“It was just you two?”
He shrugs, but his eyes won’t meet mine.
“Our older brother went out on a ship and didn’t come back. When the Hellion came our parents told Aria and me to run, but they stayed behind to fight. Nobody who did that lived.”
My throat goes tight. The War-Father always talked about what the witches took fromus: the barren islands, which Roiven claims are actually our doing, and the dragon attacks that mean only warships can enter the Wild Seas. But I’ve never heard anybody talk about the thingswetake from the witches.
“I wouldn’t have expected a king to come from a village. I’d have thought your parents would live at the Gray Tower.”
Roiven’s jaw hardens.
“I’m not king because of bloodlines,” he tells me. “My father was a fisherman. My mother made clothes. I’m king because Savasaeirn chose to be my familiar, and she was the strongest of the ancients we had left.”
We round a bend in the crevasse. Another three children are playing here. They’re younger, five and six, with dolls made out of bone and fiber. Nor, hanging up laundry with an eye on the children, gives Roiven a silent nod. The children don’t look up fromtheir game. Roiven skirts around them, so I do too. There are another half-dozen doors ahead of us. The sound of the ocean is louder, almost immediate, a pounding rhythm. I shudder.
“Where are their parents?”
“The adults here watch after them.”
“What about birth parents?” I ask, even though I can guess.
“Mostly gone. Where were yours?”
I open my mouth to tell him the War-Father raised me, but that’s not who Roiven is asking about. A shadow falls over us. I tilt my head back to watch Sava fly overhead. I blink away the bright sun and look around the crevasse again.
“There was a shipwreck,” I say.
Roiven pauses in front of one of the doors, and knocks. The door swings in before I can tell Roiven I’m not sure I want to talk to anybody here, and the words freeze on my lips.
She’s blonde, and broad-shouldered, with enchantment lines on one side of her face and scars on the other. And I remember her instantly, though she looks different now, not so starved and glassy-eyed. She’s wearing a long-sleeved tidy dress and a belt with a knife on it.
Three years ago. A transport run. The manifest didn’t have her name; they never did, but it marked her as a debtor.
She looks down at me, then at Roiven, from her raised doorway. The Witch King nods.
She puts a hand over her heart, as I shake my head swiftly, at a loss for words.
“This is the knight,” Roiven tells her.
“I’m sure you don’t remember me,” the woman begins. She grips the doorframe tightly, her chin wobbling a little.
“I do,” I croak. “Of course. I do.”
“I didn’t know if I’d ever have a chance to thank you,” she says. “So. Here we are. Thank you. If not for you, I would be dead. I will never forget what you did.”
“You don’t…” I take a step back, feeling ambushed. “I don’t need to be thanked. I’m just glad you made it.”
The woman shakes her head.
“I am alive because of you, lady knight. When Nor said there was a knight here who could pull enchantment, I hoped it would be you.”
“Why did you comehere?” I blurt. Roiven folds his arms.
“They were willing to take me in. It was that or live in solitude, as a hermit and an outcast, fearing I’d be captured.”
“But…” I start. I cut myself off before I can tell her that she isn’t safe with the witches, because I can’t very well say that in front of Roiven. And anyways, it’s instinct and memory that bring the words to my mind, not conviction.
Isn’t she safe? Safer than she was on a Hellion. Anyone who saw those marks in the Empire would know exactly what she was, and where she was supposed to be. They might drag her right back. But here? They've welcomed her. She has a home.