Rose’s words sliced through the air. “Don’t come any closer.”
He stopped where he was, his arms aching with the small effort it took to keep them up. She would need to come to him, approach carefully. He understood the instinct.
Rose dismounted with practiced ease. When she eyed him, Nicholas suddenly felt as though he needed to fall to his knees and beg for her forgiveness.
“I’m looking for a girl,” she began.
“Etta.” He scarcely got the name out.
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Where is she?”
He swallowed, trying to clear his ravaged, dry throat. “Gone.”
It was the first time he had said the word aloud, and it gained permanence; it solidified. He choked on it.
“She used the astrolabe?” Had Rose’s eyes actually widened, or was it a trick of the light? “She didn’t destroy it?”
Nicholas shook his head. “It was taken by an Ironwood and two members of the Thorns.”
Emotions stormed across her face, disbelief whipping into fury and then to despair. Just as quickly, it was all folded away, and her feelings were neatly stowed again behind steely eyes and pursed lips. “Tell me exactly how this happened.”
He tried to fill in the pieces of the story she wouldn’t know, his throat dry and aching. Rose absorbed his words, soaking them up, until she looked like she might burst.
“How did you escape?” he asked. “Etta was terrified for your life.”
“Do you honestly believe I’m not capable of escaping a few Ironwoods?” Rose shook her head. “I fought my way free on the first night, but I couldn’t get here any sooner, not without crossing paths with myself.”
“She tried to talk to you in the souk,” he said, suddenly furious all over again. “Instead of listening, you attacked her.”
“That was me twenty years ago. I’d been running from Ironwoods and the Thorns for months. I couldn’t trust anyone,” Rose said, finally lowering her gun. “I made the connection later, once Etta began to grow.”
What could he say to that?
“Why did you not tell her the truth from the beginning? About her true family—about what she could do?”
Her whole countenance tightened, and he wondered if he had trespassed on forbidden ground. But finally she said, “Etta had to be a blank slate for this to work out the way I meant it to.”
The way I meant it to? he thought, a thrumming awareness tightening across the back of his neck.
“She wasn’t supposed to have training,” Rose explained. “Otherwise it would have affected her choices along the way. I met a traveler—one past even the future we lived in. He warned me of what would happen if I allowed anything to change. If Etta didn’t destroy the astrolabe.”
My God. “Who was that?”
“I don’t need to tell you that,” Rose said. “I don’t need to explain myself to you. Everything I did—everything I had to do, I did to ensure that Etta traveled, that she would know how to find the astrolabe. How did this happen? It was all planned out.…Everything…everything was to be as it had to be, to save us from that future. I sacrificed everything, I destroyed every complication.…” She took a shuddering breath, her hand curling into a fist over her heart. “Alice…she…I wouldn’t have gone to such lengths if I knew it would come to this. And now Alice is…”
Nicholas straightened; her words were slithering through his veins like poison. “Alice. It was you? Not an Ironwood, like Etta suspected, but you?” The words raged out of him, and he saw naked pain on the woman’s face, if only for a moment. “The one who called you Rosie—who protected you your whole life—you killed the one person who actually cared about your daughter!”
Etta would have been destroyed by this, torn apart by the knowledge. He was grateful, if only for a second, that she wasn’t there to witness the unraveling of what she loved most dearly.
Rose’s eyes sparkled with fury. “This is what it means to be a traveler—to make impossible choices, to serve the good of the world and not yourself. Ironwood will tear the future apart now, do you understand? A traveler warned me of it, of war unlike anything we’ve seen, of the debts and contracts Cyrus will be called upon to fulfill from powerful men and kings. Etta had to travel. The world—time itself—needed her to destroy it. And if I have to justify that to you, to explain my motivations in any other way, then you aren’t worthy of what we can do.”
How could she begin to justify the killing of kin? Of an elderly woman who her daughter had loved above nearly all else? He could understand the importance of safeguarding the timeline, preventing Ironwood from growing that much more powerful, but the deceit here—the murder of a loved one, the outright manipulation of her daughter, which had led to her death—it all made him wonder if ice water was running through her veins. Even now, there was something so…infuriatingly calm…about the way she spoke, and he had held back his anger for too long to stop himself. “How can you be so callous about your own daughter’s life?”
Rose sent him a venomous look. “I can assure you, I’m not.”
“She’s—she’s gone forever, and you stand there, and you speak of her as if—as if you only care whether she’s useful to you—” He could scarcely get the words out. “Why…why…”
“Gone forever?” Rose interrupted sharply. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Somehow, Nicholas did. Each and every agonizing word. Coward that he was, he couldn’t bring himself to look the woman in the face.
“When a traveler dies, they don’t disappear,” Rose said, brushing a hand across her horse’s flank, brows drawn together. “If she had died, the passage in Damascus would have collapsed with the surge of energy released as time took her unnatural presence here into account. But it didn’t—I wouldn’t have been able to come through, otherwise.”
His heart was beating so fast in his chest, the pain of it stole his breath. “It’s not…true?”
“It sounds to me like she was caught in a wrinkle—anything you heard, or felt, or saw, was time reaching out to orphan her when the new timeline took effect. Only a traveler can affect that kind of change—these guardians, the Thorns, they were travelers, weren’t they?”
He nodded. If they’d truly followed Sophia as she had followed Etta and Nicholas, then they would have had to be.
“Their presence here instigated the change, then,” Rose said. “They must not have been part of the original event—the version of the timeline in which the astrolabe was destroyed.”
“Why didn’t it shift immediately when the others took it?” he asked.
“Because there was still a chance that it could be destroyed, and time would have corrected itself the best it could to smooth over the snag on the timeline that their presence caused,” Rose explained.
Unless Sophia had planned to go with the men to destroy the astrolabe, or there was a chance it might be damaged or lost on their ride back to Damascus, Nicholas couldn’t see how this was possible.
“If the traveler who warned me is correct, the alteration to the timeline will be catastrophic,” Rose said. “We must prepare ourselves for that.”