He clicked his tongue. “East, then. Tell the river I sent you.”
“I will,” I lied.
I stepped sideways into the scrub and counted thirty paces with the children’s rhyme in my throat. When I looked back, there was no sign he’d ever been there. Only lantern light thinning, thinned, gone.
The bell chimed again, closer now. The air tasted metallic, like iron left too long in the mouth. My fingers itched toward my dagger, but I forced them still.
I ran the rhyme until my breath burned. The path returned.
Every blessing in Synnex carried a price. Fire burned. Tides drowned. Vines strangled. But Nyxarra wasn’t a place of bargains. It didn’t bless. It kept. Once you stepped into its twilight, you belonged to it.
Synnex was everything Nyxarra wasn’t—chilly but not cold, even in winter, the air salted and sweet with sea wind and the occasional frost. Where Nyxarra pressed a marrow-deep cold into the bones and shadow into the lungs, Synnex gave light that clung to your skin and refused to let go.
The wind here cut sharper than I’d expected. I thought climbing the cliffs in the hot sun of Synnex had been hard. At least there, the rock had been warm, familiar.
My home backed up to a wild tangle of forest and jagged coastline. After Mama and Pa were taken, I needed something—anything—to make me feel again. So I started climbing.
Not the worn path Mama took down to the beaches after supper each evening, basket in hand. She never chose just one goddess to honor. She left a little something for each of them—water poured into the tide, a leaf set on the sand, a spark struck from flint, a whispered breath into the dark. Balance, she said, mattered more than devotion to one alone.
I made my own way. Down the rocks. Through the wind. Until I reached the sand raw and shaking.
For a heartbeat, I saw Hayat again in my kitchen, silent, leaning one shoulder against the doorframe while I packed. He didn’t lecture. He didn’t beg me not to go. He just reached over and tested the knots in my rope, thumb pressing each twist firm, then tucked a strip of dried fruit into the side pocket without a word.
The descent wasn’t long, but it was steep. A shelf of jagged shale led down toward the next stretch of trail winding toward the base of the mountain. A shortcut, if I could manage it. A death sentence, if I slipped.
I looped the rope around a tooth of rock near the mouth of the cave behind me and set both hooks. My boot wedged into the shallow ridge below, and I leaned my weight slowly over the edge. My left hand found purchase—then the right—guided more by instinct than sight.
One careful step at a time. My muscles remembered the rhythm from Synnex’s cliffs, but the cold here was a different beast—biting, numbing. I climbed lower until I reached the narrow shelf halfway down. It stretched just wide enough for my boots to rest and my back to lean into the rock behind me.
My fingers locked on the rope, boots slipping against frost-slick stone. Somewhere beyond, Nyxarra’s gates waited. Somewhere beyond them, the palace gardens—and the Etherblooms. The only thing that might bring Aeryn back to me.
Halfway to the ledge, my muscles began to shake. Just twenty feet more, I told myself.
A low groan rippled through the rock. The tooth I’d anchored to shivered in its bed, a seam of shale giving way beneath the frost. A spray of pebbles skittered across my boots.
“No,” I breathed.
The rock tooth sheared free. The ledge under my heels crumbled with it. The rope went slack as the world dropped. Frost andgrit burned my palms; the cliff face tore by, too fast, too close. I swung once, twice—then the line snapped taut on a lower spur, jerking me hard enough to knock the breath from my body.
“Hold—” I rasped, reaching for anything.
The lower spur broke.
The sky flipped. Pebbles scattered into mist. My stomach lurched as the cliff face turned to cloud. Just before everything went dark, a figure appeared at the cliff’s edge above me. Still as stone, head tilted. Watching me fall.
Stone became wood beneath me; cold became salt wind. And then I was somewhere else entirely.
The air blinked, and the world exhaled heat instead of frost. Lanternlight. The soft gold glow of sunset on whitewashed stone. Warm salt wind curled through the market square of Synnex, carrying the scent of citrus and spice. Terracotta roofs clung to the cliffs above a sapphire sea, golden vines tumbling over balconies. Wind chimes tangled with the goddesses’ charms swayed in every window.
I could almost believe the past week in the forest had been nothing but a fever dream. I bit the inside of my cheek, but no pain bloomed there.
A shout drew my gaze.
And I was ten years old again. Barefoot in the square, my nightgown clinging to my legs. The bonfire roared in the center, flames licking the wooden stakes where Mama and Pa were bound.
We’d been dragged from our home mid-sentence. I’d been reading to Aeryn when the door splintered inward. The book had fallen from my hands, its pages splayed like broken wings—caught mid-flight, as if it, too, had tried to escape.
The Halorian Guard gave no time to run.