“While falling through the sky?!”
I nodded. “And oddly enough, I ended up in the realm of the Grayfeathers. I know who my real father is now.”
“I was going to tell you, Evr,” she started.
“I know.” I took her hand and squeezed it. “Now, is Skye going to be able to fly without one of its engines?”
“I’m working on that now,” Yeeto called from across the room. He stood before one of the control panels, his hands rapidly moving over a touch-screen terminal. “It’s designed to fly without one engine, in case of emergency, but Soo Kai’s weapon caused more damage than just that.”
“What realm are we in?” Xavyr asked.
“Kyatae,” Jaffe said. “It’s the realm of the Dragon Clan.”
“We need to get somewhere we can dock the ship,” Rhione said.
“Can Skye still jump realms, or was that technology damaged by the explosive?” I asked.
Yeeto looked thoughtful, then his fingers tapped over the screen again. “Realm navigation is intact. If we could land somewhere that had the resources to repair the ship…”
“Why not go back to Ifraine?” Sabin suggested. “You have contacts there already.”
“I’m not sure that I can bring her into the docking bays in this condition,” Yeeto said.
As if to punctuate his words, Skye shuddered and began to tilt forward at a much more drastic angle. I was flung to the floor, and those closer to the bank of screens went crashing into them.
“A crash landing gives us a better chance than plummeting from whatever height we are now,” I moaned through gritted teeth.
Yeeto righted himself and entered several commands on the screen. The ship shivered, and then there was a faint pop as Skye moved across realms. The huge silver orb of the moon that was Ifraine filled several of the viewing screens. We were a half mile or so off from the docking bays, which spread over a large section of the moon like metallic spider webs.
Almost instantly, a voice rang out over the intercom in the command room. “You are not authorized to land on Ifraine. Please turn around.”
“This is Yeeto Hillaro of the City of Skye. We are critically damaged. Coming in for a crash landing.”
Panicked voices sounded through the intercom for several moments, muffled by someone’s hand over the microphone. Then, “Can you safely dock the ship?”
“Not likely. I’m bringing her in to the lunar fields east of the docks.”
There was a spectacular blast from somewhere beneath us, and the city plummeted from the sky.
“One of the other engines must have given out!” Rhione gasped.
Yeeto’s hands danced over the controls once again. “I’m rerouting power to keep us in the sky. Just a little longer.” This last bit seemed directed at the ship herself.
Skye rocketed toward the surface of the moon, passing the docks. She leveled just slightly as we began to skim over land; whatever Yeeto was doing was helping. Her speed diminished, too, and slowly Yeeto brought her to a height of about twenty feet above the surface. “That’s about as good as it’s going to get,” he said, and he cut the power to the engines.
Xavyr grabbed me as we collided with the earth. It felt like the world had been flipped upside down. We shot across the floor, knocking into the control panels. Everything rumbled and rocked. There was a whooshing, whining sound as Skye plowed through the earth. The ship began to slow and the violent movement subsided. Finally, she came to a stop.
We were alive.
A cheer rose up from Jaffe, and I added my voice to it. Jaffe helped my mother and Sabin to their feet, and Xavyr and I clambered to ours. I hoped Veron and the others had fared as well.
We’d done it. I couldn’t believe it. And that meant—
“We have to go get Kellan,” I said urgently, turning to Xavyr. “Before they lock my Rai again. Titus is gone. He’s going to tell them.”
“You can’t jump realms in your condition,” he said. The calm of his eyes was broken for once, and he shook his head back and forth. “You already said so yourself.”
“There are healing tools here.” I looked over at my mother. “Get me one of those things—the thing you fixed your leg with the last time.”
“Hold on, where are you going?” she asked, her expression growing panicked.
“I told you before—Kellan is trapped in the Timekeeper’s realm.”
“Say what?” Sabin said.
“I don’t have time to explain,” I growled. “A lot has happened in the last few days, since you two were abducted.”
“And my sister killed,” Jaffe said, as if I needed a reminder.
“If we don’t go now, the Council and Casseroux will lock my Rai and we’ll never find Kellan,” I said, my voice reaching a hysterical pitch.
“But how are we going to jump realms?” Xavyr asked. He looked defeated. “You know I can’t do it.”
“I’ll take you to the Timekeeper’s realm,” said a voice at the door.
I knew the voice before I turned to see him standing there.
Rorie.
Chapter Fifteen
Xavyr placed himself between me and Rorie, his eye burning brighter than I’d ever seen them.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Rorie looked at me, his eyes hard. “We both want the same thing: to save Kellan. I’m willing to put aside our differences.”
“Our differences? You tried to kill me! Repeatedly!”
“It’s going to take both of us,” Rorie said, ignoring my heated accusations. “You can’t jump realms now. I can help with that. And I certainly don’t think I can face the Timekeeper alone. Let’s do this. For Kellan.”
“It’s out of the question,” Xavyr said. His words came out quietly, but with the force of a blowtorch. “Leave now.”
Rorie just stared at him and after a moment, Xavyr took a purposeful step toward him.
I stepped around Xavyr, in between them, arms raised. “I don’t have time for this. Any second and my Rai is locked. Then Kellan rots down there forever.”
“Evr—” Xavyr began, but I cut him off with a look.
“I’m going with you,” Sabin said. “Even though I’m beyond pissed with Rorie now, too.”
I doubted her anger at Rorie was on my behalf; she was just mad he’d secretly formed an alliance with the Ravens. I felt as if my head were going to explode. “No. It’s too dangerous.”
“You’re not the only one who loves him, you know,” Sabin said, her voice soft and somehow both vulnerable and viper deadly. “Even if he doesn’t love me back. You can’t stop me.”
“Fine,” I said. I turned to my mother. “I need you to find Veron, and together you must convince the Council to release me. Otherwise, as of this moment I’m a fugitive for the rest of my life.”
Her eyes filmed over with tears and her lips trembled. She reached up and swiped at one of my red curls. “I don’t want to leave you. Not again.”
“I need you to save me this time. Okay?”
She nodded, though tears had begun to cascade down her cheeks. Yeeto handed her one of the healing tools and she used it to seal up the wound on my leg.
“I will accompany Rhione to the capital,” Jaffe said. “She is still a Stag, even if she hasn’t been home for a very long time.”
I reached out and squeezed his arm, smiling my thanks. “Well, it sounds like we’re all settled, then,” I said.
“I will not hesitate to kill you if you even think of betraying Evryn,” Xavyr said to Rorie.
Rorie nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Okay, now I think we’re settled,” I said. “To the Ferryman, then.”
Rorie stepped up next to me, but Xavyr positioned me next to Sabin instead. I saw Rorie place his hand on Xavyr’s shoulder, and I looped my arm through Sabin’s. We stepped through into the Ferryman’s domain. Was I really heading to face the Timekeeper with the girl who hated me, and the former friend who wanted me dead?
> The smell of water and rock and time greeted us. Mist swirled at my feet, and my boots squished in the damp moss at the edge of the water. We walked out onto the sleek metal dock that marked the entrance to Ifraine, and when we reached the end the Ferryman was already waiting for us. It was his eyes I saw first, radioactive sapphires in the purplish light.
“Greetings, Lost One,” he intoned.
“You know where we wish to go?” I asked.
“I know.” He shook his horns back and forth slowly. “I wish it was not so, but I can guess the path of your heart.”
“I ventured to the Timekeeper’s realm before and I returned.”
He scrunched his brow and gazed at me with a soul-penetrating stare. “Did you?”
I suppressed a shiver. “I will not abandon my friend. That’s all there is to it.”
The Ferryman nodded, though his body was heavy with lines of resignation. “Come aboard.”
I stepped onto the raft, Xavyr, Rorie, and Sabin on my heels. We stayed silent as the Ferryman poled away from the dock out into the dark waters. Only the plink and splash of the pole could be heard, and the occasional drip from one of the stalactites overhead. I summoned the Call and tried to sense Kellan again but I got nothing, as I had back in Casseroux’s tower. Was he still alive? Why couldn’t I sense him? If we traveled into the heart of insanity itself and he was gone… I shook my head to clear my black thoughts. He had to be alive. That’s the only reality I would accept.
As we moved through the dim underworld, I became aware of my fox as she nudged my hand with a very cold and wet nose. I startled, not only because I hadn’t summoned her, but because she was quite flesh and blood again, as she had been in Solara. Veron had told me it wasn’t possible for her to do either of those things, but clearly he was mistaken. I looked over at the other three to see if they had noticed her, but it was apparent they couldn’t see her. Sabin’s gaze was cast in my direction but she showed no signs that she could see my very solid fox spirit.
I didn’t know what it all meant, but her presence comforted me.
Thirty minutes came and went, then an hour. It seemed we were going in circles, but the Ferryman’s realm made no logical sense, with entrances to all the countless realms crammed within a relatively small and seemingly subterranean series of caverns. Time and distance compressed themselves in this place.
But then the Ferryman snorted and stopped poling, leaving the raft to spin slowly through the fog. For a moment I thought he could somehow read minds and was irritated with my impatience. But as I took in his furrowed brow and the rigid set of his shoulders, I realized something was wrong.
“Ferryman?” I asked.
He raised a hand to quiet me. Xavyr tensed, sensing something was amiss, and Rorie placed a hand on the sword at his hip.
The mist took on a sinister feel as we waited, and if I thought it had been quiet before, I didn’t know the meaning. No one breathed, even my heart refused to beat as we stood in the darkness. At my side, my fox let out a low whine.
A blinding light beamed down on us and the raft shot upwards into the air. I fell over on my side, the wooden planks of the raft rough against my skin. We rose quickly, and the ceiling approached, hard to see through the bright light but very much there. I cringed against the impending collision, and…
…then we were floating atop a massive body of water, the sun beating down on us. Not just one sun but many, all across the sky. And perhaps sun wasn’t the right word at all, since we definitely weren’t in any normal universe, and suns weren’t usually pink. Rosebud pink, with visible flames flickering at the edges of the spheres.
The lake was waveless and glassy and completely black, like a vast well of ink. I could almost call it an ocean for its size. I climbed to my feet and spun once, panicked, because there was no shore in sight. I wasn’t the only one—the Ferryman had risen to his feet and rotated in place, one gigantic clawed hand raised to shield his eyes as he looked for land. Finally, I spotted a distant shimmer of gray along the horizon, the wavy outline of something that might be mountains. In every other direction there was nothingness, just an expanse of endless black water.
“What just happened?” Sabin asked breathily. She hadn’t bothered to pick herself up off the floor of the raft, and I didn’t blame her.
“I’m not sure,” the Ferryman said slowly, and I was very afraid then.
“Is this the Timekeeper’s realm?” Xavyr asked me.
“Yes,” I responded without hesitation. “It’s not a place I’ve been, but it…feels the same.”
The Ferryman nodded. “No one else would be able to summon me from my own realm. His power is growing.”
“As if he wasn’t strong enough before?” Sabin asked.
We stood in silence for a space of time, absorbing the gravity of the situation. “Well,” I said at last, “There’s nothing to do but press on.”
“Agreed,” Rorie said.
“I can’t feel Kellan. The Call of the Hunt isn’t working,” Sabin said, her brown eyes wide with panic. “Evr, Rorie, you try.”
“I already did,” I said. “I haven’t been able to feel him for a while now.”
“Does that mean…” Rorie didn’t finish the sentence.
“No,” I said, my tone a bit more harsh than intended. “It does not mean he’s dead. It’s just some trickery of the Timekeeper.”
Sabin’s face was red, as if she were fighting back tears. “So, to the land in the distance, then?”
“That seems logical,” the Ferryman agreed.
I shook my head. “The Timekeeper doesn’t do logical.”
“Then what do you suggest?” Rorie asked.
“Go in the opposite direction.”
They all stared at me with matching dubious expressions.
“I know it sounds nuts,” I said. “But that’s why it’s going to work.”
After a long pause, Xavyr said, “I trust your judgement.”
“As do I,” the Ferryman added.
Sabin just folded her arms over her chest, her face moving from anger to tearfulness and back again. “Whatever. Let’s just go.”
The Ferryman stuck his pole down into the water experimentally. “I can’t touch bottom. I’m afraid this isn’t going to help us much.”
We spent several minutes after that debating what we could use to create a makeshift oar. Our weapons strapped together, the pole broken into smaller pieces and tied into a wider piece, one of the planks of the raft. None of the ideas were stellar, and the suns seemed to be growing in intensity.
“I’ll swim,” Xavyr said finally, “And pull the raft behind us.” He pointed to the small coil of rope at the corner of the raft.
“How long can you keep that up for?” I said, biting my lip.
“Long enough to test your theory.”
“You don’t think the water is toxic, do you?” Sabin asked.
I walked to the edge, bent down, and scooped up a handful of it. It had the same viscosity as water, but even just the small pool of it in my hand was impenetrably dark. I couldn’t see my skin through it, like a handful of midnight sky.
“Well, it’s not searing my flesh off,” I said.
Xavyr narrowed his eyes at me. “Do not risk yourself foolishly.”
“You’re about to dunk your whole body in it. It’s the least I could do.”
He looked like he would say more but instead he spun away from me, stripped off his boots, and jumped into the black lake.
I retrieved the coil of rope and tossed him one end of it. He began to side-stroke across the lake and when the slack in the rope became taut, the raft slowly slid across the surface. Xavyr was a remarkably strong swimmer and we soon picked up a decent amount of speed. He was truly a masterpiece of physicality. Seeing his shoulders ripple just above the water, my lips tingled for a moment remembering our kiss. I mean, it hadn’t meant anything, it had only been to shock me out of my violent condition. That almost didn’t even count as a kiss
then, did it?
We had traveled probably a thousand feet when I saw ripples in the water far out ahead of us. These ripples, unlike the ones Xavyr created, were coming toward us.
“Xavyr!”
“I see,” he called, pausing in his forward momentum and treading in place.
“Get back on the raft,” the Ferryman called.
“No time,” Xavyr called back.
As the line of approaching ripples collided with his expanding ones, he was yanked beneath the surface of the water.
Chapter Sixteen
“Xavyr!” I shrieked.
I ran to the edge of the raft, but Rorie pulled me back. I twisted in his grasp but there was no breaking free from his tree trunk arms. The air left my lungs as he crushed me against his chest.
Air bubbles surfaced in the spot where Xavyr went under, and the water grew turbulent. Long moments passed and my blood burned through my veins like acid.
And then, a head broke the surface. It looked like a snake and a swan and a dragon all mixed together, and it shone a metallic pewter color. It was quite large, the size of a compact car. I didn’t want to know how large the rest of its body was. Eyes of milky white pinned themselves to my face, and it shivered as if in anticipation before lunging toward the raft.
Then another head surfaced, this one far more familiar. Xavyr swam up behind the creature and threw the end of the rope around its neck, looped it once, and then tossed the end of the rope through the beast’s mouth like a horse bit. The thing screamed in rage and thrashed beneath him, but he held fast. They went round and round in front of the raft until suddenly the fight went out of the creature and the battle was over.
The creature turned back in the direction we’d been going and swam forward, pulling the raft behind it. Xavyr moved arm over arm back to the raft. Rorie loosened his grip on me and I shoved away from him.
“Don’t act like you care if I live or die,” I spat at him.
He stared back at me and something flickered through his eyes, but I couldn’t read it.
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