Page 34 of The Stolen Throne
Dang. I guess I didn’t avoid another warning after all. Cain. Horus. Now Vos. “So I’ve been told.”
Vos holds up both hands. “You two can figure it out. We just don’t want to see you hurt.”
Tziah tugs on his sleeve.
“Either of you,” he tacks on.
“Thanks.” I mean it.
Tziah has been waiting patiently, wreathed in smiles, though her lips remain carefully shut. I wait until we’ve hugged before I ask her questions, though, because Tziah can’t speak. It’s not that she’s mute, but the noise that comes out when she opens her mouth is more a weapon than a voice. I need to see her face and hands to communicate.
“Is everyone being treated well here?” I ask Tziah because I know she takes care of the Vanished. As the Vanished leader representing those from Mariana, she’s the mother hen of the group, and watches out for each person in a way the others can’t or maybe don’t see is necessary.
Tziah nods.
“Even Tabra?” I have to be sure.
Another nod, accompanied by a grimace.
I squeeze her hand. “You too, right?”
She seems to understand that I’m making sure the caregiver is taking care of herself as well and gives me a sheepish shrug. I give her a chiding look.
“See?” Vos waves a hand at me like I made a point.
Tziah swats at him.
I glance around the faces here with me. The Vanished haven’t voted in a leader to represent Wildernyss yet. That leaves two more.
“What about…um…the guy who represents the Savanahan Vanished—”
I didn’t meet him because he was on a mission in some other dominion when I was in the Shadowood, and I don’t remember his name. I glance at Vos, who supplies me with, “Hakan.”
I nod. “Did Hakan catch up to you?”
The likelihood is slim, given where the Vanished are hiding and how they got here, but maybe Reven sent someone to find him?
Horus’s grim shake of his head answers that. Not really a surprise.
“And Bina?” I ask next, softer. Because I’m pretty sure I already know.
The woman represented Tropikis and was the librarian for Reven’s stash of books and scrolls in the Shadowood. I’m still holding Tziah’s hand, or I might have missed the way she tenses, as though the spoken name moves through her like a ghost stealing her soul. All three of them go blank as I look from person to person.
The cold spreading through my veins leaves a dull weight of sadness behind. I didn’t speak more than a few words to the older woman, but my friends in this room feel the loss, so I do, too.
“When?” I ask quietly.
“She didn’t make it out of the Shadowood the night the Tyndran soldiers attacked. We haven’t had the heart to vote for a new leader from Tropikis.”
Even though Vida says it quietly, I still flinch.
I was one of the last out of there that night. I saw the carnage left over from that fight, so I knew, logically, that not everyone had made it through the portal I’d managed to cobble together in the midst of the chaos. But I hadn’t looked at the faces of the dead, hadn’t been able to make myself.
Hells. If I’d figured out how to make that portal sooner, maybe—
“Don’t.” I feel Reven’s voice like he’s inside me, around me.
Except he’s walking into the tent. My gaze collides with his—bright turquoise, almost seeming to glow despite the dim light, trained on me in that super-serious way he has—and yet still that invisible wall stands between us, growing higher and thicker by the second.
