“Why?” The flames leap again. “The last time I saw you, youwere headed for safety at the Widow’s Notch. I fight my way through a godsdamned horde of Reavers, burning down half a mountain in the process, barely managing to keep my men shielded from incineration…only to find you’re not there at all. You’re nowhere to be found. Vanished, without a trace.”
“The pass—” I try to interject.
He cuts me off. “Then, after two days—two bloody days of searching that summit, thinking you were dead, blaming myself for ever letting you out of my sight—I get word from the basest sort of man, a man I would not trust with my worst enemy, let alone with—” He exhales sharply. “And you’re not dead at all. You’re just fine. Sleeping soundly at Acrine, holding court with the devil himself.”
Two days?
Had I really slept for two entire days?
Soren never mentioned that.
My eyes find Penn’s. His are full of fire, practically glowing with it. As though whatever power the Remnant has bequeathed him burns perilously close to the surface.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper, not wanting to rile him further.
“What didn’t you know?”
“Any of it. Who he was, where I was, what had happened…” I shake my head. “It’s not like I went there willingly.”
Sparks shoot from Penn’s fingertips. I scramble backward, highly aware of the gauzy fabric that swooshes around my legs. He stomps them out with his boots before they scorch the wood. But his roar is loud enough to make me realize a few sparks are the least of my worries.
“He took you against your will?”
My mouth snaps shut at the absolute rage suffusing his voice as much as the fiery display of it. I consider my next words withextra care. Words that could, I realize belatedly, give the Prince of Dyved grounds for retaliation against the King of Llyr. Words that could, intentionally or not, start a war.
Are you trying to provoke him?I’d asked Soren earlier.
If I were trying to provoke him, he’d answered,I would’ve brought you back to Hylios.
“No, not against my will. Not exactly,” I quickly assure Penn, eager to douse the blazing anger inside him. “He found me on the mountain. I was exhausted. Incapable of carrying on. He…he helped me.”
Penn takes a series of deep breaths. He seems marginally calmer when he walks over to the fireplace and lays his palms on the mantel. It must be hot, but he does not seem affected by heat any more than he is bothered by extreme cold. He does not look at me as he barks a brittle, single-worded command over his shoulder.
“Explain.”
And so I do. I tell him what happened after he sent Onyx galloping from the clearing. Of the second band of Reavers, who’d cut me off at the pass. Of their pursuit through the woods. Of the wildfire pressing in.
He tenses at this news, the lines of his shoulders going rigid. But the fire in the grate does not leap and his hands on the mantel produce not a single spark, so it seems safe to continue the tale. My voice falters only as I describe the moment I decided to use my Remnant.
How does one put the sensation of being torn inside out into proper words? I will never be able to capture just how it felt, tapping into my power for the first time. How my skin had seemed too thin to contain it, my mind too feeble to comprehend the wind whipping through me. It was like taking a sip of wine from your glass and finding a full cask poured down your throatinstead; inhaling a singular breath and receiving a gust strong enough to explode your lungs.
He lets me speak without interruption until I describe crossing the river with Onyx.
“You forded the river,” he says flatly. I can see the frown marring his profile from six paces.
“Yes,” I confirm, not sure why he’s so addled. I just told him that wind had burst from within me in a tempest, nearly killing me in the process, and he barely batted an eye. Yet the simple crossing of a mountain stream gives him cause to doubt me?
“This late in the season that river is one endless, icy rapid, from the summit to the base. There’s no way you could make it across without drowning. Certainly not in a waterlogged dress, stallion in tow.”
“I found a narrow bend where the current was gentle,” I insist.
“I rode along that entire bank searching for you. There is no such bend.”
“Perhaps you didn’t see it—”
“I didn’t see it,” he agrees, “because it’s not there.”
“And yet,” I rebut, annoyance stirring within me, “here I stand.”