His gaze shifts from me to Zephyr and back again. A slow smile spreads across his face, breaking like the first light of dawn over the sea.
“To fly, skylark. We’ve come to fly.”
Chapter
twenty
Soren boosts me up onto Zephyr’s bare back, then settles behind me with a fluidity born of long practice. He’s practically vibrating with excitement, sharing none of the anxiety that thunders through my chest. But then, why would he? By his own admission, he’s spent more hours flying atop Zephyr than he could count over the past two centuries, starting when he was barely tall enough to mount him. This very morning, in fact, he was here clearing his head with a ride over the Cimmerians.
Despite the lack of saddle, my seat feels secure with Soren at my back, his long legs hooked beneath the shoulder joints, his arms caging my body as his fingers calmly grip the mane. My own white-knuckled clutch only tightens as we break into a canter, then lift off the ground, propelled by the rhythmic pump of two colossal wings.
Soren laughs as I shriek, amused by my terror. Had there been any breath in my lungs, I might’ve cursed him. My stomach is left somewhere on the ground as the earth shrinks from view more rapidly than I would’ve thought possible. In seconds, we’ve ascended high into the sky and are making slow orbits around the five summits of the Vale.
“Breathe, skylark!” Soren yells, barely audible over the roar of the wind. “Zephyr won’t let you fall!”
I suck in a desperate gulp of air, trying to get ahold of myself. Tears gloss my eyes—no wonder the Paexyrian squad wear goggles—and I blink them away, trying to take in the scope of the view from this altitude. There is the Avian Strait, far below us—a tapering pass through the mountainous boundary that divides the Northlands from the rest of Anwyvn. Beyond, I can see the war-ravaged battlefields that characterize the Midlands, from Aranthon’s rolling plains to the distant forests that distinguish Eastwood to the boggy mires on the border of Westlake where I almost met my end with a noose around my neck. In the east, the Endless Ocean sprawls down the coast, stretching from the southern shores of Daggerpoint all the way to the Southlands. Though I cannot see it, somewhere beyond my sight line lies Dymmeria, that dark desert kingdom where Efnysien cowers.
We circle inland, looping one of the tallest summits, where the air is so thin the deepest breaths barely fill my lungs. My eyes skim over the speckle of rooftops I know must be Coldcross, past the glacier-bound stretch of Frostlander territory, and finally to the indistinct outline of a plateau I can only just begin to make out at the farthest limits of my eyesight.
Dyved.
A violent pang moves through my heart.
Caeldera.
Another pang.
Pendefyre.
A third, this one strong enough to cause true pain.
I have not allowed myself to think of him, these past weeks. Not often, and never deeply. Worries that once plagued me relentlessly—How is he sleeping at night? Is he eating enough?Has his obsession with charging the wards waned?—no longer suffuse my every waking moment.
I do not let them.
I actively put them from my head.
At first, I did.
Now, as I squint toward the horizon, I realizeactivelyis no longer the descriptor I’d use. I am not certain when exactly it happened, I only know I no longer guard constantly against such thoughts creeping in unbidden.
What at first was a deliberate matter of self-preservation morphed, at some unidentified point in time, into unconscious habit. And for a surprising amount of days in a row, I have not sought out his maegic, nor tried to sense our thin-stretched bond across the vast distance that stretches between us.
A flush of horror furls through me when I think of the Remnant bond—not the one connecting me to the man currently pressed so tight at my back, but the one turned threadbare by circumstance.
Would it atrophy from lack of use? Would that tenuous connection from flame to air fade away? Sputter into ash and scatter irrevocably out of reach?
No, I assure myself, pulse pounding fast, breaths coming short. It cannot. Pendefyre told me so himself, a long, long time ago.
Whether we like it or not, the Remnants are eternally linked.
By power. By prophecy. By fate.
We are four weighted scales hung from the same beam, forever seeking a balance only the others can deliver. Independent, but irrevocably tethered.
Somewhere deep beneath my aching cage of ribs, a twisted string of flame still burns. I can almost imagine it there. Canalmost feel it, too, growing hotter with the renewed heat of unsettled emotions. A stoked blaze that gathers in my blood until the cold wind surrounding us seems as far removed as the ground below.
“What is it?”Soren asks, mind to mind, sensing my distress.“What’s wrong?”