needed to talk to Stavos, too. Even if Ash had to do it herself.
“All right,” she told Tor, her head dropping.
Tor spun on his heels.
Rook steered Ash for the door.
“Thank you,” she whispered to Rook. “For defending me.”
“Don’t thank me. You’re right about pursuing a lead, but you’re wrong too. I know you feel like you lost everything with your mother. But there’s always more Ignitus can take from you.” He looked at her somberly. “Always.”
Ignitus and the Kulans had their usual wing on the twelfth floor of Geoxus’s palace. For the first time, Ash had her own room with a canopied bed, chairs and a table with a washbasin, and a balcony ringed by elegant marble statues. Tor and Rook had their own chambers farther down, on either side of Ignitus’s room, while Spark and Taro had a room in the hall just below.
Ash lay in the same bed she’d shared with Char a handful of times. With everything that had happened, she’d thought that sleep would instantly seize her. But moonlight made the air a hazy, dreamlike blue, and Ash had to shut her eyes to hold on to her composure.
Having Char had always let Ash ignore her loneliness. When her lack of friends threatened to swallow her whole, Ash had just looped her arm through her mother’s and listened to the lull of her voice until she stopped wanting so much.
There was nothing now. No one in this room with her. No one to hold on to.
Ash scrambled for memories, wet eyes squished shut.
“If I had geoeia, I could build a staircase down the side of the palace,” Ash had told Char on a previous visit. She couldn’t remember how old she had been—young enough to still dream idly of escape. “We could run off into Crixion before Ignitus even knew we were gone!”
Char had been lying on her back under the silky sheets, and Ash had watched her mother stare up at the canopy’s translucent drapes. “And where would we run to?” The question sounded broken at first, a sad reminder of the reality of their lives. But Char flipped onto her side and gave Ash a conspiratorial grin. “If we could live anywhere, where would you go, my love?”
“The Apuit Islands!” Ash snuggled closer, planting her head under Char’s chin and fixing her arms around her mother’s waist. “I want to see a country that’s more water than land.”
Char hummed, the noise vibrating in Ash’s ears. “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to go to Itza? I heard they have a type of flower that’s the size of a cottage and smells worse than animal dung!”
Ash had gagged, and Char had laughed, and the two had fallen into silence, realizing that even if they could get out of Crixion, the blockade around Hydra’s Apuit Islands and Florus’s Itza wouldn’t let them pass. There was nowhere else to dream of going. There was nowhere that Ignatus could not find them.
Clouds shifted outside the window now, letting stronger moonlight illuminate the room. Ash kicked off her sheets and shrank into a ball, hands over her ears, heartbeat thudding fast.
There’s always more Ignitus can take from you, Rook had said.
She knew he was right. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like the worst had happened, so what more could Ignitus do? She had nothing left.
But she did. She wanted to run practice drills with Tor. She wanted to ask Rook if he’d heard from Lynx. She wanted to listen to Taro and Spark banter about which was sweeter, Deiman persimmons or Kulan grapes. But Ignitus had guards in the hall to prevent anyone from trying to leave—which was an unnecessary and annoying display of his power.
Ash groaned at the smoldering coals of fear in her belly. She would fight Rook, but it wouldn’t be like she was fighting an enemy. Not like Madoc, his bare shoulders heaving, his dark eyes fixed on her, glistening and afraid. He had had the upper hand; what could he have feared with his arm pressed to her throat?
Ash pushed deeper into the mattress, willing her heartbeats to slow and her mind to empty of thoughts of loneliness, of Ignitus’s worry, of Madoc’s dark eyes. That pulse of innocent terror.
She saw his mouth form her name. Ash.
He became Ignitus, crouched over her, eyes pinched in sympathetic worry. Ash.
Sleep pulled and ebbed, and she fell into it, down, down, her only escape.
Char was at the edge of the fighting ring. Dried blood