by Melissa Grey
The gods only knew if the Ala heard Echo’s plea.
Rowan and Echo tended to the Ala as best they could while Caius scouted the area. They were alone, but Echo thought that perhaps Caius felt as though the presence of a Drakharin at such a fragile time would be too much to demand of Rowan. Echo was silently grateful for Caius’s discretion. She fashioned a sling for Rowan’s injured arm. It wasn’t broken, but he needed a healer. He flinched every time her hand brushed his arm, though she didn’t think it was entirely because of the pain.
Two hours passed before a modest motorboat appeared in the distance, Altair’s brown-and-white feathers recognizable even from afar. Echo watched him warily as he stepped off the boat upon reaching shore. Accompanying him was a Warhawk with charcoal-gray feathers encrusted with plaster dust and pale green eyes that flicked to Caius whenever he made even the smallest of movements. Altair and the Warhawk placed the Ala in the boat with as much gentleness as they could muster. As the others clambered into the boat, Echo held the Ala’s unresponsive hand, as if, by sheer force of will, she could lend the Ala her strength. With only the soft whir of the boat’s engine to cut the silence, they set out for Avalon.
The castle’s battlements peeked through the mist that shrouded the island before the rest of its imposing mass came into view. Altair directed the Warhawk—Fern, he called her—to steer the boat toward the rear of the castle. The walls and wild overgrowth hid them from view. If Caius was spotted, his presence would cause a panic and the mud had flaked off his scales from the boat. The Avicen had been through enough; they didn’t need the shock of thinking their safe haven had been breached by the enemy. With Altair giving quiet commands, they docked the boat in a small inlet shielded by the castle’s high walls. Through it all, Echo kept her hold on the Ala’s hand. Even Altair seemed to sense that she needed this contact, and when he pried the Ala’s hand free of Echo’s fingers to lift the Avicen woman out of the boat, he did so with surprising gentleness. They entered through a narrow passage by the garden, barely wide enough for Altair to fit through with the Ala cradled in his arms.
As Echo walked through the passages of Avalon Castle, it became clear that its glory days were long gone. Threadbare tapestries adorned the walls, their once bright colors faded to murky browns and grays. The stained-glass windows were missing several panes, so the sunlight fell on the floor in uneven patches of color. The air was thick with dust. Echo sneezed.
“Bless you,” Rowan murmured. On instinct, she presumed. He blinked, as if surprised the words had escaped him.
“Thanks,” she said, just as softly.
Altair led them to a richly appointed room high in the castle. He laid the Ala on the bed after Fern turned down the sheets. There was a tenderness to the way he pulled the bedclothes up around her. Echo couldn’t stand to watch them shift the Ala’s limp arms and rolling head. Unlit candles rested on the mantel and on the bedside table and on the trunk against the wall. Heavy drapes had been pulled aside to let in the morning light and meager breeze. Echo stood by the window, her fingers resting on its stone sill. A garden wrapped around the rear of the castle, wild and overgrown. The Ala would have loved the room. Maybe that was why Altair had chosen it. Echo had always thought their enmity eternal, as old as the Elders themselves, but the morning’s events had revealed some deep, secret history to which Echo had never been privy.
A healer entered, arms laden with herbs and tonics, accompanied by two more Warhawks. As the healer fretted over the Ala, Rowan gave voice to what they were all thinking: “What do we do now?”
One of the new Warhawks assisted the healer, but the other had eyes only for Caius. His scales were visible in the dim light.
“What is he doing here?” The Warhawk’s words were slung like barbs, each one tipped with poison. The former Dragon Prince stood by the Ala’s bed, hands at his sides, looking as harmless as he possibly could. But even to Echo, who knew that he was far from the nightmare the Avicen told their children about, Caius could never truly seem harmless. Nothing could hide his strength or his confidence. He’d been a fighter and a leader for too long; no amount of silence or projected softness would be able to cloak the truth of him.
“He was uninvolved in the attack and he is here at my invitation,” Altair said. “If you have a problem with that, Sage, you are more than welcome to forfeit your sword and your cloak and join the children downstairs.” He waited. The Warhawk bristled, but remained silent. To Rowan, Altair said, “You and Violet will accompany our guest”—Altair jerked his head toward Caius—“to his chamber. Speak of this to no one.”
The Warhawk assisting the healer nodded as she handed over pouches of herbs that Echo knew would be useless. She must be Violet. The name was fitting: She had a cascade of pink and purple feathers that blended so well that when she moved, it was as if a candied sea moved with her. The edges of her white cloak were trimmed with gold, a sign that she was not only a soldier trained with sword and shield but also a mage. Perhaps sensing that her partner was about to say something rash, Violet moved to the bedside table, where she deposited the remaining herbs and then stood next to Sage, their shoulders touching. Sage’s auburn feathers seemed to settle with the contact.
“Should we take him now, sir?” asked Violet.
Altair shook his head. “Not yet. We have matters to discuss.”
“I am your captive audience,” said Caius, with a pointed glance at his newly assigned guards. “Emphasis on captive.”
“Can you blame us for treating you like a threat?” It was clear to Echo that Altair’s patience was wearing thin. She wanted to tell Caius to keep his mouth shut, but she was too tired to insert herself into their argument. Altair plowed on. “How many of my people have you killed?”
Caius hesitated. Echo knew that he remembered the number of Drakharin that had fallen during his time as Dragon Prince. He had told her that he sent personal letters of condolence to their families, if they had any. It wasn’t standard procedure, but he had done it anyway. If soldiers were going to die under his crest, he had said, they deserved to be recognized. But Avicen?
“I didn’t exactly keep count,” said Caius.
“How can you listen to this?” Sage said. She shrugged off the hand Violet laid on her arm. “We were just attacked. The Drakharin could be—”
Altair interrupted her. “It wasn’t Drakharin. At least, not exactly.”
Sage paused, deflated. “Then who?” Uncertainty flickered in her orange eyes, so like Altair’s. Echo wondered if they were related, however distantly.
“The kuçedra,” Echo said. Heads swiveled toward her place by the window, as if they had forgotten she was there.
“And why is she here?” Sage was spoiling for a fight. Echo understood. Sometimes anger was easier to deal with than grief. Echo let herself become Sage’s target. “We all saw which side you took in the Black Forest. You attacked our commander in defense of Drakharin.” An accusatory finger was pointed at Caius. “This Drakharin.” She turned to Rowan. “This is the one who killed Ruby, isn’t it?”
What? Echo’s mind skipped like a scratched record. She had killed Ruby. Not Caius. And yet, Rowan’s gaze skittered to Echo and then away. He nodded.
Altair watched them keenly, as if he was waiting for the holes in Rowan’s story to show themselves.
Echo cleared her throat. “I—”
“It’s true,” Caius said. “We fought. It was my blade that felled her.”
No.
Rowan had lied for her. And now Caius was helping him.
“And I am sorry for that.” Caius looked at Echo, but his expression revealed nothing. “Sorrier than I can possibly say. I cannot bring back the dead, but I can help safeguard the living. We don’t have to live as we always have.”
Sage was ready to spit fire. “I won’t fight alongside Drakharin,” she said. “I can’t. He can take his apologies and—”
Altair’s voice rose above hers. “You will, or—”
Echo closed her eyes. The din in the room escalated as Violet tried to talk Sage down, and Altair shouted above them both. At some point, Rowan slipped out, claiming to anyone who could hear him that he needed some air, departing before Altair could give him leave. Caius did himself no favors by trying to counter Sage’s vociferous assertions that the Drakharin were behind the attack. It was loud enough to wake the dead.
“Stop,” Echo said. The discord was so great it made her feel as if she were suffocating. No one heard her. She raised her voice. “Stop.”
It made no difference. They were caught up in centuries of patterned behavior. The Avicen and the Drakharin fought. They always had and they always would. It was the way of things. One confrontation led to another, and the cycle began anew. Conflict fed upon conflict, growing fat on their hate and their rage and their bile.
“Stop!” Echo’s shout was accompanied by sparks falling from her hands, wholly unbidden. She curled her fingers into tight fists and fought for control. Of herself. Of the rising tide of enmity in the room.
All fell silent. Even Altair seemed taken aback.
“This is what it wants,” Echo said softly. The fire that had been building in her chest died to embers. “This is what the kuçedra wants us to do. Fighting, war, hatred. Fear. It feeds off it. It gorges itself on our suffering.” She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. “We can’t do this. It has to stop somewhere.”
“What do you suggest?” Violet’s soft voice pierced the silence. She looked at Echo expectantly.
Echo wanted to hide from that look. How was she to know? She was no strategist like Altair, or Seer like the Ala. She had never led armies, like Caius, or trained to be in one, like Sage and Violet. “I don’t know.”
“We work together,” Altair provided. He fixed Sage with a hard stare. “As much as it pains us to do so, we must use all the tools at our disposal.”
Was that what Echo and Caius were? Tools? Weapons in an arsenal?
“Let me talk to my sister,” Caius said. “The new Dragon Prince. I don’t think she was behind this attack, but I’ll be able to tell if she’s lying to me.” He rubbed the base of his neck. “I’m not as blind to her treachery as I used to be.”
Altair mulled the idea over. They all watched him in silence. His countenance gave away nothing of his thoughts.
“I can ask her for a truce,” Caius added. A little desperately, Echo thought.
Skepticism colored Altair’s response. “A truce? Do you honestly believe she would agree to such a thing?”
“No,” Caius admitted. “But it might buy us some time.”
They continued their conversation. Ever the politician, Caius had already positioned himself as some kind of Drakharin emissary among the Avicen.
“Can I have a minute alone with her?” Echo asked, her gaze falling to the Ala. Politics were not her strong suit. She didn’t feel like negotiating terms or discussing strategy. She felt like a lost little girl, desperate to hold her mother’s hand.
“We have no time to waste—” Altair began.
“Please.” Echo hated how her voice fractured on that one word, but she could feel herself cracking, like a dam about to break.
Perhaps Altair’s sympathy was a by-product of whatever emotion stirred within his heart at the sight of the Ala prone upon the bed. Perhaps he sensed that Echo was about to shatter into a million pieces and he wanted no part in her unseemly crumbling. Either way, he nodded and ushered the Warhawks and the healer out of the room. Caius was the last to leave. He looked over his shoulder as he closed the door behind him, but Echo did not—could not—meet his gaze.
A vanity sat in the far corner of the room, its surface coated with dust. Echo pulled the matching stool up to the bed and slumped down on it. An acute heaviness settled in her bones. Had it really been only a matter of hours from the last time she had seen the Ala? The warehouse in London felt as though it belonged in another life. Echo took the Ala’s hand in hers. The Ala was as still as a corpse, but her hand was warm. Black veins, darker even than the black of her skin, stood out on her arms, swollen, but this part of her was unblemished.
“One for sorrow,” Echo sang quietly. “Two for mirth. Three for a funeral…”
The lullaby the Ala had taught her caught in her throat. Whenever Echo fell ill, the Ala had sung it to her. Echo remembered the way the Ala would brush the hair from her fevered forehead. The calming scent of the incense in the Ala’s chamber, the warm glow of the candles. Echo had never known such safety, such love. Tears caught on her eyelashes, overflowed, ran down her cheeks. She held tightly to the Ala’s hand and laid her head on the bedsheets.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
The Ala had shown Echo kindness. Had sheltered her after years of abuse and neglect left Echo small and starved and broken. And this was what the Ala had earned for her troubles. Suspension in a state between life and death. Echo’s tears soaked into the cotton of the bedsheets. She allowed herself this one indulgence. The time had come, she knew, to put away childish things. But for now, she wept like a child lost, alone in the dark.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ivy could count on one hand the number of times she’d been to Avalon. Most of the time, the Avicen evacuation drills ended at the shore, where boats driven by Altair’s Warhawks would be waiting to ferry them to the castle. The first time she’d entered the sanctuary, she’d marveled at its vaulted ceilings and the aged stone walls that seemed to whisper secrets gathered over the years. Now all she could focus on was putting one foot in front of the other. She was dimly aware of the group behind her, following hot on her heels as she made her way through the castle’s quiet corridors looking for Echo or Altair or anyone who could convince her not to let the panic rising in her gut overwhelm her.
Sneaking Dorian and Quinn in wasn’t as hard as she thought it would be. Echo must have told Altair to expect them, because upon arriving at the shore of the Hudson River—a safe distance from where any Avicen might see them—she found a sullen Warhawk waiting near a boat, none too pleased to be tasked with the duty of bringing a Drakharin and a warlock into the Avicen sanctuary. So far, the only information Ivy had been able to glean from the Warhawk was:
“My name is Fern.” Delivered with all the grace of a series of grunts.
“The Ala is alive, but unconscious. Don’t know what happened to her.”
“Your friend, Echo, is with her.”
And lastly, with a sharp look at Dorian, “The other one is there, too.”
The other Drakharin. Caius. Ivy caught the way Dorian’s shoulders sagged with relief and his hand loosened on the pommel of his sword.
The Warhawk led Ivy to the wing where the Ala had been taken, Dorian, Quinn, and Jasper silent shadows behind her. Even the warlock seemed to understand the enormity of what had happened. Their home had been attacked. The Nest had been abandoned. Nothing was as it should be.
The castle had an air of the forgotten about it, as if it were only just now waking up from a long slumber. After what felt like an eternity, Fern motioned for them to proceed into a long hallway. Ivy took the lead. Better for the Avicen to see her face first rather than that of a Drakharin or a warlock or an Avicen whom they barely trusted. At the far end of the hall stood a cluster of people. Altair had his back to a closed door. Beside him stood Caius, who seemed remarkably short next to the Avicen general despite his six feet of height; two Warhawks; and Rowan, whose arm was held in a sloppy sling, clearly fashioned by someone who possessed only the most rudimentary of first-aid skills.
Dorian drew to an abrupt halt beside Ivy. She glanced at him just in time to see a pall pass across his features.
“Dorian?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
He stared straight ahead, as still as a statue, and as silent as one too. Ivy followed his gaze, and in an instant, she knew what troubled him: Altair.
How did you lose it? she had asked him in her cell in the belly of Wyvern’s Keep.
Altair.
Good. I hope he kept it. I hear he loves a good trophy.
Decades of anger and resentment and, though Ivy knew he would never admit it, fear had hardened Dorian into the person she had first met in a dark dungeon cell. But months of tenderness, of kindness, of stories told in the dead of night and laughter shared in the light of day had softened years of calcified hatred. It was such a fragile progress, and Ivy could see it all beginning to unravel as Dorian laid his one lovely eye on the imposing figure of Altair at the other end of the hall, the ruin of his other eye hidden by the navy blue eye patch.
They had been so different then, she and Dorian. It had been only three months since she was held prisoner in the Drakharin stronghold, not a terribly long time in the grand scheme of things, but Ivy felt as though she had metamorphosed into a completely different person. She had once taunted Dorian’s loss, had spat at his feet. And in return, he’d struck her while she was in shackles, leaving a bruise to blossom on her face in stages: red, purple, blue green, yellow. Forgiveness had not been easy to come by, but through some miracle—and by saving each other’s lives—they had found it. Their uneasy alliance had become a friendship, and if there was one thing Ivy knew about friendship, it was that sometimes you had to carry your friends through their most difficult moments.
Altair showed no sign of recognition. His gaze flickered to Dorian and then away, registering him as the Drakharin he was told to expect by either Caius or Echo, and nothing more. Ivy wondered if he even remembered, or if Dorian had receded into the mass of nameless, faceless casualties that had fallen beneath Altair’s blade.
Yet Ivy knew that for Dorian to come face to face with the man who had taken his eye, who had left him with scars that ran far deeper than the surface of his skin, was a challenge of extraordinary difficulty. She placed a hand on his forearm, not to prevent him from doing anything foolish but to show him that she was here. He was not alone. His body tensed beneath her touch.
She was standing on his bad side, the one without an eye, and he had to angle his upper body to look at her. In his face, she saw the old Dorian. Without breaking eye contact, she slid her hand down his arm and held his hand. It was a brief gesture. A quick squeeze and then a release. But it was enough. The old Dorian slipped away and the new one, the one he’d fought so hard to build on the shaky foundation of his former self, offered her an equally short-lived smile. It was barely more than an uptick of the corners of his lips, but that, too, was enough. Dorian had to face his demons—no way around that—but he knew he did not face them alone.