Lady Smoke (Ash Princess Trilogy #2)(13)

Tears sting at my eyes and I hasten to wipe them away.

“Heal him,” I say again. “Or I won’t get you your answers.”

With a loud exhale, Heron drops to a crouch on S?ren’s other side, taking his limp, broken hand in both of his.

As Heron’s healing power starts to leak into his body, S?ren forces his eyes open and they find mine. There is so much pain there that it takes my breath away.

“I’ll fix this, S?ren. I promise.”

I shouldn’t make promises I have no idea how to keep, but the words spill out before I can stop them.

“?’S’not so bad,” he says with an attempt at a smile. “Could be worse.”

With Heron’s touch, the torn skin of S?ren’s wrists closes and smooths beneath the heavy manacles; the bruises that cover more of his skin than not turn yellow before fading completely. The broken bones of his face, the cut lip, the black eyes, all of them fade before my eyes as if weeks have passed. When Heron is done, S?ren almost looks like himself again. But there is no way to magically heal the weariness in the set of his mouth, or the way his eyes are sunken deep into his sallow skin, underlined with harsh purple half-moons.

“You want something,” he says quietly, trying to sit up straighter. Heron didn’t do a thorough job of healing him, and he still winces in pain. Bruised ribs, maybe.

“I didn’t realize it was like this,” I tell him. “I had no idea.”

S?ren looks at me incredulously before his gaze softens. “It’s war,” he says. “This is how it goes. Your friend is right. We both know I’ve done worse things.”

I can’t deny that. I think of him using berserkers in the Vecturian battle. I think of how, when he lost that battle, he ordered the Vecturians’ food sources destroyed as they retreated. How many of them are dying now, starving as winter takes hold of the area and their crops stop growing? Maybe this is a kind of justice, the only sort people like Elpis’s mother have at their fingertips.

In my mind, it almost makes sense, but I’ve been in his place. I remember the Kaiser having me beaten whenever other Astreans caused him trouble. Only last week I paid for the Kalovaxian deaths in the Vecturian battle. It feels like the same thing, even though I know it’s not.

“What is it you want?” S?ren asks. “You didn’t come here to pity me.”

I don’t pity you, I want to tell him. I have been where you are, and I know that no one deserves this, not even you with your blood-soaked hands. But I can’t say any of that, not with Heron here listening. I press my lips into a thin line and straighten up, putting a little distance between us.

“What do you know about berserkers?” I ask him. “What happens between the mines and the battlefield?”

S?ren’s bloodshot eyes glance between Heron and me. “The guards at the mines sequester those with symptoms of madness. Sometimes they would be too far gone to use in battle or their bodies would be too weak. Those were executed on the spot. Sometimes, one would turn up with signs of a gift instead of the madness. They would be kept somewhere separate.”

“For experiments,” I say.

S?ren nods, looking away and swallowing. “I didn’t like to think about it,” he says, but the words come out weakly.

“Leonidas didn’t have a gift,” Heron says quietly. “And when the guards finally discovered him, he was delirious—he couldn’t even stand on his own anymore. We managed to keep it hidden for so long.”

S?ren doesn’t say anything, he only shakes his head.

“You killed him, then,” Heron says, wiping the back of his hand over his cheeks to catch tears that I hadn’t realized had fallen.

“I didn’t,” S?ren says. “But the guards would have, yes.”

It happens so quickly I don’t have time to decide to react. One moment, Heron is frozen in shock; the next he’s lunging toward S?ren and then I’m standing between them, shielding S?ren even though I’m not entirely sure he deserves protection.

I put my hands on Heron’s shoulders, and though I know he could bowl past me easily, he doesn’t. His gaze is murderous and hateful, feelings I didn’t think him capable of.

“Theo, move,” he says through clenched teeth.

“No,” I tell him, enunciating the word carefully so that I sound stronger than I feel. “It isn’t going to help anyone.”

“You don’t know that and I’d like to find out for sure,” he says.

“You’re right,” S?ren says before swallowing. “It doesn’t matter if I didn’t do it myself; I stood by while it happened—not just to him but to thousands of others. I’m going to end it.”

Heron sneers at him. “You can’t end anything, Prinkiti. You’re in chains, on a ship full of people who hate you.”

S?ren doesn’t have a response to that, so he says nothing. After a moment, Heron’s fists slowly unclench.

“After you people came and destroyed everything, I wanted nothing to do with the rest of the world. I just wanted my home back,” he says, each word a dagger. “Leonidas was different. He still wanted to travel, after the siege. He told me that there had to be more of us out there than you. He thought the world was mostly made up of good people. I wonder if he’d say the same thing now.”