Chapter 63 Chapter 63

Chapter 63 Chapter 63

Isla's POV 

She had her hands around my throat.
I couldn't breathe and I couldn't scream and I couldn't do anything except look up at her face and wonder how it was possible that the face I had missed every single day since she was gone was the same face that was killing me right now. Her eyes were black. Not dark brown, not shadowed, black all the way through like something had hollowed them out and filled the space with nothing.

"Isma." I tried to say but nothing came out.

Her hands tightened.

I kicked. I clawed at her wrists and kicked and twisted my body trying to throw her off but she was stronger than she had any right to be and her expression didn't change at all. Not with effort, not with feeling, nothing. Just that empty black stare looking down at me like I was something she was finishing rather than someone she knew.

"Isma please." I couldn't hear my own voice. "Isma it's me, it's Isla, please—"

Her head tilted slowly to the side.

And then she smiled.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted, my hands were sweaty, my heart beat twice as fast.

The sound tore out of me before I was even fully awake and I sat up so fast my whole body lurched forward, hands flying to my own throat on instinct, breathing so hard the air burned going down. My heart was somewhere in my ears. My hands were shaking.

"Isla." Someone called out.

I turned so fast I nearly fell off the bed.

Isma was sitting up beside me, eyes wide, reaching toward me with both hands. In the low light of the room she looked exactly as she had always looked and for one terrible second my body couldn't decide whether to reach for her or pull away.

"You were screaming." She said, jer voice was soft and careful. 

"Isla it's me, you were dreaming."

I stared at her.

Her eyes were brown. Normal brown, warm, the same shade they had always been, and she was looking at me with the kind of concern that you couldn't fake, the small crease between her brows that she had always gotten when she was worried about something she didn't know how to fix.
I knew that crease. I had grown up watching it.

"I'm okay." I said, even though my hands were still shaking.

"You don't look okay."

"I said I'm okay Isma." I pulled my knees to my chest and pressed my back against the wall and focused on breathing until my heart stopped trying to leave my body. Outside the window the sky was still dark but the kind of dark that meant morning wasn't far off. We had to be up soon anyway.
I didn't sleep again after that.

By the time everyone else was moving I had already washed my face, strapped my blade to my side and stood outside watching the horizon turn from black to the grey blue that came just before the sun decided to show up. I heard Twilight come out behind me. I knew her footsteps the way I knew my own breathing, I sensed her.

"You didn't sleep." She said.

"I slept enough."

"Isla."

"Twilight I'm fine, can we just get moving please."

She was quiet for a moment and then she said "okay" and that was one of the things I loved about her.

She knew when to push and she knew when to let something sit and right now she let it sit and I was grateful for it.

Devonye came out next with her hair still half undone and a piece of bread in her hand. "Are we going or not." She said, not really asking.
Isma came out last and I watched her. 

I watched the way she moved, the way she looked around when she stepped outside, the way her eyes adjusted to the light. Everything looked right. Everything looked like her. I told myself the dream was just a dream and the fear in my chest was just the fear that came with grief and loss and getting something back that you had already accepted was gone forever.

I told myself that and I almost believed it.
We started the journey toward where the egg was said to be kept. The land between here and there was open and rough and would take several days on foot. Twilight had mapped the route the night before and Devonye had memorized it the way Devonye memorized everything, without appearing to try.

On the first stretch of open land Twilight suggested we train while we walked. Not full training, just drills, keeping the body sharp while covering ground. It was something we did when missions ran long and there was no time to stop.

Isma joined without being asked.

I noticed immediately.

The Isma I remembered was talented but she was always a little behind me in training. Not by much, she would have hated me for saying that, but there was always a gap. She was better with her mind than her body and she knew it and she had made peace with it. She trained hard but she never moved the way I moved.

She moved that way now.

Devonye threw a small stone toward her without warning, a reflex test, the kind of thing we did to each other constantly without thinking. Isma caught it without blinking, without even turning her head fully, just lifted her hand and closed her fingers around it midair like she had seen it coming before it left Devonye's hand.

Devonye looked at me.

I looked at Devonye.

Neither of us said anything.

"Nice reflexes." Twilight said, and her voice was perfectly even, the way it got when she was filing something away rather than reacting to it.

Isma smiled. "Thank you."

We kept moving.

By midday I had tried three times to reach the council. Not out loud, through the way I had been taught, the quiet internal reaching that felt like pressing your thoughts outward in a specific direction and waiting for something to press back. It had worked before. It had never not worked before.

Nothing came back.

I tried again after we stopped briefly to eat and I got the same result. Silence. Not the natural silence of an unanswered call but something denser, like the signal was going out and hitting a wall before it could reach anywhere.
Something was blocking it.

I didn't tell the others. Not yet. I wanted to be sure before I said anything because the last thing we needed right now was more uncertainty. Twilight was holding everything together with the kind of quiet determination that I knew cost her more than she showed and I was not going to add to that without something solid to give her.

So I kept it to myself and I watched Isma and I kept trying.

The days moved in that particular way that long journeys do, where each one feels both very long and somehow gone before you noticed it passing. 

We trained every morning and every evening without fail. Isma kept pace with all of us and then some. She learned new combinations the first time they were shown to her, adjusted her footing before anyone corrected it, anticipated movements in sparring that she should not have been able to anticipate.

Twilight said she was a natural.

Devonye smiled and agreed and said nothing else and I knew her well enough to know that she was thinking exactly what I was thinking and had decided the same thing I had, that we would wait and watch and not say it out loud until we had more.

On the fourth night we made camp near a cluster of flat rocks that broke up the open land around us. The fire was low and everyone was tired in that deep settled way that made conversation feel like too much effort. 

Devonye was asleep within minutes. Twilight lasted a little longer, she always did, sitting with her back straight and her eyes on the dark around us until finally her body gave in and her head dropped slowly forward.
Isma was already asleep on the other side of the fire.

I should have slept too. I lay down and closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the wind moving over the flat ground around us and tried to make my body heavy the way Devonye had taught me when sleep wouldn't come on its own. Breathe slow. Let the ground take your weight. Stop fighting.

I was almost there.

Then I heard it.

Voices.

Not close, not loud, more like something carried on the wind from a direction I couldn't place. I lay still and listened and for a moment I thought I had imagined it but then it came again, low and layered, more than one voice speaking at once in something that was almost a rhythm
I sat up slowly.

The fire had burned down to almost nothing. The rocks around us were dark shapes against a sky full of stars and the wind was moving steadily from the east bringing whatever sound it was carrying along with it.

I got up carefully, stepping around Twilight without waking her, and moved toward the edge of our camp in the direction the sound was coming from. 

It grew slightly clearer the further I walked, still not words I could make out, but something about the pattern of it was familiar in a way that made the back of my neck prickle.

I stopped behind one of the flat rocks and looked around it.

There was a figure standing maybe thirty steps away with their back to me. Still, not moving, standing in that open ground in the middle of the night like they had been there for some time. The wind moved their hair and I watched the shape of their shoulders and something in my stomach began to drop very slowly.

I knew those shoulders.

I had grown up watching those shoulders carry things.

I stayed behind the rock and I watched and I told myself I was wrong, I was tired, the dream from the first night was still sitting in me and making me see things that weren't there. I told myself all of that very carefully and very quietly.

And then the figure turned around.

And I looked at her face.

And it was Isma.

My eyes went to where we had made camp and I counted the sleeping figures and I found Twilight and Devonye and the place where Isma had been lying was empty.

I looked back at her.

She was standing in the dark in the middle of the night talking to no one I could see, her lips moving in that same way the servant girl's lips had moved in the druid settlement, quiet and rhythmic and meant for someone I couldn't hear.

The cold that moved through me had nothing to do with the night air.

I pressed my back against the rock and closed my eyes and stood very still and thought about the dream. The black eyes. The hands around my throat. The smile that didn't belong to my sister.
And I finally let myself think the thing I had been refusing to think since the moment she walked through that curtain.

This was not Isma and this I was sure of.