Incendiary (Hollow Crown #1)(41)

Sayida directs me down a flight of stairs into a small windowless room and locks the door behind her.

Crates of potatoes and jars of olives and pickled fish line the walls. Sayida pushes a rack containing nothing but sacks of flour to reveal another door. A hidden room.

“Where are we?” I ask, and realize I’m shaking.

Margo’s lying on a pile of rice bags, a cloth over her eyes. Esteban sits on the stone floor, his head resting against a brick wall, turning only when he realizes we have returned.

“Ren?” He hurries over to me. “Are you all right?”

At least, that’s what I think he’s saying. His lips move and his voice is an echo that’s already fading.

Fingers snap in front of my eyes.

Suddenly, Sayida wraps her hands around my shoulders, gentle as a caress. Her fingers spread out around the curves of my sweat-drenched back. Her magics flood my body, like a cooling balm on a sunburn.



Dez sits under a tree in San Cristóbal. He cuts the skin of a bright red apple with a pocketknife. There is something about the way he smiles at me—

Dez returns from a solo mission. Before he goes to report back to his father, he finds me in my small chamber. “I brought you something.” He pulls out a box of sweets—

Dez searches for me in the dark and pulls me close. Closer still. “Stay a little longer, Ren.”



“No more,” I beg Sayida. The emotion she’s pulling gathers at the base of my throat. I want to name it, but I can’t. With her power she’s found my memories. I don’t want them. “Please.”

Sayida sits back, rubbing her hands against her trousers. “I’m sorry. I wanted you to find your happiness.”

I turn my face toward her. She’s blurry, as though I’m staring at her through the thin veil of a funeral shroud.

I slowly sink down onto a rolled-out cot on the floor. It hurts to swallow the metallic taste on my tongue. “Even I didn’t know that’s what you’d find.”



When I wake, I snap up and reach for my sword.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Margo asks, standing with her hands on her hips. I can’t meet her red-ringed, swollen eyes for long because they mirror my own.

All three of them are in similar borrowed clothes. Plain loose trousers and white tunics like cantina servers. There’s a bundle at my feet.

“Where are we?”

“My nan’s boardinghouse,” Esteban says.

“You have a grandmother?” He’d said he had family, but I thought that meant a distant cousin. So many of us have lost everyone that the word grandmother sounds strange to say. I never even met mine. I try to picture Esteban having someone to care for him, and a want springs forth that I didn’t even know I had. “I thought you were from Crescenti.”

“My family left after the King’s Wrath,” Esteban says, biting at his already raw cuticles. “I went to the Whispers and Nan came here to help the elders. She’s one of the Olvidados,” he says. There’s the shadow of bruises on his brown skin. One on his cheek and a couple on his forearm, as if someone grabbed him and wouldn’t let go.

“The forgotten ones?” I remember stories about the Olvidados. They were people born to Moria families, but their magics never surfaced. Centuries ago, in the kingdom of Memoria, the old priests and priestesses named them Olvidados—forgotten by the Lady of Shadows.

“My nan’s family didn’t shun her for not having magics,” Esteban explained. “In Citadela Crescenti, Moria born is Moria no matter what, as long as we keep the Lady of Shadows in our hearts. We were separated after the King’s Wrath, but she found Illan and offered to be his eyes and ears in the capital. One of them, at least.”

Margo nods solemnly. “We do not betray the identity of our spies. But—”

Her voice quivers, and she doesn’t have to finish, to say, But under the circumstances. But Dez is dead.

“We shouldn’t be here,” I say.

“She brought us fresh clothes and food for the night. There’s water to clean up,” Sayida says carefully, like she’s trying to keep a wild animal calm.

The ceiling creaks beneath the feet of boarders, but the silence in the streets carries its own weight. I need to get out of these moss-covered walls. I need to find him.

“Eat,” Esteban says roughly. He won’t look into my eyes. “Nan was kind enough to bring us dinner. Don’t let it go to waste.”

“I am grateful for that,” I say, sounding like I gargled with sand.

“You aren’t acting that way,” he says.

“I just watched our leader get beheaded,” I snap. “Forgive me if I can’t stomach food just yet, Esteban.”

Margo kicks a sack of rice beside her. “Stop acting like you’re the only one who cared for Dez.”

Sayida steps to the center of the musty room. Her soft black waves are loose, and out of all of us she’s the most calm. What must it be like to be in control of your emotions that way? Can her Persuári magics drown out her sorrow? Could she do that for me? Take my emotions the way I take memories?

“We are all hurting,” she says. “We will all deal with this in different ways. Shouting at each other isn’t going to be one of them. He wouldn’t want that.”