After a night of no sleep and a morning spent shoving food down my throat with no appetite, my arms hardly have the strength to lift a full bucket of water from Cloak's bathing chamber and back to his bed. He is sprawled out over the top, his head stuffed underneath the pillows, and I move them to the side.

When I bend low, blood rushes into my bruised cheek, forcing tears into my eyes, but that is the least of my struggles. The concerned glances and Gustus's desire to heal me are. After an hour of persuasion, he finally dropped the subject and agreed that healing me would lead the queen to investigate every living beast living in her home. Eventually, the truth would slip from someone's lips and then a sparkling new hell would break loose.

So I'm left to deal with double-takes and pitying stares. If only for a few days.

Drool puddles on the sheet next to Cloak's mouth. He fell asleep with his arms tucked underneath his stomach and the sheets wrapped around his ankles like silk chains. I will not wait hours for him to wake, I will not waste the day after he burdened the night.

It is time for me to make change happen.

With all the strength I possess—which isn't much—I hoist the full bucket into my arms and use my knee to lift it to the mattress's height. Cold water sloshes over the side and onto the floor, dripping down the side of his mattress and soaking into the frame. I wince.

Gustus made this look so easy. Not only with dumping the bucket onto his brother's head, but getting away in time for him to start swinging for faces.

I tip the bucket to the side, spilling the cold water onto Cloak's face, and he lurches, sputtering under the endless wave until the bucket is empty. He leaps from the bed, shaking his head every which way, and drags his hands down his face.

"You...asshole!" His growl turns into a scream and he whirls, somehow sliding off the edge of the bed to plant his feet in front of mine—inches away. Drawing his fist back, he prepares himself to deliver a wicked punch, but I don't move. When he realizes his brother isn't the one standing there, he stops himself.

Arm cocked, hand tightly wound, he hesitates. A bead of water streams down his broad nose and soaks into his top lip. He licks it away and forces his arm down, back to his soaked side. "You have no right," he says sharply. Walking to the side of the bed to chuck the bucket across the room, he adds, "Go back home. I'll never talk."

I don't possess the right to do much these days. Yet I find myself with no other choice.

"Your mother will kill me if I don't do this, Cloak," I remind him. "Do you care about my life at all? What about those children? If you cared about their lives, you should care about mine."

Cloak stops in the middle of his room and stares at the wall as if the answer to my questions is there. I watch a droplet of water drip from his chin and land on his bare chest, sinking down to his stomach before turning to steam against the heat of flesh. He releases a long breath. Something slaps him internally, and he continues towards his bathing chamber to snatch a towel. When he reemerges, wiping at his face, he hammers the final nail into my coffin. "I show no sympathy for other lives."

I don't know Cloak that well. Our encounters are arguments, hatred, and regret for the mistakes we made to force our paths together. But I know he doesn't speak the truth. What he did in the war and to those children will scar him forever; he did them because he had to. No one sane wants to see bodies littering a field at your hand. On your order.

There are many reasons Cloak drowns his sorrows every night and tries to forget. The things he has done are just the beginnings of a surface I have yet to crack. Having falsified my emotions before, I stride across the room and stop in front of him, folding my arms over my abdomen. He stops rubbing the towel along his face, mud brown eyes flickering to the faint bruise on my cheek. A flash of recognition from the day before, then nothing.

I force my eyes to burn. I pinch the outside of my arm and hope for the best, thinking of Castiel and what my life would be if I didn't have him. The moment I discovered Rylan unfaithful, the night my parents died, and the moment I realized this Luminary power would never leave until the day I took my last breath.

All my sorrow pools into one sweltering mess of thorns and pain, blood streaks and cages. My vision blurs. Chin quivering, I plead, "You can't let her kill me."

His breath catches. For a second, I wonder if I've accidentally transformed into the Luminary vision I'm hiding, but he blinks himself from the trance. I feel suddenly foolish, but shove that down and prepare myself to unleash as many tears as it takes.

"My mother forced me to kill those children," he breathes. "She threatened to kill me if I didn't listen to her order." Cloak's eyes are wholly glazed.

My lungs rob themselves of air. "We are more alike than you believe, Cloak."

"I had to let those children die."

He stares at me for a too-long moment. Those children mirror my face, my innocence, what he is trying so desperately to protect. Or what he believes he should cast a shield over. He had wanted to save lives and went with no intention of saving his own. Never has, never will. I wish to reach out to him, to tell him it's all right, but he snaps away at the same moment I believe comfort is what he needs.

Cloak slouches on his couch, the towel still clutched in his grip. His knuckles have gone bone white. "You trust your mother," I test.

He nods. "I believe she is cruel, but I understand her ways. She wishes to protect her rule against those that oppose a single woman leading a kingdom. Her sister, Wyetta Terravale, is a threat."

I have no questions to ask. As to not startle the words—the truth—leaving his bloodless lips, I ease myself down onto the other edge of the sofa. False tears forgotten; I listen. It's time to hear what Cloak has to say, and for my sake, I hope he doesn't stop.

"I tried to overcome it, I—I tried to be good enough for her but all she wants is to see the end of Luminaries." He clutches the towel tighter and drops his voice to an unbreakable level of silence. "When will she realize she is the very threat we're trying to end?"

I see how broken he is. Underneath a layer of hard muscle and an unwelcoming frown, he has shattered to pieces. Nothing will repair the damage that has been done. Once the solid structure crumbled to heaps of dust and ash, Cloak still had hope to repair himself. Then his mother walked over the broken shards and crumbled them further. No one could withstand that.

Holes reside where certain pieces don't fit. Shadows leak through the cracks and suffocate Cloak's existence. Sometimes, not everything must fit together perfectly, but if something exists—or someone—that can hold the entire structure together, there's a chance. I plan to be what he needs to survive this.

I'll be throwing him back into his mother's cold arms. Making him healthy, only to return him to the wolves with a shiny bow tied around his throat. Cloak can't escape the life she forced him into, and no amount of healing will keep him from going under again. If he has to kill more children or more soldiers in a border war to protect his mother and his people, he may crumble. And through the constant bickering and lack of support, I don't wish to see that happen. Not to him.

"This isn't your fault," I whisper.

"I am the leader of the Panjandrum Corps, am I not?" he snaps as loudly as he dares. "Am I not the one to take responsibility for what my people do?"

I shake my head slowly, hardly a movement at all. "You are not your people."

"You wonder why I turn to alcohol and yet, you have a brother that drinks potions to take away the pain."

"Physical pain, Cloak. He drinks those potions so he can breathe without feeling a stabbing sensation in his back." The fact that he listened to what I said in the woods surprises me more than him speaking at all.

I'm thrown off even more when he lifts himself from the sofa and closes the distance between us. I lean back to grant us separation. His breath reeks of alcohol. "There is no remedy for the monsters in my head," he says with lethal calm. "I have ways to halt them, stop them, but the only way to achieve absolute tranquility is if I drink the day and night away. You can't possibly tell me that if your brother didn't have those potions, you wouldn't desire him to do the same."

I open my mouth to speak, to retort, but nothing comes. There isn't a word he says that I'm able to contest. "You are a prince," I say. "You hold more standard than a village boy."

He scoffs. "You'll never understand. If anything, you're just like the rest."

I want to tell him everything—the emptiness in my gut those first few days of being a Luminary. The constant wonder of whether it would be worth it to continue on...I can't speak a word. I stand quickly and his eyes follow me. I wonder if he'll reach for my hand, urging me to stay, but his contorted face tells a different story. Leave. Leave and never come back.

"That's all for today."

His mouth turns down, following his stare.

You'll never understand.

I rush to Gustus's chambers but he's not there. The truth he spoke demands to be rememberedas such, for the guards don't attempt to stop me. In the quiet, I run myself a bath and try to get Cloak's voice out of my hand. You're just like the rest.

If only he knew how wrong he was by saying that. I lift the veil of my illusion and hug my knees tight against my chest. I'm more different than he'll allow himself to believe. I want to show him; I want him to know that for once, he's wrong. These thoughts, they're too dangerous for me to have. I cannot comprehend what efforts would be expended if I went against the throne, against Cloak, against the queen.

She wishes to derail her sister but has no idea a fellow Luminary sleeps in her home.

I sit in the tub for as long as it takes for the water to run cold. By that time, I'm relieved enough that covering myself with a normal identity doesn't create an ache, and I can meander through the halls without wondering what could've been.

You'll never understand.

Scoffing, I make my way to the dining hall. An empty stomach forces me to eat, but like everything else in this palace, I have no desire to partake in their activities. Even swallowing their food has turned to a sour habit.

The Raven Queen gave me a mercy by granting extra weeks. I will not waste them, especially as I overhear that the Panjandrum Corps received another task.

My day with Cloak is not over.

Cloak is packing when I arrive back at his chambers for a second time. Unlike the last, this won't be a simple excursion into the capital. He stuffs two shirts, two trousers, extra pairs of wool socks and undergarments into a satchel and bounces it around in his grasp, attempting to shove more inside so he can pack lighter.

Along the sides, he shoves extra knives, daggers, and bottles of what I believe to be poison. I won't bother asking. I don't believe I want to know the correct answer.

"What are you doing here?" he asks.

The inability to say exactly what I want threatens to clog the truth. My mind steers me in one direction, but my determination holds tight onto the reins and forces down the less-traveled path. "I want to go with you again," I say with clipped ease. "I want to help."

"You behaved well last time. But this won't be like the last. We have to cross the bridge leading into the Grave. We're going through Rootbeak Wastes, Marie. This won't be the capital." He shakes his head at me, again bouncing the satchel around. I don't believe he can fit anything else until he shoves a book on the top of everything else and clips the flap back over the top.

"I understand that."

"That means I'm not risking my life to protect you." He stares at me down the bridge of his nose. "You have to know how to behave and how to handle a rootbeak. Can you do that?"

Like many other terrors, my father used to warn us about the dangerous beasts to the west. Below Hegemonize and squeezed in next to Wildsurge—another treacherous journey—The Grave lives up to its ghostly name. The only village lies towards the coast and past the Rootbeak Wastes, barren land on ash and dry sand. The decaying branches of trees, their trunks purging farther and farther from the earth, dance in the thick layer of mist that hangs over that horrid expanse.

Hiding behind a layer of fog said to be the final screams of their victims, rootbeaks scour the remnants of time in search of life, of skin to shred from live bodies. They're ruthless creatures, and through lack of control underneath the Void Queen, have become unstoppable. More witches and wizards have died at the hands of those horrid beasts. In search of precious crystals or gems, they risk their lives—leaving the confines of the Magic of the Wise—to face Rootbeak Wastes.

Some survive and live to tell the tale. My father was one of them, but he never claimed himself to be anyone of magic. No, a witch paid him to be a pack mule. He saw a rootbeak shrouded in mist and dripping with fresh blood from a recent kill. Skin hung off its branch-like arms like drapes in the wind, a cape, and it attempted to take my father, too. So soon after the last.

Of all the places my father warned us to never visit, the Rootbeak Wastes was at the top of that list. I never went against his teachings growing up, but I can save another Luminary life if I go with the Panjandrum Corps. Someone will protect me, whether Gav or Keaya. Even if I can't count on Cloak, his mother won't allow him to return empty-handed.

"I can't say I know how to handle a rootbeak, but I can outrun one," I respond to his back-handed claim that I can't defend myself. "They're notoriously slow."

His brows draw together. "How do you know that? You never left the Farm Territory."

"My father went to the wastes once. He survived—and told us everything he knew."

Cloak slings the pack over his shoulder. "So you won't be entirely useless then."

Have I ever been? I won't dare to ask that question. The answer won't land in my favor either way. Cloak instructs me to hurry along and pack for the journey, bring spare clothes and a few weapons if I have them.

I shove everything into a leather satchel and pen out a quick letter, one that I shove into Setsuko's arms on the way to the courtyard, practically sprinting down the hall. In my mad dash to make it back before Cloak leaves me behind, I hear her shout that she promises to get the letter out in time. If I don't return, or if this takes longer than expected, I don't want Castiel to worry that I haven't returned home. Knowing I've ventured into Rootbeak Wastes is likely worse than no response at all, but my brother cannot make that long journey to stop me. Nor can anyone else.

The horses are already saddled by the time I get out to the courtyard. Cloak brushes out the mane of his mare and makes final adjustments to the saddle's straps. But that's not where my attention goes. On the horse next to his, a large stallion standing next to Pip, Aela stares longingly into the distance. My heart immediately sinks.

She's going with us. Great.

I shuffle over to Pip and put on my best smile. Aela grins down at me, not a hint of kindness in her beige eyes. "I'm going, too, if you haven't figured that out," she calls down to me. "I figured I needed to keep an eye on you to see if you're doing your job. Queen's orders."

She puts emphasis on the final word, reminding me of why I received the slap across the cheek the day before. Of course, she knows. The queen wouldn't dare keep such a savage act to herself, and especially not to her personal guard. Amongst all the other mistakes I've made in my life, that will hang over my head too.

Slapped by the queen for one wrong word.

"The more, the merrier," Cloak grumbles.

Aela tries to unsettle me with one of her wicked smirks, but I focus my attention and the steadiness of my hands onto strapping my bag onto the side of the saddle. In the capital, Gav taught me one or two knots—both I remember fondly.

The rest of the corps arrives shortly after I'm saddled onto Pip. Gav and Keaya carry on a conversation about the tastiest syrup, whether the one made by the fladline chef or seennouk chef. "I don't care for feathers in my syrup," Keaya snaps as she hoists herself onto the saddle.

Gav grins and laughs under his breath, eyes crinkling in the corners. When they spot Aela at my side, all smiles disappear. Their conversation comes to a halt, but we seem to be the only three that notice. Cloak gives the order to ride out and they straighten their spines, not daring to act out of turn around the queen's personal guard.

If it's true, and the Raven Queen sent Aela to watch after me, I'm not the only one that'll receive unwanted attention. The entire Panjandrum Corps will have to remain on their toes, conscious of everything they say and do. It's easy for Aela to twist any fault in her favor. She won't be the one that pays. It's us, Keaya and Gav included, that fall into the pit of the queen's misery. And just when I was becoming overjoyed to visit the wastes for the first time in my life to follow in my father's footsteps.