All pretences shattered beneath the pounding of Raya's feet. Calm and unity and normalcy were left worlds away, lost in the sprays of sand she kicked up as she skidded around corners, yellow hood yanked up to conceal at least some of her face. She'd been acting off already this week without being seen hurtling across the city as if possessed by some maddened spirit, but she couldn't slow down. With calm's mask gone, panic pounced on her, yapped in her ears and nipped at her heels. Her heart spasmed as if she were the one in danger of being killed.

The consequences she ran from were still very real and terrifying, but it wasn't her heart they would pierce. She knew that and had to remember. It made the fear less the heavy burden of water and more like fire, spitting sparks and prompting haste, action, something, as long as it was fast.

She found Corvin exactly where he should be. Perched on the edge of her bed with a blanket twisted in his lap, he looked up, startled by the chaotic array of bell-chimes that announced her entry. She gripped her knees and doubled over, panting, though unable to tear her eyes from his. She dreaded to think how wild her gaze was to stare into.

His shock faded into placid curiosity, then concern. He slid off the bed and snatched up his flute. "You are okay?"

She shook her head, unwelcome tears stinging her eyes. Willing them back turned her voice hoarse. "My mother is home," she said, gasping for air. "You have to leave, now."

He didn't understand, not at first, but he let her drag him out of the house all the same, swaddled in one of her brother's few navy cloaks that didn't fit his wiry frame. He flinched only at the touch of the spell she used to cast his disguise. Antsy wariness consumed him the moment she drew the pinch of pearlescent dust from her pouch, but he stayed still, frozen like a statue in her house's main hall, until the haze of particles settled upon his antlers.

Breathing sharper and faster than it had been mere moments ago, he whimpered, lips curled in a tight grimace. Her lungs seized, and she fought to regain her focus. Slowly, in blurred patches, his antlers wavered out of view. She hardly dared look where they'd been, too distracted by the red glints of fear in his eyes. "Does it hurt?"

He nodded.

Guilt swarmed upward in thick, strangling vines. She held out her hands, palms hesitantly nudged forward. Relief was a needle prick when he took them. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "It won't be for long. Then you'll be safe. I only need to—"

He laced their fingers together, stopping her with a gentle squeeze. It struck her how strange he seemed with his antlers hidden, his shaggy off-white hair like an exposed field of snow, all that remained of his difference to her. Their absence had soothed her during his rescue, but now it tied a knot in her stomach. He looked incomplete.

His smile shook when it poked through. "Trust you."

She couldn't tell whether it was a statement—a reassurance that he trusted her, that he would follow anyway—or a command.

She didn't want to let go of either of his hands, but stepping outside demanded it. He stayed tight at her side regardless. She was grateful for that, thankful that he kept pace with her despite the pain he must've been in. His gaze strayed frequently to the sky, bouncing over rooftops and chasing the brightest rays of the sun as if seeking escape, what she could only assume was his form of distraction. He lost himself in the sunlight, and she buried herself in watching him. The ache of maintaining her magic was quick to form and heavy to carry. She needed a will to keep going and a shield against the buzz of fear in her ears. He was all she had, but he was enough.

The face of every mage they passed looked like her mother's. One even tried to stop her, offering a wave and a friendly greeting, but Raya didn't even have it in her to blink and pause and recognise the girl. She called back a reply she couldn't hear, feeling it leave her tongue numbly, in slow motion. Corvin went tense at her side. The girl frowned, then readied to say something else. Raya yanked her gaze away and kept moving. Her heart was a bomb ticking in her chest, every person they passed wielding daggers in their stare. She kept moving and didn't stop, didn't look anywhere else except at Corvin, not until they were back in the shadow of the watchtower with Tehazihbith's boundary sketched in the shifting sand at their feet and the city's noise was distant enough to create a bubble of silence.

Arms clutching her middle, she sank back against the wall, giving way to a bone-rattling shudder. Corvin's antlers reappeared. He jerked back as if feeling their weight anew, body pressed into the hidden spot alongside hers.

As if the journey here had been white noise, the quiet festered. It felt barren, picking up her spine like a counter awaiting the moment they were discovered and everything would flood in again, but Corvin's closeness was anchoring. His touch was as light and tentative as ever. It shouldn't have shocked her, but it did. Tears leapt again to her eyes with startling force, and she huddled into herself, failing to choke down a sob.

She sensed Corvin's confused gaze trained upon her but couldn't meet it. Focus on the sand at their feet, she swallowed thickly. "I'm sorry, Corvin." Her voice cracked right down the middle. "I'm so sorry."

He inhaled like he had a response, but the only sound he made was a short, gentle hum, pricked by an unsaid question.

Steeling herself, she forced her head to lift. The shadow must've accented the red in his eyes, for meeting them when they were this wide and focused had the same effect as staring into an open wound: disarming in a way that seized her lungs and dipped her stomach and dragged her thoughts in deeper than it should.

She had the sudden, foolish urge to fling her arms around him until the tears stopped. Resisting hurt.

Instead she inched backwards, creating a sliver of distance between them. "Go," she whispered.

From the look on his face, she feared he would resist, but again he proved her wrong. His half-smile banished the strange colour from his eyes. Antlers dipped slightly towards her, he held out a hand. "Come."

She blinked, unsure if she'd heard him right.

"Come with me," he repeated, more firmly. "Leave."

Raya couldn't breathe. She gaped at him, thoughts scattering to the dustiest corners of her mind, leaving behind a heavy, aching blankness. Her heart beat so hard and so off-kilter she was sure it had shifted to her throat. She shook her head. The tears clinging to her cheeks developed an icy quality. "I can't."

His hand opened out, beckoned to her. His smile relaxed into place. "You can."

Again her head shook, moving of its own accord, slow and rhythmically. It clashed with the disorderly tangle of her words. "I have... jobs to do, Corvin. Responsibility. I... My whole life is here." Her vision blurred again despite the easy logic in that sentence. It was true, so why did it fall from her tongue in pieces, shaky and detached? "I can't leave that all behind."

Corvin's brow furrowed. His hand dropped to his side, curling into a fist like it shied from her. It looked lonelier that way. His eyes shone with more unanswerable questions. "You do not like living here."

"What gives you the right to decide that?" she hissed. Through the tears, her voice shredded even further, scattered like shrapnel.

The broad shade of the watchtower above them crept a sheet of darkness over Corvin's face. His voice was small in contrast. "It is what I have seen."

"Then stop looking." This was wrong. She had to stop crying and stop talking and the instincts fought, smothering one another. "You don't know who I am. I've done my part in saving you, but don't ask me to abandon my life."

"Your life—"

She couldn't let him argue. "You don't have a home," she bit out. She swiped roughly at her eyes to rid them of the shameful, continuous flow of tears. "You don't understand."

Her anger was wet, sticky moisture that trickled through her fingers and splashed salty in her chest and left her with nothing solid to grasp. In contrast, the fury that swelled in Corvin's eyes was coarse and hard. She knew instantly that she'd made a mistake.

He surged forward. She couldn't decipher the first word he growled, but the second—the slower, human version—hit her like he'd slapped her cheek. "Coward."

Her flinch stripped her of any residual outrage and left her numb. Senses dim, she stumbled over her own feet, hardly aware of the laboured sound of her own breathing and the whine in her ears that cut through it, seeing only Corvin's snarl and the long, pointed tips of his antlers. The red of fresh blood spattered his glare. She tasted the heat of it on her tongue and pictured those burning corpses. Her shaking legs begged her to run—desperate, it seemed, to prove him right.

Realisation crossed his eyes, and he drew back, bared teeth locked behind tightly pressed lips. Neither the colour nor the hardness left his gaze. "You do not know yourself." The aggression in his voice rolled now, muted but spiking in all the same places and highlighting the foreign harshness of his accent. His fists curled and shook. "I do not have a home because your people would destroy it."

Something heavy inside Raya dropped low into her stomach, eating itself into a hollow pit that pulled all feeling towards it. She hated that she could only stare.

When he finally tore his eyes from hers, it felt like being released from a scalding spotlight, leaving her raw all over and draped in forgiving darkness. The tension dropped from her shoulders but remained in her core.

With his focus on his toes, he loosed a quiet, sad sigh, then flicked a softer look back up at her, expression twisted into one of pity. It was somehow harder to meet. She managed barely a second before breaking the stare.

His words washed over her head. "I do not blame you for it, Raya." She heard the sand shift as he did, from foot to foot. "But it is truth."

"I know," she said quietly. She suddenly wished for more tears, but the urge to cry had been replaced by an awfully dry ache.

Her fingers brushed his, then something smooth and solid—hollow wood, peppered with holes her thumb glided across. Startled, she looked up to watch him close her hand around his flute. She could barely grip it. It felt wrong against her skin, like dipping a finger into the temple's sacred pool.

She shoved against his hold, trying to give it back. "This is yours."

He shook his head. "Take it."

"But—"

His hand tightened around her closed fist, sealing the flute in. "Take it." There was little confidence in his smile, but heart behind it, beating strong in his focused gaze. "If you one day decide you want to leave, make a song, and Meag will come to you."

The pause that followed sank between them, and she had no idea how to fill it. She could scarcely find the breath to form words. "Corvin, I..."

"Yeah, just down here."

The intruding voice was a knife in her back, a sharp poker that shattered the sphere of otherness that had formed around them. His hand darted from hers as if burned. She whirled around, threw a hasty glance upward at where the voice had come from, then ducked lower into the watchtower's shadow. A pair of men was descending the steep steps from the tower's perch, one toying with an ivory hilt sticking from a sheath at his hip, the other with a weapon already drawn.

Panic was a blessing. It flooded sharp and sweet into her veins and reawoke her will to move, kicking her into action. She shoved at Corvin's chest. "Run," she hissed, careful now to keep her voice low. "I'll distract them."

They had only one splinter of a second to look at each other for the last time. In that moment, she wavered. There were too many things she wanted to say, and so none emerged. Then he nodded, flashed one fleeting smile, and skidded away towards the empty dunes.

She couldn't watch him leave. The voices of the men grew louder, closer. Sucking in a sharp breath, she turned her back on him, summoning all the false pieces of herself, the haughty confidence and stony stance copied from her mother, and started up the staircase. She remembered too late the flute still clutched in her hand and stashed it in her cloak's pocket without allowing time to think.

It would have to stay that way—hidden, buried deep, out of sight. She couldn't let her thoughts chase Corvin. He would be safe, she was still home, and the world was set right. They were both where they belonged.

She greeted the men with all the grace of a liar.

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