When I saw Inara lying in her bed, dusky eyelashes resting on her cheeks, one hand on the pillow beside her, partially open, I exhaled in relief. Her chest rose and fell, gently moving the age-yellowed sheet pulled up to her shoulders. She looked so peaceful … and so young. Too young to have been forced to endure all that she had—and that she would continue to suffer if Raidyn and I couldn’t figure out how to heal her permanently.
Something he didn’t seem to think was possible.
My heart thumped painfully in my chest, heavy with the weight of her uncertain future. After thinking I’d lost her so many times already, I couldn’t bear the thought that what we’d done—what we could continue to try to do—might eventually not be enough.
The supple leather of my boots made no sound as I moved to the chair still next to her bed and sat. Please let her live. Please … help us find a way to keep her alive.
* * *
Breakfast was a solemn gathering with everyone at the citadel, except for Ivan and Lorina, who had taken their gryphons out for exercise and to watch for any signs of Barloc.
I sat beside Inara, holding her hand in mine. Our twin fears and worries flowed between us, the sanaulus even stronger after the second, more intense, healing.
“We can’t take Raidyn and Zuhra away from Inara—if this happens again, they both have to be near her to save her life,” my father said, running a weary hand over his face. Between the loss of his father, the attack on Inara, his worry for his mother, the shifts during the night, and everything else that had happened, he’d seemed to age right before my eyes.
“There is no other gift here that he would want more—besides Loukas’s,” Sachiel responded. “And we’ve already agreed that his must be a surprise. We have to use her to set the trap or there’s no guarantee it’ll work.”
Mother turned cold eyes on the other woman. “And how are they even going to make sure he hears about her ability and knows to come try to find us?”
“He has the power of three Paladin inside him now. Your husband should be able to sense him from miles away.” Sachiel lifted her eyebrows at my father, as if daring him to contradict her. “Track him down, make sure he overhears you talking about Zuhra, and then wait for him to come. He will. I guarantee he won’t be able to resist the chance to steal the power to enhance the abilities he already has.”
“I can’t take them away from Inara—not if there’s a chance she’ll die while we’re gone.” Father pushed the sliced strawberries on his plate around with his fork, not taking a bite of anything.
“Then take her with you!” Sachiel cried out. “But if we don’t do something—and soon—he is going to either come back here and who knows how many of us will die … or he’ll start attacking the humans!”
Inara stiffened, her fingers tightening on mine.
“Would one of you be willing to carry my daughter with you? I know that is asking a lot, but I can’t … I can’t bear to lose another member of my family.” Father’s voice broke, but he managed to wrestle his emotions into check and looked to Raidyn, Loukas, and Sharmaine—standing together near the windows.
Loukas and Sharmaine exchanged a glance that was difficult to read, but I felt Raidyn’s dismay even from where I sat across the massive table from them.
It took me off guard when Loukas nodded. “I will, sir. I will take your daughter, if that is your wish.”
For the first time since I’d woken that morning, the heaviness in my chest lifted slightly.
Sachiel shook her head, dark braid swinging, her lip curled with what looked like disgust, but she remained silent.
“What about me? It’s my uncle that did all of this,” Halvor spoke up, staring at Inara as he did. He sat on the other side of her, holding her other hand. When he’d found out what happened during the night while he’d been sleeping, he had gone pale and hadn’t recovered his normal color yet—nor had he left her side. “I should be there when you … when he … when it ends.”
“Absolutely not,” Sachiel bit out, before anyone else could respond. “Do you not realize what it will do to the gryphons to have all these extra bodies on them? It’s ridiculous to bring Cinnia and Inara. Anyone not integral to the plan should stay here. Raidyn said the healing should last longer—trust that he’s right. Go out there, finish this, and then come back as fast as you can.”
Father sighed again and sat down heavily in the chair closest to where he stood. “I know this is not ideal. I know no matter what we do, there is potential for problems, for things going wrong. But I can’t … I can’t split my family up again, Sach. I can’t. So please, don’t ask me to. Even if it means our gryphons will be tired, even if it means the jakla will have more targets. I don’t know what else to do.”
Sachiel glanced at the trio standing together, watching her, then at me and Inara, then back to my parents. Finally she exhaled and ran her hands along the shaved sides of her head. “I’m sorry, Adelric. It’s just such a risk. I understand why you don’t want to be separated again. I … I wasn’t prepared for all of this to happen.” She gestured at the citadel. “To be trapped here.”
“I don’t think any of us were prepared for any of this,” my father replied. “Nothing went how we expected.” He glanced toward the window where the gravesite for Grandfather was visible below, across the courtyard.
“If this is what you think is best, then take your family with you. I will stay here with my battalion members and do our best to protect the gateway, should he get past you.”
“I don’t know if it’s what is best, but it is what I must do.” He turned to the three Paladin standing together. “Thank you for being willing to do this for me.”
“And what about me?” Halvor asked again. “You can’t leave me here. Please.”
“That’s up to Sharmaine.” Father looked to her. “I won’t force anyone to do something they’re uncomfortable with.”
There was a long pause. “Yes, sir,” she finally agreed. “If that’s what you wish, I will take him.”
“Thank you. I know I’m asking a lot of you—and your gryphons.”
“How soon will you be leaving?” Sami asked, eyes glistening. Her quiet question struck a shard of regret through my chest. Of course she couldn’t come … she had no choice except to be left behind in a citadel full of strangers—unless she returned to Gateskeep after all of these years.
“The sooner the better,” my father announced. “He has a head start on us right now, but with our gryphons, even weighed down, we will easily be able to catch up. And Sachiel is right—with that much power emanating from him, we should be able to sense him if we get close enough.”
“If you can find him,” Melia muttered, “may you have better luck than we did.”
“Why not just let him go?” Cyrus suddenly burst out. “There are enough of us here—let’s reopen the gateway and go home. Leave him here to rot.”
“Cyrus!” Sachiel’s eyes widened. “I didn’t think you felt that way.”
“He’s right.” Melia nodded at her husband. “Haven’t we lost enough protecting these unthankful humans? Let the jakla do what he will.”
I expected Sachiel to get mad at them, or at least scold them, but something akin to sorrow crossed her face as she crouched beside the grieving couple. “I know you have both endured far more than your fair share of sorrow, even before he murdered your gryphons and your friends. But I also know this isn’t how you truly feel. With time, I think you would come to regret the choice to go back home, allowing him to murder innocent people, just as he took the lives of your innocent mounts.”
“The humans figured out how to kill plenty of us last time. Let them deal with him. They’ll stop him eventually.”
“They’ve never faced anything like this before—not even the Five. He is unimaginably powerful now. Even if they did somehow succeed in stopping him, how many will die before then?” Sachiel reached out and gently rested her hand on top of theirs. I didn’t know what to make
of this side of her. “Even one more innocent life lost is too much. We took an oath to protect the lives of all those around us.”
Melia and Cyrus shared a look, and then Melia shot a surreptitious glare at Loukas. “Can we have this conversation alone—another time?”
A muscle in Loukas’s jaw ticked, but he kept his expression impassive. Did they think he was influencing Sachiel?
“As a jakla, his eyes might not even settle,” Sachiel continued, ignoring their insinuation. “If they don’t, the humans will have no warning of what he is—or what he can do to them. We have to find him and stop him. It’s our duty.” She stood back up. “You two can try to open the gateway on your own if you wish, but I am staying here.”
Silence.
I continued to watch Loukas. As if he could sense my scrutiny, he met my gaze boldly, a challenge in his green-fire eyes.
“Well,” my father said, “we’d best start preparing to go. Let’s meet in the courtyard in an hour.”
Everyone around us stood, but Inara and I remained sitting, holding hands. Raidyn looked like he wished to linger, but my father walked over to him and asked him something, and together they left the room, Loukas and Sharmaine trailing behind.
Once we were alone, Inara’s icy fingers tightened on mine. “I’m scared, ZuZu.”
I looked at my sister, my heart scraping like broken glass against my chest with every beat. I was being taken as live bait for someone “unimaginably powerful,” according to Sachiel.
I am too, I thought. Out loud, I said, “It’s going to be fine. Raidyn and I will be with you—we will heal you as many times as it takes.”
She nodded, but I knew she could feel my fear as clearly as I felt hers.
“I won’t let anything else happen to you, Nara. I promise,” I vowed.
She laid her head on my shoulder, and I reached up to smooth her hair down. “I know you won’t,” she whispered. Her words were as hollow as mine, with our twin terror beating in our separate hearts.
SEVENTEEN
INARA
I took one last look at my room, everything inside me so tight, I wondered that I could keep breathing, keep moving at all. Would I ever return—ever see this bed, these walls, that window again? I’d never felt trapped here the way Zuhra did. The citadel was a comfort to me, the familiarity of the few rooms we lived in, the hallways I walked every day of my life, the lack of hatred here—that I knew awaited me outside the hedge.
But my eyes no longer glowed, my power no longer marked me as a target. I was nothing more than a normal girl to anyone I met now.
With a long, slow breath that chafed my throat, I made myself shut the door.
“Inara, good.” A voice from down the hallway took me by surprise. “I’m glad I caught you.”
Confused, I turned to see Sachiel striding toward me. For the first time in my life, I wore breeches like hers, after Zuhra explained how uncomfortable it would be to ride a gryphon in a dress. She halted in front of me, glancing around furtively.
“Is your sister in her room?”
“I don’t think so,” I replied, baffled by the fervency on her face, the low whisper of her voice.
“We don’t have much time, so I will make this quick.” She reached out for my arm and pulled me in closer to her, her voice dropping even further. “There is a way to get your power back.”
Words could be so very powerful, and oh—the power that those words held. Everything stopped with them, even my heart stuttered to a painfully hopeful halt.
“But if they succeed in killing Barloc first, you will miss your chance.” She glanced over her shoulder one last time before whispering, “You have to steal it back from him. The way he stole it from you. If you perform the same act, you can get it back. And then you shouldn’t need to be healed anymore.”
I stared at her. “Why are you telling me this now?”
She swallowed and glanced past me, urgency in every tense line of her body and the way she gripped my arm. “I thought you were healed—I thought that was the end of it. I didn’t think it was worth the risk. But Adelric has already lost so much. And now…”
Now that we knew I would continue to need to be healed over and over, and that eventually it might not be enough to save me. Now it was worth the risk. “How do I it? Do I just have to … to drink his blood?” A shudder of ice-cold memory gripped me; Barloc crouched over me, his mouth stained crimson, my neck ripped open.
“Basically, yes.”
“But … how would I ever get close enough to him to try—let alone actually succeed? This plan—your plan—hinges on Loukas being able to control him for only a few seconds. Just long enough to … to kill him.” I couldn’t bring myself to say cut off his head. It was no more than he deserved, but too gruesome to consider.
Sachiel glanced furtively down the hallway. “Well … I do have another idea.” She beckoned me closer and began to whisper.
* * *
“I’m not sure about this.”
I stared at the massive beast, heart racing, palms slick with sweat. It ruffled its feathers, as if my nervousness were agitating it.
“You’ll be fine. Flying is the most amazing feeling in the world,” Loukas said from beside me.
I wasn’t sure what I was more scared of—getting on that thing, or having him get on behind me. I wanted to ride with my father or even Sharmaine, the other girl. But Father was taking Mother with him, Raidyn was taking Zuhra, of course, and Father said Halvor had to ride with Sharmaine to help keep the weight even.
That left Loukas for me.
I wasn’t sure why, but he scared me. He was so big—tall and muscular—and so quiet; his strange green-fire eyes took everything in, but he rarely commented on anything or got involved in any of the discussions. I much preferred Halvor, his easy conversation and his warm brown eyes. But Zuhra didn’t seem worried about me riding with Loukas, and Halvor didn’t have a gryphon, so riding with him wasn’t a choice.
I had no option except to lift my leg and let him help me swing into the saddle, the way Zuhra, Mother, and even Halvor already had, their Riders climbing on behind all of them. The breeches I wore were too revealing, too tight. Loukas grabbed my boot and easily hurtled me into the air. I had to grab onto a fistful of feathers to keep from launching right over the top of the gryphon and landing on the ground on the other side. I’d barely managed to right myself when he settled onto the saddle behind me, his arms coming round me to pick up the gryphon’s reins. I stiffened.
“I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to ride double. Maddok isn’t used to it, so I need to have both hands on his reins,” Loukas explained.
I glanced over to see Halvor scowling from where he sat in front of Sharmaine, her arms similarly wrapped around his thin waist to grip her gryphon’s reins. I tried to summon an encouraging smile but was afraid it ended up being more of a grimace.
The only good thing about being paired with Loukas was that it gave me an opportunity to talk to him without being overheard.
If I could summon the courage to do it.
The other Paladin who were staying at the citadel stood on the steps, solemnly seeing us off. Father whistled loudly and the gryphons began to move. Sachiel lifted one hand, her burning gaze on me as Loukas’s grip tightened even more and Maddok charged forward. Her words from earlier still rang in my ears as the gryphons leapt off the ground, their powerful wings spreading and catching the air, pushing us up into the sky. My stomach lurched into my throat as the ground fell away. I had to squeeze my eyes shut.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Loukas was barely audible over the wind and the beating of Maddok’s wings.
I didn’t respond, too busy keeping my eyes closed and gripping the gryphon’s feathers.
“You don’t need to rip those out. I won’t let you fall.” It sounded like he was trying not to laugh.
It took conscious effort to relax my grip on Maddok, but somehow I managed to loosen my fingers—slightly.
“Don’t you at least want to take one last look at your home?”
The finality of those words—the realization that I may never see the citadel again—was what finally jarred me enough to open my eyes and turn my head. We were already far enough away that the citadel and the hedge began to blend into the cliffside where it perched, the waterfall that ran underneath it entirely visible, plummeting to the valley floor a thousand feet below it. I’d seen bits and pieces of it before, from the courtyard, from the trail when I’d ventured to Gateskeep to try to heal those wounded by the rakasa … but I’d never seen it so entirely before. Not like this.
My home was … breathtaking.
I watched until the hedge was nothing more than a thin green line, the citadel a gray speck against the massive mountain.
“There,” Loukas said when I finally twisted to face forward, “you see? It’s not so bad.”
I didn’t respond.
After a few moments of nothing but the sound of Maddok’s wings beating against the wind, I finally asked, “Where are we going?”
“I’m not sure. All I know is that we’re following the river for now, since that’s where Melia and Cyrus found him.” Loukas released the reins with one hand to point at the earth far below, to a narrow, winding band of blue amidst the thick growth of trees and bushes.
“How will we see him from way up here?”
“We’re flying this high because it’s daylight and we’re out of range of attacks up here. Once we switch to nighttime, we’ll fly lower and probably a bit slower, too, to try to track him.”
“Oh.”
We fell into silence. Though Loukas was right—it wasn’t so bad after all—I was still uncomfortable so far off the ground, being carried by the flying beast. If the Great God had intended for me to fly, he would have given me wings.
Warriors of Wing and Flame Page 12