“As if anything could,” said Ivy.
“Hey, man,” Echo said, scooping a dollop of cream off her plate, “once you know what it’s like to go hungry, you never turn down food.”
The hand Rowan rested on Echo’s knee was warm, even through her jeans, and his eyes went that soft shade of greenish gray she loved. His left eyebrow twitched upward, his way of silently asking, “Are you okay?” Echo smiled in response, letting him know she was. The day the Ala had introduced them all those years ago, he’d been eating a cupcake, and a significant amount of the frosting had found its way onto his face. When he’d caught her staring at the cake crumbling in his hand, he had—without the slightest hesitation—offered her the remaining half. Food, Echo thought, was the foundation upon which the very best friendships were built. Rowan gave her knee a single quick squeeze before resting his elbows on the table and turning back to Ivy.
“Look, Ivy,” he said. “Not all of us have the luxury of cushy healer apprenticeships. If I’m going to have to take orders from someone, I’d rather it be Altair. He’s not a bad guy, despite what you tree-hugging hippies might think.”
“Tree-hugging hippies?” Echo asked, dabbing at a few renegade drops of tea on the table. “Did hippies ever actually hug trees?”
Ivy opened her mouth, no doubt to say something unkind to Rowan. Echo kicked Ivy under the table, digging the toe of her boot into the other girl’s shin. Ivy’s sunglasses did nothing to mitigate the force of her glare, but that was fine. Echo could handle a dirty look, so long as it was silent.
Rowan sighed, hands held up in mock surrender. “I didn’t come here to fight, Ivy.”
“Apology accepted,” Ivy replied. Haughty was not a look she wore well, so Echo knocked her boot into Ivy’s shin once more.
The remainder of Ivy’s éclair was swiped from her plate before she could react. Rowan’s megawatt grin could have lit an entire nation. “I also didn’t come here to apologize.”
Echo nudged her elbow gently into his side, making little grabby hand gestures at the éclair. Rowan broke it in half, offering her the slightly bigger portion. She took it with a smile, certain it tasted sweeter because it had come from him. Ivy looked as though she was ready to choke on the betrayal.
“Then, pray tell, why did you come here?” Echo said, ignoring the daggers Ivy was emitting from her eyeballs.
“Like I said, to see you,” Rowan answered, darting in to press a quick kiss on Echo’s lips. He stood and stretched, arms reaching high above his head. His shirt rode up, exposing a sliver of skin between his jacket and the top of his jeans. It had to have been deliberate, but Echo was strangely at peace with that. Rowan smiled as he said, “And to tell you the Ala was looking for you. She said she needs you for something.”
He pulled a battered leather wallet from his back pocket and tossed a fiver on the table. It was the wrong amount, from the wrong country, but Echo appreciated the gesture nonetheless. “You heading back?” he asked Echo. “If you are, I’ll go with you.”
Ivy shook her head at Echo behind Rowan’s back. Echo studiously ignored her.
“Yep,” Echo said. “Don’t you have to do that thing, Ivy?”
Scrunching her nose in puzzlement, Ivy asked, “What thing?”
Best friends, Echo thought, should be able to read minds better than this. All she wanted was some alone time with Rowan, but Ivy needed to get the telepathic memo first. “That thing you told me about that you have to go do. You know … that thing.”
With a slight sigh, Ivy acquiesced. “Oh,” she said. “Right. That thing I have to do. That’s … elsewhere.”
Echo shot Ivy a grateful smile. She owed her, but the friend economy would balance itself out sooner or later. She added her own money to the pile on the table, making sure to include enough to cover both the stolen éclair and Ivy’s tea.
“In that case,” Rowan said, “I’ll wait outside.” With a wink and a wave to Ivy, Rowan sauntered away. Echo watched him go, denim clinging to his form in all the right places. Ivy slurped down the rest of her tea, as noisily as she possibly could, before saying, “Honestly, Echo, he’s still that sticky brat who’d steal all of the Ala’s cupcakes. I don’t know what you see in him.”
Callipygian, Echo thought, watching Rowan depart. The quality of having a nice butt. She took a moment to appreciate the scenic view before saying, “Honestly, Ivy, I don’t know what you don’t.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Caius was in a bed, but not his own. His head rested on a fluffy pillow, soft and sweet-smelling, and not the dark mahogany desk he had the vague memory of falling asleep on. The cry of seagulls outside the window and the warmth of sunlight on his face were sign enough that he was dreaming. The sky above Wyvern’s Keep was perpetually cloudy, and birds had not been seen over the northernmost tip of Scotland for years. The few that made it through the wards—the same ones that blocked it from the view of humans—were struck down by Drakharin archers. One never knew what form an Avicen spy would take.
The sheets beside Caius still held the warmth of the body that had rested next to his. Laying his palm flat against the soft linen, Caius rolled over, pressing his face into the pillow beside his own. The faintest trace of her scent still lingered there. She had laughed when he’d buried his nose in the feathers on her head and told her they smelled like pears. It was a strange thing, he’d said, to smell like pears, with a name like Rose.
“I hate pears,” she’d replied, but she had smiled, and that was all Caius wanted.
Here, he was warm. He was happy. The sun was shining, and the birds were singing, and they were safe. Caius needed nothing more than that to know none of it was real.
He cracked open his eyes, flinching at the onslaught of bright morning light. He couldn’t see her, but he knew Rose was there, sitting by the window. A gentle breeze rustled her hair-feathers, with their contrasting streaks of black and white. She was singing quietly, so as not to wake him, and it brought a sleepy smile to his face. He hummed along, just barely in tune. Rose turned to him then, a small, secret smile dancing at the corners of her lips. The moment was beautiful, like her, and as tranquil as still waters.
Naturally, that was when the world erupted into flames.
The firebird will be another mess of yours I’ll have to clean up.
This was how Tanith cleansed. With fire and blood and death.
“Caius!”
Stumbling from the bed, Caius reached out for Rose, but he faltered on the glass that had shattered as wind and flames screamed through the windows, littering the floor with broken shards. Jagged edges cut into his skin, but he hardly noticed the pain. How could he notice anything when she was screaming, burning, dying? He tried to grab her, but she was beyond his reach. The curtains were on fire, and she was lost to view. Caius shouted her name, but he couldn’t reach her. The room was engulfed in flames, and Rose was dying.
“Caius!”
A strong hand wrenched him from the nightmare. Caius’s head shot up. The captain of his guard knelt next to his chair, one hand gripping Caius’s shoulder like an iron vise.
“Dorian,” Caius said, scrubbing at his face, wiping away the dream.
Silvery-gray bangs just barely brushed the top edge of Dorian’s ever-present eye patch. His one good eye was the cerulean of a Caribbean sea, mingled with the navy of a starlit ocean. Specks of teal danced in his iris if he stood in the right light. It was a shame about the other eye, for more than just his lost depth perception. Though the eye patch was stitched in a sapphire hue that complemented the blues and silvers of his tunic, the perfection of his face had long ago been marred by the injury sustained during the last open battle between the Avicen and the Drakharin. Dorian’s lips quirked up in a lopsided smile, tugging at the pale scars on his cheek. The smile didn’t quite reach his eye, but Caius took what he could get.
He needed a moment to orient himself. There was no cabin by the sea. No burning curtains and screaming ghosts. He was seated
behind the mahogany desk in his library, right where he’d fallen asleep, surrounded by soaring shelves piled high with books he’d spent centuries collecting. Leather-bound atlases crowded against yellowing rolls of parchment. Slender volumes of spells rested atop chunky guides on every subject from medieval alchemy to modern cosmology. The room was silent save for the popping of the fire in the library’s elaborately carved stone hearth. Fanged wyverns danced around the flames, along with salamanders breathing little puffs of smoke, nagas crawling along a shore, and nixes swimming beneath marble waters. If Caius squinted, the undulation of the flames made the carvings look as if they were moving.
“Caius.” It was Dorian’s voice, but an echo of Rose’s scream hid behind it. Caius closed his eyes and focused on breathing. In and out. In and out. It was all in his head. Dorian was speaking, just Dorian.
“Are you all right?”
Caius nodded. “Yes,” he said, voice cracking. The dream clung to his skin like a film. The fire blazed in its hearth, and the smell of burning wood was a special kind of torture. “Yes, I’m fine.”
He was not fine.
“You don’t look fine,” Dorian said. They’d been friends for too long. Caius hadn’t heard him enter the library. He hadn’t even heard the door swing shut, and he knew for a fact that its hinges were incurably rusty.
“You called for me,” said Dorian, brows drawn together. “Remember? Not going senile in your old age, are you?”
“We’re practically the same age, Dorian.” Two hundred fifty was hardly what the Drakharin would consider old, but Dorian was three whole months younger and never let Caius forget it. It seemed fitting for the youngest prince in Drakharin history to have the youngest captain of the guard, so Caius had arranged for Dorian’s appointment as his first order of duty.
Caius stretched, spine popping. When he tilted his head back, he could see the mural painted on the library’s ceiling. It depicted the tale of some long-forgotten battle, colors faded as surely as the memory of the heroes who’d fought in it. Bright swathes of orange and gold cut across the ceiling as a green-scaled dragon breathed fire on a cluster of birds. Caius wrenched his eyes away. The nightmare clung to him with stubborn wisps of smoke and the whisper of a scream on scorched air.
He hadn’t dreamed of Rose in ages. If there was one thing he’d learned to do in his years as prince, it was compartmentalize. A century ago, when he’d been elected, he was young and stupid, a foolish prince barely out of his adolescence. But now, he knew better. The memory of Rose refused to be erased, but Caius had locked it away as well as he could. Or he thought he had. Evidently, Rose was as adept at picking locks in death as she had been in life.
“Caius?” Dorian asked, voice hushed in the silence of the library. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
Caius avoided Dorian’s concerned gaze, choosing instead to rummage through the chaos on his desk for the map he’d torn out of one of his contemporary atlases before falling asleep. “Here,” he said, holding the page out to Dorian. “Look.”
“Ah, a map.” Dorian took it with a curious glance and hesitant hands. “Yes, I have heard of these.”
“Don’t be funny. You’re no good it.” Caius snatched it back. “It’s what the map leads that concerns me and, by extension, you. Because you’re the one who’s going to find it.”
“And what, pray tell, am I going to find?”
“The firebird.” He paused. “Or at least a clue that might tell us where it’s hiding.”
Dorian’s eyebrow inched closer to his hairline. “Sorry, I thought I just heard you say the firebird, but that can’t be right. That would be insane.”
Caius let his glare speak for him.
“Right,” Dorian said, slipping the map from Caius’s fingers. “And you want me to go find it … but why me? Doesn’t Tanith normally run this sort of errand for you?”
“Because I trust you.” It was the only answer Caius had and the only one Dorian needed.
Dorian was silent for a handful of moments, studying the map. “Are you sure about this?” he asked, looking back to Caius.
“As sure as I’ll ever be. I would like to see this war end in my lifetime, and if the firebird is the way to do that, I will find it. We’ve all lost enough.”
Dorian’s hand rose halfway to his eye patch before he let it fall to his side again. “The Avicen believe it’ll end the war in their favor. Couldn’t they be right?” The word “Avicen” clawed its way from Dorian’s throat as if he were expelling a demon.
“Whoever controls the firebird decides how it’s used,” said Caius. “The fact that those two Avicen scouts were sent to look for the firebird concerns me. It makes me think they might be on to something, but if we find it first, then we control it. We can end this war on our terms.”
“And if I may be so bold,” Dorian said. “What exactly are our terms?”
It was the exact question Caius had feared Dorian would ask. For Caius, finding the firebird was unfinished business. Not his own, but Rose’s. She’d searched for it, chasing peace, but death had brought her mission to a premature end. Caius had vowed, by the smoking remains of her cabin by the sea, that he would finish what she’d started. Dorian, on the other hand, wanted revenge. For his eye, for their friends that had fallen in combat, for every loss he could lay at the Avicen’s feet. Caius knew he wouldn’t be able to sway Dorian, so he simply said, “Our desired outcome is a clean end.” He’d let Dorian interpret that as he would.
Dorian nodded absently, but remained silent, eye focused on the map in his hands.
Caius sighed and asked, “Do you think I’m sending you off on a fool’s errand? Honest opinion.”
“My opinion hardly matters,” said Dorian. He might even have meant it.
“You’re my closest friend, Dorian. Of course it does.” Caius was rewarded with a small smile, and he was glad of it. Dorian was notoriously sparing with those.
“I’ll admit,” Dorian said, trailing a finger along the lines of the map, “the idea of a firebird sounds a bit far-fetched.”
Caius pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to will away the headache he felt blooming behind his eyes. It didn’t work. “Which is simply a much nicer way of saying the same thing Tanith did. And if she did come around, I don’t know that any of us would like what she would do with something like the firebird. You know how she feels about escalation.”
“Well, Tanith certainly has her … opinions.” The disdain in Dorian’s tone was almost thick enough to walk on. Tanith was fire to Dorian’s water, and there was little love lost between them. Dorian raised his eyes from the parchment to meet Caius’s. “But you are my prince, and I would follow you anywhere. Even on a fool’s errand such as this.”
Caius grinned. “I knew there was a reason I kept you around.”
“I thought it was for my roguish charm and devilish good looks.”
“Well, yes, but I assumed that went without saying.”
“So,” Dorian said, holding up the map at an angle. “Where am I going? I can’t read this.”
“That’s because it’s in Japanese,” Caius responded. “I took it from one of my atlases. You’re going to Kyoto. I did you the favor of circling the location our Avicen prisoners had visited prior to their capture.”
“Oh, excellent, I might just catch the cherry blossoms.” Dorian folded the map and tucked it away in his pocket. “Any idea of what I’m looking for specifically?”
And that was the rub. “No,” Caius said. “We have the where, but not the what. They said there’s some elderly human woman living at the teahouse they were sent to and that she didn’t know a thing, but there has to be more to it than that. Altair’s too smart to waste resources on dead ends. Interrogate her. Find out whatever you can. If Altair has a lead on the firebird, I want to chase it down.”
“You want me to terrorize a fragile old lady?” Dorian asked. “What kind of monster are you?”
Caius punched him on the shou
lder. “That’s no way to speak to your prince.”
Dorian bowed deeply, but with a hint of a laugh dancing at the edge of his lips. “Forgive me, my liege.”
Caius knew the gentle teasing was for his benefit, and he appreciated the effort. With tensions rising in his own court, it was nice to be reminded that he still had friends, even if they were in short supply these days. “You flatter me with your sincerity, Captain. Now get going. Round up a few of your best guards and make haste. I want whatever this is in my possession by morning.”
“Then have it by morning you shall,” Dorian said, straightening. With a brisk nod, he turned to leave.
Caius knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he could trust Dorian with anything and everything, but some things still needed to be said. “And, Dorian?”
Dorian turned, eyebrow arched.
“Tell no one.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was an easy jaunt from Charing Cross Road to Grand Central, and Rowan was the consummate gentleman the entire way, opening gateways to the in-between and holding Echo’s hand as they crossed them. He was only a few months older than Echo, but there was something about him that made him seem more mature than his years. Confidence was a second skin he wore as comfortably as his own. It hadn’t always been that way, though. Echo had been there to witness his awkward adolescence, when his limbs were gangly and he flopped around like a puppy that didn’t know how to use its oversized paws. Over the past year, he’d blossomed like a beautiful flower—not that she would ever, ever say that to him. Unless, of course, she felt like making him cringe.
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