Bansaerin promised to see to stabling Gwinny for me so I could find Mirdal but in this, he needn’t have worried. After Bansaerin’s grumbling at the night guards whom he had trained and who attempted to perform their duty and slow our entrance, we found Mirdal waiting just inside the gate.

  He sprang forward, exclaiming first at the lateness of the hour and then again at seeing my injured side and arm. “This way,” he ordered Bansaerin and Gwinny, showing the assertive side of his nature that he usually reserved for me. I thanked Alfonse, angling between my determined, self-appointed rescuers. The older Hume bowed his head and promised to see me shortly at the meeting house and bade Bansaerin not to dawdle.

  Once again the leader of the Nightblades surprised me by taking no offense at Alfonse’s instruction. He would brook no protest on my part, either, when Mirdal took it upon himself to provide detailed directions as to how I should best be removed from the horse. Bansaerin ignored the apprentice apothecary and paused at the stable.

  Before I could swing myself down from Gwinny’s side—neither of them were listening to me that having ridden all the way back, I could get myself down again. Scowling at Mirdal, Bansaerin stomped out of the stable, low stool in hand, and plopped it down next to Gwinny.

  Had I realized his plan, I would have protested, but I hadn’t been sure of his intentions for the groom’s stool. Bansaerin stepped atop it, scooped one arm beneath my knees and balanced the other at my low back before lifting me off the saddle, swinging me over Gwinny’s back, and stepping down onto the ground again.

  Mirdal stared at Bansaerin, mouth agape.

  “Lead the way,” Bansaerin ordered, and Mirdal scurried to comply.

  He lingered at my side until after he’d had a few words with the healers and the apothecary. “They’ll see you taken care of and then, if you aren’t too tired from your ordeal, I’ll see you at the meeting house.” He brushed his hand back along my hair, staring down at me, his face hidden by the dancing shadows of the firelight.

  “May I insist to the pair of you again that the girl is far from death’s door,” the apothecary whinged, shooing Bansaerin out of her way.

  With a flash of his sideways grin, he ducked out of the tent, leaving me with the healers, apothecary, and Mirdal.

  I shook my head at my best friend, eyeing the company around us with the silent promise we could talk about what had just transpired later. I was as taken aback as he was.

  While the healers worked at cleansing and mending and the apothecary tutted over my arm, I recounted my daring escapades around Shakerton. Mirdal’s eyes grew wider and wider as I spoke, with equal interest on his part to the traveling apothecary and the goons who attacked Eletria and me. I didn’t tell him about Eletria’s baby so that Aunt and Uncle could find out from me first. Mirdal had a habit of dispersing everything he’s told across the Clan whether that information was meant to be shared or not, though he usually made an exception for me.

  “Ouch!” I exclaimed as one of the healers pressed a bandage into my bruised side. “Surely this will hold till morning. I rode all the way back here. May I go to the meeting house?”

  My argument for my capability held more water with the healers than it had for Bansaerin and Mirdal. With several warnings and instructions for rest, they allowed me to depart.

  I hurried away, Mirdal in tow, to the chief’s meeting hut on the other end of our settlement and arrived just in time for an angry Bansaerin to spring up and bang his fist upon a table. “Then it’s time we finally do something! Stand up to them and fight!”

  “Find me later,” Mirdal whispered as he slipped away from me to sit by the chief’s son.

  The chief looked grim, Alfonse pale. Uncle sat to Bansaerin’s left, his fingertips pressed against his temples as he shook his head.

  “Uncle,” I murmured, hurrying to his side. “What is happening?”

  “Draeza.” He smile-sighed his relief and embraced me. Bansaerin continued in his tirade against the Hume, specifically the Order, though I still wasn’t sure what had occurred. “I heard you were hurt. Are you alright?”

  “The healers set me to rights.” I frowned, searching around the hut. A few of the younger Nightblades sat with their faces covered by their hands in the back of the tent, and several over the elders kept their eyes downcast. Fear sparked about the tent, its sour scent catching on the crisp truenight air. “What’s going on here?”

  “There’s been a disturbing development,” Uncle began.

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  “Good, Draeza, you're here.” Everyone stopped speaking as the chief greeted me. Uncle patted my knee reassuringly and turned to regard the chief. “Alfonse, if you would be so kind as to repeat your report of our predicament so our spiritspeaker might hear. Draeza, I will trust you to share this with Aveela after our meeting has concluded.”

  I agreed and Alfonse stepped forward. “There has been a proclamation from the king.” He cleared his throat and glanced toward Bansaerin who had crossed his arms over his chest and remained on his feet. “I just learned of it and had planned to come deliver the news when I saw you earlier today.” Alfonse nodded toward me before raising his chin to address the room. “In this proclamation, the king declares that all of his subjects must swear fealty to the Order.”

  My breath shuddered in my chest.

  “Those who fail to comply must remove themselves from the king's lands to above the seventy-fifth meridian.” Alfonse wetted his lips. His hands were trembling. “This proclamation is to be enforced immediately and with the utmost haste, beginning with Lifkin settlements such as this one.”

  I rose to my feet as well. “When? When will they get here?”

  Alfonse shook his head. “However long it takes them to arrive from Dust. The baron is to carry out the enforcement within his lands.”

  Days. We had only a matter of days before they would come to expel us from our homes, if that was all they meant to do. I closed my eyes, trying and failing to not remember the last time there had been soldiers among our people. Iredella's screams. The red of my mother's blood, bright and pooling along the street beneath the cover of clouds.

  Uncle's breath was ragged beside me. He was thinking the same thing, the pair of us trapped in the past.

  “I know this is not a welcome question,” one of the elders began with a pointed look at Bansaerin and the two Nightblade lieutenants hovering behind him. “What if we were to yield?”

  Bansaerin had been watching me. The youngest of seven, he’d lost all six of his older brothers that day. They’d fought alongside my father. Three had been taken with Papa to the Hume prison in the capital. They'd all been tortured. Executed.

  His attention shot toward the speaker and then back toward me as I raised my voice to speak first. “We cannot.” I looked about, as surprised as everyone else to hear my own voice interjecting in this way. The chief inclined his head, bidding me to continue.

  The question and my own sense of surprise pulled me out of the past. My people were here, now, and once again, our survival was at risk.

  “If the king truly intends to offer at least the appearance of choice, we cannot accept. It is bad enough we were moved from our homes, many of us divided from our families so we could be relocated here.” Fourteen years had passed since the Great Displacement. Most of my life, most of my memories had occurred right here. “Under threat of violence and death, we moved north, out of the way. But giving in to this demand grants the king purview over not only our bodies and our homes. We would be going against our own sacred teachings and beliefs. Worse, we would be granting a Hume king rulership over our minds and hearts.” I shook my head. “Our spirits remain our own. They do not belong to a Hume king or any other.”

  I sat promptly, distracting myself by fixing my shawls and short overskirt. Silence held until I looked up again, until I met the gazes of my Uncle, Bansaerin, the chief. Once I was settled, the chief indicated the debate could continue.

  They waited for and deferred to me as they would have Avella. I shivered, leaning in to uncle's side. This newfound deference would have frightened me more had not the Hume's threat been so great.

  “We shall speak of this more on the morrow,” the chief said with a significant look at my uncle once the debate among us had begun to circle itself. “And we will appoint additional watches for the in-between time.” The chief dismissed the gathering by rising from his seat.

  “I must see the seed removed,” Uncle murmured to me. Multiple contingency plans were already in place for protecting the seed from a variety of threats. If the baron’s soldiers and members of the Order were coming to our gates, we would ensure the safety of our means of survival before they arrived.

  I glimpsed the back of Bansaerin’s head as he stormed out of the meeting hall. The chief was conferring with Alfonse who would stay with him for the night as his guest before returning to Shakerton on the morrow.

  I rushed out into the night after Bansaerin who had already disappeared into the gloom.

  Clouds obscured the stars overhead, and a heavy mist covered the ground. I didn’t need to be able to see far though. I knew these pathways, and I knew where he was going.

  I jogged to the stables, slowing as I neared. “Bansaerin?” I called so he’d know it was me.

  I slid into the doorway and leaned against the open wooden gate. He was throwing items into a pack and had half-saddled his stallion who stamped uneasily against the packed earth outside his stall. Bansaerin didn’t turn toward me or acknowledge my arrival.

  He was trying to leave, tonight.

  I hurried forward and grasped his elbow. “Saerin,” I murmured. He stilled at my use of his nickname, one he’d acquired from me years before but which I used only sparingly now. “It’s not safe. It’s truenight. It will take them time to reach us, as Alfonse said. Please. Wait for the morning.”

  The muscle in the side of his jaw twinged. Hazel-gold eyes met my copper ones, and he softened. “I need to do something.”

  I kept a hold of his arm, certain that if I let go he would swing up onto his horse and ride out into truenight and a pack of mournlings. “I know that you do.”

  I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes, but something shifted with the tone of my voice. He believed me, which was a start. “I’m going to find the Wolves. There’s too much talk of action here but no doing. They’re not willing to fight!”

  “Shh,” I urged. The horses were growing restless. Several of them thumped at their stall doors, trying to nudge their way out. “I’m not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t go. But does it have to be now? Can you wait for the morning? Please?”

  Bansaerin glanced down at my hand upon his arm. A muscle feathered in his jaw. “I am going to find them.”

  I nodded. “I know you will.”

  His shoulders dropped as he sighed. “As you wish, but I cannot promise longer than the morning. We’ve been waiting here too long as it is.”

  I released his arm to squeeze his hand. “Thank you,” I whispered. My heart had yet to slow after Alfonse’s announcement, but Bansaerin’s relenting granted me a tiny spark of hope. Maybe things would be better with the dawn.