Frustrated, Ayla started to ask again, but then she looked over at Storme. His dark brown eyes, so like her own, were fixed straight ahead, over the hills. His jaw was tight, mouth a thin line. The veneer of professionalism, the adviser to the queen, had disappeared. In its place was a sixteen-year-old boy. Young and haunted. Her brother. Her twin.

“I’m sorry,” he said, voice shaking. “I’m sorry. I—I’m not used to trusting people, telling people things, and I know you’re my blood—I know you lived through it too—but it’s hard to believe it sometimes. It hasn’t sunk in yet. That you’re here.”

“I’m here,” she said. “Storme, I’m here.”

“Yes. Yeah.”

She swallowed hard. “Get me off this infernal creature, and we’ll talk.”

They ended up just walking alongside the horses, reins held loosely. Ayla felt a thousand times better with her feet on the ground again, swishing through the long grass. There were tiny white flowers dotting the hills like patches of melting snow, horseflies buzzing around, sometimes lighting on the horses and being shooed away by a flick of the ears or tail.

“That day,” prompted Ayla.

“The day of the raids, after I hid you in the outhouse . . . ,” Storme began. “They saw me. The sovereign’s men. They’d already killed Mama and Papa, right in front of me, I watched it happen, I was hiding behind the outhouse but of course they saw me. I ran. They chased me. They should have caught me in seconds, but everything was burning, you remember. I ran into the thick of it and the smoke helped hide me. I covered myself in ash and lay down next to—a body, I don’t know who it was, the face was—the ash was still hot, I ended up with burns all over. Here.” He pulled up his shirtsleeve, showing Ayla the skin of his arm, pockmarked and oddly shiny. She made a small wounded noise, and he pulled his sleeve back down. “I played dead for a while. With all the smoke, it was black as night even in the middle of the day. I waited until I couldn’t hear them anymore, and then I ran. Out of the village, all the way to the edge of the ice fields. You remember the Bone Tree?”

Ayla nodded. They’d grown up in the north, in the liminal space between northern Rabu and the Far North, where everything was flat and icy and there wasn’t much vegetation at all. The Bone Tree had been the tallest thing around for miles: a tree that stood just outside the village, long dead but still upright, its bark the yellowish-white of bone. The children of Delan had always used it as a marker. Race you to the Bone Tree. Sit under the Bone Tree and count to a hundred while I go hide.

“I hid in the branches. I was small, it was dark, I knew they wouldn’t be able to see me unless they stood right below the tree. I wanted to go back, I wanted to get you—but I could hear them. Calling out to each other, searching for survivors. I should have gone back anyway. I should have—but I was scared, I was paralyzed with fear, I didn’t have a weapon. I was a coward.”