Quin frowned. His friend had always possessed an acerbic wit, but the line between acerbity and vitriol was growing thin.
“I don’t understand, Tobin. You’re leading a band of murderers and thieves?”
“Do we look like thieves? We’re a band of brothers, sisters, friends, lovers. We are the Embers. The ones the world expected to flicker and die out. Instead we ignited a revolution.”
“Remember the Embers,” his broad-shouldered acolyte said solemnly. “They remember you.”
Quin arched a brow. “Is that some kind of slogan?”
Tobin folded his arms. “Do you not approve?”
“A little grandiose, I think.”
“You know what I find grandiose?” Toby smiled. “Tyrants.”
The room pulsed with a strange energy Quin couldn’t quite read. As if a crust of sardonic laughter had formed on top of something far more malicious.
“You’ll come with us,” Toby said. “Won’t you?”
Quin studied him closely. Was it an invitation or a threat?
He drew himself up, doing his best to sound kingly.
“I’ve got my own matters to attend to.”
“One night, at least. Have a few drinks, a few laughs? Like old times.”
Tobin’s gaze was steady. Those silver eyes had once sparked delicious heat in Quin’s body. To his embarrassment, they still did.
“It’s been so long,” Toby murmured, in a tone Quin never thought he’d hear again.
A new horror squirmed through him. He had returned to the river kingdom to make his claim to the throne. Any pretenders were his enemy. If Toby led the Embers, would Quin have to fight him? Kill him?
“Please.” Tobin gestured toward the others. “It would make all of us so happy.”
Quin looked from face to face. He did not see happiness. He saw distrust, amusement, and disdain. He wished Domeniq hadn’t abandoned him; surely they’d have had at least a glimmer of the friendship they had begun to forge on Refúj.
Again Quin met Tobin’s eyes. This time, he understood something. If the lonely farmer was to be believed, the Embers posed the greatest threat to his claim. For days Quin had been following their carved triangles. Not triangles, he realized, in a jolt of epiphany. Flames. Those flames had led him, finally, here. The Embers now had a face. A face that Quin had once loved. A face that, he felt certain, had once loved him back.
If he accepted Tobin’s invitation, it was tantamount to bedding with the enemy.
What better place than the bed of the enemy to ascertain the threat?
“All right,” Quin said. “One night.”
Reactions rippled through the group—a mixed bag, from what he could tell.
“Wonderful!” Toby cried. “I’m so happy to hear it. I’ll lead the way.”
When Tobin turned and walked out of the brothel, Quin did not fail to notice the hitch in his gait. That hitch was a gift from King Ronan. The kind of gift you could never give back.
Killian Village was in ruins. Cottages stood empty, doors ajar or ripped off their hinges. Shops had been ravaged by fire; carts and wagons lay overturned, spilled fruit rotting on the cobblestones. There were carcasses in the streets: rats and dogs and sometimes larger bodies that shook Quin to the core. A mantle of snow covered everything, scabbed over with soot and mud.
As Tobin led the group through the village, Quin fell behind. All the other wrecked towns paled in comparison to Killian Village. Had his father done this? Had he unleashed one last torrent of fury and destruction? Had Zaga? Angelyne? Or were the Embers to blame?
They were passing a corner Quin knew well. On instinct, he looked toward the building that had always lifted his spirits—and stopped dead in his tracks.
What was once a pretty two-story facade had been decimated. The fire-eaten walls were little more than rock and ash; he could see the building’s blackened innards. It called to mind a gentle giant, charred down to the very bone.
The orphanage.
Quin could pinpoint exactly when his furtive visits to the orphanage had begun. For years he’d watched his sister ride into Killian Village bringing food, clothes, and other supplies. The villagers invited Karri into their homes, their pubs and taverns, their houses of worship. The princess came ever ready with a kind word or a pint of cold ale. She had a gift.
Quin had no illusions. He’d never been as generous or good-hearted as his sister. But after witnessing firsthand what his father had done to Tobin in the castle crypt—what he was capable of doing—Quin knew he could no longer look the other way.
It was too late to protect Toby. He had failed miserably in that regard. But he would do all he could to atone through other means.
The day after King Ronan banished Tobin’s family from the Kaer, Quin had slipped out to the stables, saddled a horse, and rode straight to the orphanage. He had stuffed his pockets full of treats: sweet candies in waxy paper he’d pilfered from the kitchens, little music makers constructed of wood and twine, dolls with straw hair. And coins, of course. Tiny discs of Killian gold his father would never miss—but that could feed and clothe a child for months.
Sometimes he wrote them plays. He would bring a pile of costumes, and they’d stomp about the orphanage, performing their roles. Other times he played piano. He’d sit at the rickety instrument and play Glasddiran nursery rhymes, songs the children’s mothers might have sung to them. He could guess what had happened to those mothers. Had Quin seen their hands hanging in the king’s Hall?
Sometimes when Quin went to the orphanage, he simply sat on the floor with the children, telling stories, laughing at their jokes, and braiding their long, matted hair.
And then he returned to his privileged life. Back to his decadent feasts, his jackets with gold buttons, his cozy canopy bed where every night a servant girl packed smoldering embers into a copper warmer and tucked it between his plush linens.
More often than not, he cried the whole ride home.
And now the orphanage was gone.
What had happened to the children inside?
He wanted to ask Tobin, but by now most of the group had passed him by. His former music teacher walked swiftly at the front, deep in conversation with one of the Embers.
Quin turned back to the orphanage. He strained his eyes to make out the hunk of scorched wood in the corner. The piano. He stared at his hands, wondering if he still remembered any songs the children loved. The last time he had touched a piano was in the Snow Queen’s music room, when he’d bludgeoned it with a violin.
A sickening thought snaked through him. He could have wrought this destruction himself. With the magic in his hands, he would have needed no torch to set the orphanage on fire.
“Hello!” chirped a small voice.
He looked down to see the puckish blue-eyed girl staring up at him.
“I’m Briallihandra Mar. But you can call me Brialli.” She smiled widely. “It’s very nice to meet you, Your Grace.”
Quin’s emotions settled. He began to walk again, Brialli falling in step beside him.
“Did you grow up in the village, Brialli? You speak very well.”
“I should think so! My mother was a scholar of the old language, and of the histories, too.”
“The histories were always my favorite subject. I begged my tutor to bring me all the books he could get his hands on.”