“But you weren’t outside Wren’s room, were you, you dog?” Speyd nudged her brother in the ribs, and then she raised her hand in the air, looking like she wanted to give him a high five.
“Please, sister, not with Wren in the room.” Quiq seemed to be seeing if he could get his cheeks to turn a brighter color than Wren’s red feathers.
Before Wren’s tired mind could figure out why Quiq was looking so embarrassed, Piru finally spoke. “I…I should…”
“Wait,” Sia said before he could finish. “Piru, Grandfather, I hate to do this to you, but I want you to drink some of the truth potion.”
“Why should that matter?” Piru spoke so quickly that Wren was startled out of her half-asleep haze. “Isn’t it clear that Wren was wrong, and we’re all now to be trusted?”
“Not really,” Sia answered slowly in return. She looked somewhat ashamed as she said, “I don’t want to distrust you, Piru, but, you see, I’ve had a vision, with you in it, and—”
Piru didn’t allow her to finish her sentence. “Shut up, Sia!” he shouted. Everyone in the room turned to look at him, and they all must have seen the startling change in Piru’s normally kind face. A feral snarl had replaced his usual gentle smile, and this was the first time Wren had thought him even slightly capable of anger. With one last furious glance in Torien’s direction, Piru changed into his ravenform and flew out of the room. Wren was sure she wasn’t the only one to notice the fast-growing cloud of red that had surrounded his feathered body. She probably wasn’t the only one who had been startled, either, but unlike her, some of the room’s other occupants were quick to respond to this new and unpleasant knowledge.
After only a moment’s pause, Sia yelled out an order. “Follow him!” But even before the second word had left her lips, the triplets were already at the door Piru had left through, with Quiq quite obviously in the lead.
“I guess in the end, Piru was the only one who couldn’t be trusted,” Wren said. A few moments ago she’d been about to yawn, but with this latest surprise, she’d found a surprising amount of energy had come back into her body. After a brief stretch of her arms and a wiggle of her back muscles to relax her shoulders, she turned to Torien. “What should we do now? About Piru?”
“I think we should follow the triplets. Yes, it’s obvious that a trip to Piru’s is in order.”
“Damn right it is!” Sia didn’t look nearly as certain as her choice of words might have implied, and Wren couldn’t blame her. It was bad enough that Wren had her own heartbreak from discovering the lies of her birth mother and Ember. Why did Sia have to suffer the same pain Wren had just been forced to experience? “We’ll get through this, Sia, I promise,” Wren told her, getting up from the couch with some effort and walking over to her. “At least we can still trust each other, right?”
These words seemed to brighten Sia’s mood, at least a little. She turned to Wren with a weak smile, but her voice had regained some strength. “We absolutely can.” Sia rolled back her shoulders and released her wings. “Okay, Wren, are you up for another midnight flight?”
“Totally. Let’s get to the bottom of this. I’m sure Piru is innocent, no matter what it looked like.” Wren started striding toward the mansion’s front door.
“I hope so.” Sia sounded rather doubtful, but Wren just chalked it up to shock. She was carrying plenty of that herself, but it wouldn’t do to let it take over, not now. Not with their problem with Piru still to solve.
And not with the battle that would be arriving on their doorstep in far too little time.
Chapter Thirty-four
Wren hoped that this next journey through the night would pass less eventfully than the last, even if things were likely to be a little too exciting once everyone had landed at Piru’s. She couldn’t help but enjoy the feel of Sia’s hand in hers, who had insisted that she needed to hold on to Wren in order to help her if she shifted too quickly again and started to fall.
Wren’s frustration with herself was pretty deep by the time Sia first took her hand mid-air, and she wondered while they flew what she had ever seen in Ember. Maybe it was just that she was young and able to be manipulated by someone’s good looks, rather than led to like them by their good heart.
Like the one Sia happened to have.
On the way to Piru’s, Sia told everyone all about her vision. She added her theory that while Piru was obviously not in his right mind, if they could get him back to his normal self somehow, maybe he could still help them.
“I’m worried we might be too late for that, but someone will need to help us with my daughter’s impressive new power, and I don’t know who that could be, other than Piru,” Torien replied with a slight frown.
“Impressive?” Wren asked quietly. Then an idea came to her, just as Piru’s home was coming into view. “I wonder if we need Piru’s help at all. If we can find the prophecy book, maybe something in it could help us instead?”
“Possibly.” Torien nodded slowly. “Yes, I think that’s a damn good idea, Wrenny. Good thinking!” Her father’s compliment struck her as surprising, considering how much “bad thinking” she’d practiced in the past few days. But it seemed her father might have already forgiven her. Or at least she hoped he had.
A moment later, Wren, Zyr, Sia, and Torien landed next to Piru’s front porch. Just as Zyr, the last of them to land, touched down, the triplets came out of Piru’s house, one by one.
“He’s gone,” Speyd told them, and Wren could clearly see that she was worried, appearing almost scared. Wren couldn’t have imagined this strong-looking Amazon looking scared before now, but apparently the tough-seeming Speyd was capable of fear after all.
Quiq turned to Speyd, rubbing her back for a second. “You okay, sis?”
“Obviously!” Her angry tone held notes of the same ferocious emotions Wren saw on her face, and she guessed then that this was bravado, just there to cover up what Speyd was really feeling.
“You should come inside,” Faest told them, sounding none too pleased with Piru’s disappearance. Wren wasn’t all that happy about it, either.
The foursome followed the triplets into Piru’s house. The first thing Wren noticed was how startlingly hot the living room was.
“Bit warm for a fire,” Torien said, and Wren instantly agreed with her father. Why would Piru build a fire on a warm night like this? And why would the fire glow blue, instead of orange? Unless…
“The book!” she cried out, and she ran over to the fireplace as quickly as she could. Lying partway out of the roaring fire was a thick, blue-covered book. Wren grabbed it, dropping it almost instantly on the rug a few feet away from the fire. Flames still danced across its cover and pages, but not for long: a blanket brought over by Sia landed on top of it, and she and Wren frantically worked at smothering the burning book until all that remained of the burning parts was acrid, blue smoke that made everyone in the room cough.
Zyr and Torien busied themselves with opening all the windows and doors in the room, and soon the air was clear once more. “Well?” Sia asked Wren. She sounded a far way beyond mere impatience. “Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Of course.” Wren lifted the blanket off the book, its cover and the edges of the pages scorched black. She was surprised that it was already completely cool to the touch. Wren lowered herself to the rug, and Sia sat down next to her. Torien and Zyr walked over to them and stood on each side of Wren’s back, and even the triplets seemed to think that it was worth more attention than the missing Piru, as they went to stand behind Wren and Sia as well. Now that everyone was gathered round and able to see, she picked up the book and lifted open its cover.
The first two-thirds of the book were undamaged, thankfully, but that didn’t seem to matter, because they were completely blank. Page after page was empty, and she found herself increasingly losing hope as she looked at each following blank page.
“This isn’t doing us any good,” Wren said, allowing her hands to flop onto the
pages the book was open to.
Then Wren’s luck with the book abruptly began to change. First, a single word appeared on her left hand, moving too fast for her to make it out as it traveled down her fingers and onto the page on her left. Then a second word, a third, and then more and more, until her wrists and hands were completely black, as word after word traveled from her skin and across each of the two pages. After a few minutes of this startling event, the book rose, floating into the air in front of her. Unsure why, exactly, she was doing this, Wren lifted both hands off the pages.
The words continued to travel from her skin to the book. Now its pages were turning, but slowly, almost as if the book was worried it would get something wrong if this magic worked too quickly. At last, a final word flowed from Wren’s left thumb and landed on the last remaining blank page. The fire had made the rest of the book entirely black. With the final word now in place, the book landed with a quiet, happy sigh in Wren’s lap, almost as though it were coming home.
Now the prophecy book’s pages were once again full of words for them to read. Wren began to thumb through the book’s pages, noting that the cover was now red and blue. Its text was also varying shades of blue and red, some paragraphs entirely printed in hues of red, while others were completely blue, and some were both. A fair number of the words were even half of each color. “No wonder the Winged Red couldn’t make sense of most of it,” Wren said softly.
She stopped going through the book when she reached the beginning of the book’s undamaged pages, and there, on the page on the left, slightly burned around the edges, a penned drawing caused her to pause and stare.
Sketched in the same ink that made up the words on each page was a picture of a girl, one who she realized might be her: she was dressed in a robe that looked strikingly similar to the one Wren had worn her first day in Azyr. She looked a good bit like Wren, too. The final clue that it was Wren were her wings, identical to the bi-colored ones that she now possessed. But, as useful as the drawing made this part of the book seem to her, that was where its helpfulness ended. The words on the facing page were in a language Wren had never seen before.
“Can any of you read this?” she asked, looking at Sia and then Zyr. Glancing at her father’s face, she saw his brow was furrowed. His slightly squinting eyes made it seem as if he was trying to figure out the book’s strange-looking symbols, and his next words made it clear that this was true.
“I can understand only one paragraph, this one that’s entirely blue,” Torien said, placing his finger right next to the words. “It may take me a while, though. I’m a little rusty in this, our oldest written language.”
“Please try your best, Torien,” Zyr pleaded, “You know how important this is.”
“Yes, of course I do.” Wren’s father cleared his throat, then began to speak. “‘She…she will be…of both lands. She will be able to…shift into becoming anyone, and this will be her blessing but will also be tied to her greatest pain.’” Torien paused, seeming to ponder what the words said. “‘Her greatest pain’? That doesn’t sound very…I mean, I should continue reading before I make any guesses as to what it means. ‘The full moon will turn from blue to red, and the young shifter must learn to use her…her ultimate power by the time the Winged Red have come. And…and then she will have to give all of herself to succeed, and then she will be gone.’”
But that was where Torien had to stop, because the book’s words began to flow back onto Wren’s arms before her father could continue reading. She tried to will the words to stay where they were, but this magic wasn’t under her control. Just like her shifting abilities, it seemed that someone or something else believed she didn’t deserve power over either these words or her own flesh. That thought made her even more upset than the loss of the book’s knowledge. And what was this “ultimate power”? Would she even be able to come close to controlling it, when she couldn’t even control her emotions?
Because her tears were just now threatening to fall for the second time in mere hours, it took all the fight Wren had within her to not let them escape her weary eyes again.
Chapter Thirty-five
It was time now for Passea’s next task. It had been one of the parts she hadn’t looked forward to, because it required that she leave Wren with Ember, and she was already starting to wonder how much she could trust the young woman; she hadn’t felt all that great about tricking her daughter in the first place. All those years she’d spent away from Wren, merely watching her daughter through her mirror as often as she could, had taken their toll. She already felt almost unbearably raw from all her lies to Wren.
Now that Wren was apparently back in the land of the Winged Blue, probably thinking that her mother was no good and didn’t love her, well, that had made Passea’s limbs ache and her chest clench painfully for hours. It had been part of the necessary plan, but still: it hurt.
She didn’t want Ember and Myuss to discover exactly how much pain this had caused her, deceiving her daughter, nor did she want her troops to know of this hidden weakness of hers. It wouldn’t do for them to all go into battle knowing that their leader was not completely empty of fear, of softness of heart, of caring for any of the Winged Blue. The humans, yes, she held no love for any of those lowly creatures. Myuss had told her many stories of the humans’ stupidity as they’d grown up together, stories that Myuss told her proved that it was the Winged Red’s duty to overtake those lesser beings.
She hadn’t planned to have any feelings for the daughter she and Torien had made together, the daughter she had borne out of duty instead of the craving for a child she’d lied about to the Winged Blue’s male leader. She hadn’t wanted to feel guilty about abandoning her daughter: it had been planned, and the prophecy had foretold of this, too. She certainly hadn’t wanted her guilt to grow, bit by bit, as she helplessly watched all that happened to her daughter when the girl’s stepmother remarried. Even having a Winged Blue for a father was an improvement over that monster.
She’d had to stay strong, though. If she went to the Winged Blue’s land, gave in, told Torien everything, it wouldn’t have helped matters. She’d had no other choice. Books of prophecy didn’t lie, and as Myuss had told her, if she didn’t listen to what she, the Seer, had told Passea about the book’s knowledge, things would only grow worse for Wren. Maybe it had been a mistake, all of those years of pain from watching her daughter grow up from afar. Maybe. But it only would have hurt more if she hadn’t. It only would have made the hole in her life from abandoning Wren even larger and emptier.
So yes, now it was time for the next part of the plan: the plan the prophecy had for her, and for the rest of the Winged Red. At least she was convinced it would work, as Myuss had assured her time and time again. And at least once she had conquered the Winged Blue, she and Wren could finally be together. As they were meant to be.
Passea, already in her underthings, went over to the bed to study the robes Wren had arrived in, robes of a color that had no place in Passea’s beautiful city. As she studied the blue cloth, she wondered: maybe their horrible blueness wasn’t quite as repulsive as she’d previously thought. Wren’s blue wings had struck her as nothing other than intensely beautiful, starting at the first time she’d seen them. The blue feathers paired with the now-red ones had looked striking, too, and not at all unpleasant.
At least to her. She’d known that Ember felt very differently, but maybe with the right words from Passea, her second-in-command would change her mind. Passea just hoped Wren would change hers, too—and that she might be as quick to forgive Passea as she had always hoped.
After she’d changed—in both the necessary ways—Passea turned toward her mirror, where she now saw her daughter’s lovely face, Wren’s sweet smile tinged with sadness at the moment. Not Wren’s sadness, but there might be an echo of this smile when Wren found herself back in the land of the Winged Red. If there even were a smile on her face, once she woke to find herself in Passea’s bedroom.
&nbs
p; At least her daughter’s accommodations would be pleasant enough. Passea had done her best to make Wren’s bedroom in her soon-to-be-home as inviting as she possibly could. It was the only way she could think to show her daughter how much she had missed being in her life. The words would come eventually, she thought, to tell her daughter the truth—a truth Wren would accept, given enough time.
She had to.
Passea glanced around her bedroom one last time. She wouldn’t be seeing it again until the battle was over, but that fact didn’t matter to her. Home wasn’t home without family. And since the Winged Red’s victory would be quick to come, she could soon return home and relax fully—for the first time in almost twenty years.
With less enthusiasm than she would have liked, she walked over to her dresser, where she selected and uncorked the bottle she needed, then poured out its contents onto the floor. A few moments later, a knock came on her bedroom door. “You may enter, Ember,” she answered. “I’m just about to leave.” Her voice startled her: she hadn’t remembered that, for the time being, she would hear her own daughter’s voice whenever she spoke.
Her second-in-command came into the room, looking a lot calmer than Passea felt. The young woman always seemed so confident, so cocky; it was starting to seem possible that Passea might need to have her step down, once the battle had been won. But Ember had assured Passea she wouldn’t do anything to Wren, and Passea’s good friend Myuss had promised she would also be there to keep a watchful eye on Ember.
“You don’t have to worry,” Ember had reassured Passea the last time they’d spoken, and Myuss had smiled kindly at her younger friend and told her, “Everything will work out just as it’s supposed to. Wren will be in good hands.”
It was a struggle to come back from the past, but ruminating on risks wouldn’t help her with her next actions. She needed to stay in the right frame of mind, and so all her doubts would somehow have to be left behind. “I guess it’s time for me to go,” Passea announced, and she wondered if she was saying it more to Ember or herself.
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