoenix Riders, but the atmosphere in the camp was subdued. No one expected them to come.
Though the idea made his skin crawl, Sev wandered the camp until he found a well-guarded tent near the supplies that could house only one kind of occupant: prisoners.
The soldiers guarding the door looked bored and didn’t object when Sev nodded at them before poking his head through the flap. There were fifteen people, mostly children, and Sev suspected they were animages—or at least animages according to the soldiers who’d snatched them. The strategy for finding animages was simple: The soldiers usually went for children, who, in their panic, would accidentally call whatever animals happened to be nearby. Dogs would howl, horses would kick and buck, and birds would scatter into the skies in a cacophony of shrieks and wingbeats.
The soldiers made mistakes, occasionally grabbing children without magic, but it wasn’t a concern this time. These animages weren’t here to be sold on the black market—they were here as bait, and whether they were actual animages or not was irrelevant. All that mattered was that the Phoenix Riders thought they were.
Most of the prisoners were sleeping or staring desolately at the walls of the tent, their faces soot-covered and their clothes torn and filthy. Sev thought he spotted the boy with the baby—the one who’d fled with another young girl when Kade was stabbed—but he was so covered in dirt it was hard to tell.
Sev leaned back out of the tent. “Won’t they slow us down?” he asked the guards next to the door.
“They’re leaving separately. A lucky few of us have the honor of marching them straight to the border before sundown,” the nearest soldier said bitterly. “As if we weren’t up all night as well. Now we get to stay up all day, too.”
“Just a few of you?” Sev asked, trying to keep his voice from betraying his interest in the subject.
“Why, you want prisoner-escort duty?” he asked skeptically. “You’re welcome to my spot.”
Sev smiled and shrugged in a noncommittal way. His shoulder throbbed. “I’ll think about it.”
It was as Kade had said—they were marching the animages to the border of Ferro, where hundreds of other soldiers, and even more animage prisoners, were already stationed, in an attempt to draw the Phoenix Riders into a large-scale battle. More death, more locals caught in the fray. How long could Sev keep this up? How many innocent people had to die—some by his own hand—before he was no longer a good guy pretending to be a bad guy and was just a bad guy period? What did it matter to that dead old man that Sev’s intentions were good? And what was Sev learning at this point? Rolan’s men would have spread the existence of the animage hostages far and wide…. Maybe Sev should leave now, before things got any worse.
When he ducked back inside the medical tent, he froze—Kade was awake, propped up on pillows so he could drink from a steaming mug that one of the assistants was holding up for him.
Sev barged through the narrow space, and the healer and her assistants paid him no mind—he was a familiar sight by now.
“You’re up,” Sev said, standing at the foot of Kade’s cot.
The assistant stood and handed Sev the mug for him to take over—something they’d done several times over the past twelve hours. Hands were sparse and help was