Chapter 64 Chapter 64

Chapter 64 Chapter 64

Twilight's POV 

"I don't think it's her."

Isla said it so quietly I almost missed it. We were at the edge of camp, far enough from the fire that our voices wouldn't carry, close enough that I could still see Devonye's sleeping shape and Isma's beside her.

The sky was still dark and the air had that particular chill that settled in the hours before dawn when everything was still and the world hadn't decided to start yet.

I looked at Isla.

"What do you mean you don't think it's her." I asked her.

"I mean exactly that Twilight." She turned to face me fully and I could see it in her eyes, that look she got when she had been sitting with something for too long and had finally decided to put it down.

"Something is wrong with her. The way she moves, the way she fights, the reflexes, none of it is Isma. The Isma I grew up with was good but she was never that good and she never moved like that. Never."

I opened my mouth and she kept going.

"And I tried to reach the council." She said. 

"Multiple times. Since we left the settlement I have been trying and something is blocking it. Every time I reach out I hit a wall and I cannot get through and that has never happened to me before, not once in all the time I have been able to do it."

I was quiet for a moment. Choosing my words carefully the way you did when you knew the wrong ones would close a door.

"Isla." I started.
"Let me finish." She said. "When I was with the druids, before the ritual, I had a moment. I don't know what to call it, it wasn't a vision exactly, it was more like I was pulled somewhere else entirely. I was with the council and they said something to me. They said why do you search for what is not lost."

I stared at her.

"What is not lost." I repeated.

"That's what they said." She answered.

“You know how much they speak in riddles.” I said.

I turned that over in my head and looked at the dying fire and then looked back at her.

"Isla that could mean anything. It could mean Isma was never truly gone, it could mean the connection between the two of you never broke even in death, it doesn't have to mean what you think it means."

"I know what it could mean." She said, her voice steady and low. "I'm telling you what I think it means."

She held my gaze and I held hers and the silence between us had weight to it, the kind that pressed on your chest.

"Okay." I said finally. "Say you're right. Say it isn't her. Then what walked out of that curtain and what have we been travelling with for four days."

Isla said nothing.

She didn't have to. We were both thinking the same name and neither of us wanted to be the first to say it out loud because saying it out loud made it real and real meant we had made a very serious mistake.

Then I heard movement behind us.

We both turned at the same time.

Isma was standing a few feet away, awake, watching us with an expression I couldn't immediately read. Her eyes moved between me and Isla slowly and then dropped to the space where our hands were nearly touching and then to the sigil that sat on my wrist, the one that had appeared weeks ago, the one that marked the bond between me and Isla in a way that had no explanation and needed none.

She looked at it like it offended her personally.

"You two." She said.

Not a question. Not surprise. Something flatter than both of those things combined.

"Isma." Isla said carefully. "We were just talking."

"I can see what you were doing." Her voice had an edge to it that didn't belong to the hour or the conversation. 

Her eyes stayed on the sigil and her jaw was tight and there was something in her face that I had not seen there before in all the days we had been travelling together.

Judgement.

I watched her carefully. I had heard enough about Isma from Isla to know the shape of who she was supposed to be. The sister who never once made Isla feel like she needed to justify herself. The one person in Isla's life who had looked at her completely and found nothing that needed to be fixed or hidden or explained away. Isla had told me that on a night when she was tired enough to be honest about the things that had kept her going in the years before we found each other.

The woman standing in front of us right now was looking at our sigil like it was something to be ashamed of.

"Is there a problem." I said.

Her eyes moved to mine. "Should there be."

"You tell me." I said. "You're the one standing in the dark staring at us like we've done something wrong."

Something moved across her face, quick, there and gone before I could name it. Then she turned and walked back toward the fire without another word and I watched her go and kept watching until she sat down and pulled her cloak around herself and went still.

I turned back to Isla.

Isla was already looking at me and her face had gone very quiet in the particular way it did when something had confirmed what she already knew but she had been hoping she was wrong about.

"My sister." She said. Her voice was barely above a breath. "Would never look at me like that. Not once in her entire life. Not when we were children, not when things were hard, not ever. She was the one person who never made me feel like what I am was something to be looked at sideways."

"Isla—"

"I need you to hear me Twilight." She stepped closer and her voice dropped even lower.

"I have been trying to tell you since before we got to that settlement. I told you something felt wrong and you asked me to trust you and I did because I always trust you. But I am standing here right now telling you that what came back through that curtain is not what we went there for."

I pressed my fingers to my temple and turned away for a second, breathing through the tightness that was building in my chest. The frustration wasn't at her. It was never at her. It was at myself, at the desperation that had made me push so hard for something without stopping long enough to question it properly.

"I hear you." I said, turning back. "I do. But Isla you have to understand where I was coming from. You wanted her back so badly it was sitting on you every single day and I could see it and I couldn't do anything about it. I just wanted to give you something back. I wanted to fix it."

"I know." She said softly. "I know that."

"But you think I made it worse."

She didn't answer that directly. She just looked at me with those eyes that always saw more of me than I intended to show and said 

"I think whatever is out there used that against us. Used what I wanted against both of us."

The fire crackled quietly and I was about to respond when Devonye's voice cut through the dark sharp and low.

"Twilight.”

I turned fast.

Devonye was on her feet, blade already drawn, eyes fixed on something beyond the edge of camp. She hadn't screamed, hadn't panicked, she never did, but the way she was standing told me everything.

I looked.

A light. On the left, maybe a hundred steps out. Orange and low and moving in the way fire moved when someone was carrying it rather than when it was burning still. Then another one appeared on the right. Then one behind us and I spun and counted and by the time I finished there were six of them arranged in a loose circle around our camp, all roughly the same distance out, all moving slowly and deliberately inward.

"How many can you count." I said to Devonye.

"Six visible. More behind them, I can hear them."
"Directions."

"All of them." She said grimly. "They've got every angle covered."

Isma was standing now too. She had risen from her place by the fire and was looking at the approaching lights and her face was completely calm. Not the calm of someone who was controlling their fear. The calm of someone who had none.

I filed that away and kept moving.

"North gap." Devonye said, already thinking ahead the way she always did.

"Between the second and third torch on the north side, the space is wider than the others. If we move now we can push through before they close it."

"That's exactly where they'll be waiting." Isla said.
Devonye looked at her sharply.

"Every opening since we left that settlement has had something in it." Isla said, her voice tight and controlled. 

"The road, the water crossing, the eastern side two nights ago. We don't stumble into trouble on this journey, we get directed into it. Every gap leads somewhere and something is always already there."

The torches were closer now. Close enough that I could see the shapes of the people holding them, dark figures moving in slow measured steps like they had all the time they needed and knew it.

"So we don't run." I said.

"If we run we go exactly where they want us." Isla said.

"And if we stay they close in on us completely." Devonye said.

"Then we fight." I said.

"Six torches Twilight, at least twelve people, probably more."Devonye said.

"I've fought more."

"Not with this many unknowns in play." Devonye said and she glanced at Isma when she said it and I understood exactly what she meant.

I looked at Isma.

She was still watching the torches with that unbothered expression and something about it made the back of my neck tighten in a way that my instincts had been trained to listen to.

The closest torch was maybe fifty steps now and I could see the face of the person holding it clearly. They were looking directly at me. Not at Isla, not at Devonye, not sweeping the camp the way you did when you were searching for a target.

Straight at me.

And something landed in my chest like a stone dropping into still water.
This was never about Isma. The ritual, the druids, the thing walking around in her sister's face, the blocked connection, the torches in the dark, all of it, every single piece of it had been arranged around one thing.
Getting to me.

"Why." I said out loud without meaning to.

"What?" Devonye said.

"Why go through all of this." I said. "Why the druids, why Isma, why herd us out here instead of just coming directly. What do they need us to walk into that they can't just take by force."

Nobody answered.

The torches kept coming and the circle kept tightening and somewhere behind me Isma stood perfectly still in the dark and said absolutely nothing at all.

And that silence was the loudest thing I had ever heard.