Incendiary (Hollow Crown #1)(7)
Now I know why Esmeraldas felt familiar. Every memory I’ve ever stolen is a part of me. It’s taken years of training to push them back, keep them in locked compartments. But sometimes, they find a way out. I should thank the stars that the memory that has spilled from the vault of my mind is a joyous one. A rural harvest where everyone comes together to burn the old year away. And yet, my hands tremble and sweat drips down my back. I don’t want to look at it anymore. I force myself out of the Gray, shoving the memory back into the dark where it belongs. I’ve heard it called the curse of the Robári. Curse or not, I can’t let it get in the way of finding the alman stone.
My eyes sting from smoke and the piercing pain that stabs my temples. I push my weary bones to stand. There is no alman stone here. If I were Celeste, where would I have run?
Then I hear it. A single sound pierces the air.
At first, I think it’s from another unwanted memory slipping out of the Gray, but it grows clear as cathedral bells on Holy Day. A voice crying out for help.
Someone in Esmeraldas is trapped.
Chapter 2
They say it didn’t use to be like this. That there was a time when the kingdoms of Puerto Leones and Memoria were at peace. Were prosperous. Even when Memoria fell, conquered by the family of lions, there was a treaty. Order. My kind didn’t hide our magics, our bodies, our everything, in fear of a king. This is what we tell our children. Stories. The elders of the Whispers say a lot of things to make the days and nights pass by more quickly, but for many of us the world has never stopped burning.
It was a fire just like this one that changed me from the inside out. Even now, eight years later, that fire lives within my bones and blood and muscle. It’s brighter than this, brighter than the colorless Gray of my stolen memories. What I told Dez about forgiveness was the truth, but deep inside I know that I’ll always be trying to outrun flames that will never be extinguished.
I swallow the ash that forces its way into my nose and mouth, and race down a narrow street, following the desperate voice. I hurl myself over the debris that blocks my way. My scarf keeps sliding off. Smoke obscures my sight, and I nearly collide with a horse charging down the road. I skid into a muddy bank to avoid it.
A door swings from a nearby empty stable—it is here in front of a small house where the cry is loudest. The flames have burned through everything, and I have a feeling this is the origin of the destruction.
The door hangs slightly ajar, and footsteps large and small go in both directions. Who would return to a burned house? I toe the door open and wait a breath. The roof has already caved in over the living space. The white walls left standing are striped with black.
“Hello?” I call out.
No answer.
Behind the rubble is a hall that still holds. For how long, I can’t be sure.
“Where are you?” I shout again, forcing my way down the hall and into a small kitchen.
The room is hazy with lingering smoke and smoldering embers. I chance another step, my eyes sweeping the room. An upturned wooden table and roughly carved chairs, one of them broken into splinters. My next step crunches on broken glass and I make out various sets of footprints, dark with mud and something wet—oil? Blood? I crouch down and touch the substances. When I bring them to the tip of my tongue, I taste both. I spit on the floor.
There must have been a terrible fight here.
“Hello,” I say again, but my courage slips from me.
My attention snaps to the kitchen door swinging open and closed in the breeze. A chill passes over my skin, prickling with warning when I turn to the fireplace. A large bundle lies on the ground, bits of glass strewn all around it.
I stumble backward so quickly I fall.
It’s not a bundle.
It’s a person.
When I close my eyes, my own memories are bright flashes that suffocate me. The blazing orange and red of fire, like the great mouth of a dragon, devours everything in sight. I slam my fist into the floor and the shock of pain snaps me back to the here and now.
My morning meal comes up until there is nothing but bile on my tongue. I wipe my face on the sleeve of my tunic. This can’t have been the sound I heard. I tug at my hair, fearing I’ve followed one of my vivid memories by accident, like the time I swore a woman was drowning in the lake and I dove in and found nothing, or the time I didn’t sleep for a week because I was certain there were children playing in my bedroom, singing a lullaby that kept me up all night. I live a life with the ghosts I’ve created, and as this house groans against the wind I swear my power will one day lead me to my death.
I brace myself on my hands and knees to stand. I have to get out of here. I have to reach the rendezvous point before Dez comes searching for me. A ray of sun beams through the kitchen window and illuminates the glittering glass along with something else, something clutched in the corpse’s hand.
A copper ring.
Inching toward the body, I breathe through my mouth. But that only makes it worse, because I can taste the death in the air. I flip the body over, knowing I’ll find a woman. My heart already knows what my eyes take time to see. Half of her body is charred. I brush away the smoldering rubble from her unburned brown skin. Her hair is silver with age, bright red blood is caked around her mouth, and a single brown eye is open and lifeless. If I walked past her in the village square, I would have seen just any older woman in the kingdom with gray-and-black homespun clothes.