Requiem Read Free

weak. “Where are they?” But before the man could answer, Rudolfo was racing toward camp and shouting for his fastest horse.
    Winters
    The moon was a smudge of blue and green behind a veil of clouds, and Winteria bat Mardic walked beneath it, forcing each step despite the protest of every muscle in her body.
    It had been a long ten days, moving from village to village on foot. Exhaustion saturated her. She spent her days putting one foot in front of the other, moving among her people as they made their way southeast. And she spent her nights tossing and turning, struggling beneath the weight of bad tidings she knew she must soon share with Rudolfo about Jin and Jakob, about Isaak and Neb.
    Neb. She’d been terrified of him. Something had changed the boy into … what? She didn’t know. But after healing her cuts with a touch, he’d gone out to face the Watcher, and he’d held his own against that ancient metal man in a battle that left a wide path of ruined forest behind them. And he had not come back. Neither had Isaak or the Watcher.
    She glanced over her shoulder to where Charles sat upon the back of a tired pony. His face had paled at the earthquake, and he’d said fewer than three words to her in the days since. But she’d seen him wiping tears from his eyes from time to time, and she suspected strongly that he knew what she feared most—that Isaak was not coming back.
    And Neb may not be either.
    She shook the thought away, refusing it. She needed to believe that he somehow escaped. That somehow, he was doing what her people’s dream had called him to, seeking their Home, and she wanted to believe that maybe Isaak had escaped with him. And that maybe, somehow, they’d wrested the final dream from the Watcher before they fled.
    But she saw no evidence of that, and she’d left with her people the morning after the earthquake, even while the Machtvolk scouts and soldiers scoured the forest for some sign of where Neb and the mechoservitors had vanished to.
    Scout whistles ahead startled her and she stopped abruptly, hearing the sound of fluttering feathers grabbed from the air by catch nets. She knew they were close now, and soon Rudolfo would demand answers of her.
    She sighed and steeled herself, adjusting the knives she wore at her hips before hurrying ahead.
    She heard the pounding of hooves first, followed by a whispering wind that betrayed the approach of magicked scouts.
    Winters reached the front of the caravan even as a dark mare and turbaned rider crested the rise of frozen scrub ahead of them. There was something different in his posture now, but it was unmistakably Rudolfo. His head moved from side to side, taking in the scattered line of refugees.
    “Hail, Lord Rudolfo,” she shouted, stepping out in front of her people. The Gypsy Scout Aedric had left in charge materialized beside her. “I’ve brought more orphans for your collection.”
    He didn’t answer. Instead, Rudolfo whistled the horse forward and toward them, letting the beast pick its footing carefully on the snow-swept slope. As he drew closer, she saw his eyes narrow at the sight of her scars, his lips pursed in anger.
    When he spoke, there was a cold edge in his voice that she was not accustomed to. She could feel the weight of his stare. “Where is my family?” Then, his eyes shifted to the Gypsy Scout. “And where is my first captain?”
    She watched the man try to meet Rudolfo’s gaze and fail, hanging his head in wordless shame. “Perhaps we should discuss this matter in private, Lord,” she said.
    He turned on her quickly, moving the horse in close. “Where,” he asked again, this time slowly, “is my family?”
    She swallowed. “They have left the Named Lands,” she said, then glanced over her shoulder at the people who stood nearby. “It is a matter we should discuss privately, Lord Rudolfo.”
    He looked away from her and to his scout. “And Aedric?”
    The scout reached toward his sash. “I bear a letter