“You weren’t a coward,” Ayla said quietly. “You were a child. If you’d gone back, they’d have just killed you too. And I really would have been alone.”

It felt so strange, talking about that day—the smoke-dark, the smell of blood and burning flesh, the roar of the devouring fire, the sound of wooden houses collapsing as the fire ate away at their foundations, the sound of death—on such a clear, beautiful day, walking slowly through the grassy hills. So far away from all of it. Seven years out. They weren’t even in the same country anymore.

“This part is so stupid,” said Storme, letting out a shaky breath. “It’s such a ridiculous thing, but—I wasn’t wearing a coat. It was early winter; you remember how cold it was. I stayed in the branches of the Bone Tree all night, waiting for the sovereign’s men to leave, but it was so cold. I must have lost consciousness and fallen out of the branches. Because two days later, I woke up beside a campfire in the middle of the ice fields.”

Ayla’s eyes widened. “Wait, what?”

“It was a human rebel group. They’d heard about the raid on Delan. They’d come to look for survivors, and I guess they found my body under the Bone Tree and saw I was still alive. They took me with them. I was—I was the only one they found. They nursed me back to health. I’d been more than half dead when they found me in the snow. Though falling out of the branches turned out to be a stroke of luck. The snow kept my burns from getting infected. Almost freezing to death saved my life.”

Almost freezing to death had saved Ayla’s life, too.

She was so cold that it didn’t feel like cold anymore. It didn’t even burn. She barely noticed the winter air, the snow soaking through her threadbare boots, the ice crystals that whipped across her face and left her skin red and raw. She was cold from the inside out, the coldness pulsing through her with every weak flutter of her heart. Dimly, she knew this was how it felt right before you died.

That was how Rowan had first found her, in the snow-choked streets of Kalla-den. A lost orphan, with nowhere else to go.

“They told me there were no survivors,” Storme said. His voice sounded strapped-down, tightly controlled, like he was holding back—not tears but some raw emotion, some old grief. “They said I was the only one, everyone else was dead. Years later, I heard there were survivors of Delan. The rebels just hadn’t found them, or who knows, maybe they were lying. I don’t know. I’ll never know. But—I was nine. I’d just watched the Automae kill my parents. I was terrified and grieving and alone. I believed them. When they told me I could join them, I said yes.”

Ayla realized her vision was blurring. She pressed her lips together and kept walking, one foot after the other. She brushed her knuckles against the horse’s flank. Demonic beast or not, it soothed her—this big warm animal who had not experienced terrible things.