by Ivy Asher
“Ryn...” I breathe out heavily, and I can’t tell if his name on my lips is an invitation or a chastisement.
I can’t get the image of him holding our severed bonds to his chest and desperately trying to reattach them. The pain in his face haunts me, but so does everything that’s happened between us. The mistrust and accusations, the fighting and betrayal.
I don’t know if it’s possible to come back from that.
His lips are on mine, and I’m opening to him before I can question what I’m doing. He kisses me and throws me off my axis, just like he has from the first moment I saw him on the balcony in the Eyrie. He cups my face and devours me, mind, body, and soul, and as much as I question coming back from all the awful things that have happened between us, I know in this moment, that there’s no coming back from this either.
As hurt as I’ve been. As lost and as broken as he’s made me feel, you can’t kiss someone with this much passion if you have no hope for more.
He can’t sear his lips and soul to mine, pour his sacred promises into my mouth, caress his passion against my own, if I don’t feel all of those things too.
I pull away from Ryn’s lips, panting and confused. His thigh rubs against my sex, and I’m practically grinding against it as the rest of me tangles around him. I don’t drop my hands from around his neck or open my eyes, because I’m not ready for this moment to be over...and it has to be over.
I can feel Ryn’s unspoken apology in his kiss, his words, and in the way that he’s holding me right now. I’m woman enough to admit that as much as I don’t want there to be anything between us, there is. But if I accept him, then I know Zeph and Treno will come too, and I’m not there.
“Ryn…I can’t…” I start, but his lips steal my words.
“You can. You just choose me like I’m choosing you, and we fight for that,” he tells me, as though it’s all that simple.
“If it were just you, Ryn, then that argument might work, but it’s not.”
“I need you. We need you, and you know you need us,” he argues.
I sigh and try to pull away from him. “What do you need, Ryn? Because I need trust, respect, and validation. I need to feel important and cared for, and I need to be understood. All I get from the three of you is venom, blame, and resigned affection. Suspicion laces your every word to me, and your loyalties are divided, Ryn. You can’t decide if your Zeph’s Altern or my mate, and I deserve more than the scraps you three throw my way to keep me compliant and pliable.”
“We know that, but you won’t even look at us,” he tells me, ducking down so that his eyes are at the same level as mine. “We’re trying, Falon, but you don’t see any value in it. You want to cut us out of your essence instead of letting our tenuous connections grow into more.”
He huffs out an exasperated breath.
“We didn’t do things right, but they’re done. No Ouphe magic in the world will allow us to erase it, but why are we irredeemable to you?” he asks quietly, and the sorrow in it hurts more than I thought it could.
“I don’t know, Ryn, why was I never worthy of any of you in the first place?” I ask as I fervently try to blink back the emotion welling in my eyes. “You refused to see me from the beginning, to trust me, to acknowledge our connection and what it meant. You three all taught me very important lessons about what the term mate meant to you,” I lament. “You can’t get mad at me now for simply taking your lead and learning to see things the same way.”
“Falon, you’re not seeing, you’re hiding. Zeph is wearing your runes even though they haunt him. He’s trying...for you. Treno says you need time and space, that we owe you that much, but I think you need to wake up. Navigating the current between us is never going to be easy, but you wouldn’t want it if it was. We made mistakes, but we called to you for a reason, and you called to us right back. We fit. It may not be pretty or look the way you thought it would, but we fit all the same. You need to admit that to yourself and accept it so we can move forward.”
“I need to go,” I tell him, wedging myself out between his warm body and the tree behind me.
“Don’t run, Falon.”
“I’m not, I just need to think...and to sleep, and to not be drunk when I’m trying to figure shit out.”
The image of Wekun’s tent and my bed of pillows pops up in my mind, and the next thing I know, I’m not standing with Ryn in the brush bordering the Gryphon camp, but I’m once again in Wekun’s tent.
“Fuck,” I snarl and run my fingers through my hair.
I pull at my roots, as though that will activate an instruction manual for these fucking runes and what they can do.
It doesn’t.
First thing tomorrow, I’m training with Wekun, I tell myself. No more whining and putting shit off. Clearly, I have no control over my abilities, and that is not a good thing when we’ll be heading into war any day now.
The Bond Weaver is nowhere in sight as I fling the entrance to his tent to the side. I stomp out and make my way back toward the Gryphon camp. Ryn is going to think I pulled a bitch move and ran away like a coward. Even though I am done with the discussion we were having for tonight, I don’t want him to think that I didn’t hear him and that I’m not going to give what he’s saying thought.
He did give me a lot to consider. I just need to do that when I’m completely sober—and he’s not pressed up against me, clouding my good sense.
It takes me several minutes, but I cross the line between the Ouphe side of tents and the Gryphons’. Winding my way through the camp, I move in the direction of where I know the bar tent is located. I figure Ryn will have gone back there as soon as I disappeared.
“She’s being harder than a rock troll’s prick,” a voice declares to my right, and I pause mid-step when I recognize that voice as Ryn’s.
“We’ve been hard on her, so are you really surprised?” another deep voice replies, and I’m surprised to hear that it’s Zeph’s.
They’re inside the tent I’m currently standing next to, and I pause for a moment, not sure what to do.
“I thought she would understand. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I thought she would see what we have been up against our whole lives and that we had to be careful. Loa is just more proof of why we couldn’t simply rely on our instincts: they’ve been used against us for so long,” Ryn confesses, and I bristle at the sound of Loa’s name.
I want to destroy her. I’ve never wanted to hurt someone as badly as I want to hurt her. I take a deep breath and file my vengeance-filled thoughts away. I’ll think more on that later when I don’t need to focus on spying on the guys.
“She doesn’t see things as one-sided the way we have though,” Treno offers. I stare at the side of the tent in shock. Are Zeph and Ryn really having a heart-to-heart with their mortal enemy? Is Treno seriously talking to them like equals? “We all keep forgetting that this isn’t her world; she doesn’t have the same prejudices as we do. She takes everything and everyone at face value, and truly we can’t expect any different. None of us gave her time to make up her own mind before we pushed our will and the way that we see things onto her.”
“But what choice did we have?” Ryn asks him.
“Maybe none, given what we’re up against, but what choice did she really have either?” Treno volleys back.
“She was shoved into this world, and we all demanded that she make a choice before her wings ever caught the current. We did the best that we could, but so did she,” Zeph states, and the tent goes quiet.
“So what now?” Treno asks.
“We do better,” Ryn answers simply. “She doesn’t want to listen, but the bond works in our favor: she physically responds when we’re close. It’s natural for mates to crave one another, and she gives into it instinctively when she forgets to fight it.”
I shoot an incredulous look at the tent. I’m going to punch Ryn in the dick the next time I see him, giving my weaknesses away like that to the others.
“She st
ill wants to sever the bonds,” Treno informs them, and deep growls bleed out through the tent.
“That tree rutting Ouphe told her he couldn’t do it,” Ryn supplies.
Well, well, well. I suddenly don’t feel so bad about eavesdropping, when they’ve obviously been doing the same thing.
“He’s going to ask someone else about other ways to do it, but some female Ouphe threatened to hit me with a pot if I didn’t get out of their camp, so I didn’t catch who. We need to keep an eye on him,” Ryn adds. “I told her we were all going to fight for her, that we were all working to show her that the mating matters to us.”
“And what was her response?” Treno presses, like he’s a kid at a sleepover hanging on every word his friend is delivering about his crush. It would be kind of cute if the foundation between us wasn’t layered in fucked up.
“I think, despite everything that’s happened, she wants to believe it, but she’s going to think that all we are is what she’s seen so far.”
“We’ll just have to show her more then,” Treno declares, and Ryn grunts in agreement.
I’m so floored by what they’re saying, and the fact that the Altern of the Avowed and the Altern of the Hidden are the ones saying it, that I don’t even feel the person behind me until their huge hand is covering my mouth, and their other arm is holding me tightly against them. My feet lift off the ground, and I try to kick out as I’m pulled away from the tent and whatever the guys are saying now.
“It’s not nice to listen to conversations that you weren’t invited to be a part of, little sparrow,” Zeph whispers in my ear. He nips at my lobe as he holds me even tighter against him, and my fear is quickly replaced by irritation.
I try to bite the hand that’s pressed over my mouth and squirm out of his hold, but all of a sudden, my stomach drops and we’re no longer standing in front of a tent, but inside a cool dust-covered room.
We both tense, Zeph still holding on to me tightly, and I mumble fuck against his palm. I think I slipped us somewhere, only this place doesn’t look familiar at all.
“Cum on a tree sprite,” Zeph whispers quietly, his hold on my mouth and waist weakening slightly. I look behind me and see recognition in his eyes, and I immediately realize that I didn’t slip us anywhere...he did.
16
I swear, as soon as I figure out how to slip from one place to another on purpose, I’m never going to walk again, but until that happens, this shit is annoying. I look around the unfamiliar room, taking in the lumpy mattress and the handmade wooden frame. There’s an armoire in the corner, and the walls and floor are made of old wooden planks.
The place has a distinct cabin vibe, but more rustic and handmade than anything I’ve seen before. There’s a large window to my left that’s letting moonlight trickle in to kiss the dusty surfaces, but when I look out, all I see are...tree branches.
“Where are we?” I ask, pushing out of Zeph’s hold.
He lets me go, but when the floor creaks ominously underneath me, I instantly wish he hadn’t.
“It’s safe,” Zeph reassures me. “My father laid the floor himself; it will hold us.”
“Your father?” I question, turning from the branch-hindered view back to Zeph.
“I lived here until…” he trails off, but I can fill in the blanks on my own. He lived here until they were murdered.
I look around the room and wonder if this was Zeph’s or if it was his parents’. When Dri told me about what happened to Zeph and his brother, I assumed it happened in Kestrel City, but I’m starting to grasp that might not be the case.
“Are we in a tree?” I ask, as the branches on the other side of the window catch my attention again.
“We are.”
Zeph’s voice crackles with emotion as he walks to the bed and runs his hand over the comforter that’s covering it. The air in here is stale, and everything looks like it has surrendered to disuse and age. Leaves are prying their way into the room at one corner, like the tree this place is nestled in decided to start to reclaim it.
I suspect there’s more house on the other side of the closed door, but I suspect cracking it open to see would force Zeph to deal with more than just stagnant air and dust bunnies. His whole world started to crumble inside of these walls.
Dri said that after Zeph’s parents were killed, he and his brother were forced to go live with Lazza and Treno’s family. I look out through the window and spot other houses in the branches of colossal trees, and wonder which house belonged to his betrayers.
“My brother and I used to sleep in this room,” Zeph tells me as he sits on the bed, a plume of dust rising up to greet him.
“He was older, right?” I question gently, my tone telling him he’s not obligated to answer if it’s too much.
“By a year. Issak was a good big brother,” he tells me softly, and I ache for his loss.
The name sparks something in me, and my brow folds in question. “Was Issak a common name?” I ask curiously, I’ve heard it twice now, which suddenly seems odd to me.
Zeph shrugs like he’s never really thought about it. I make a note to ask Wekun when I get back. I lean a shoulder against the wall and quietly try to give Zeph as much time in this place as he needs. I’m curious as to why he brought us here, but I realize that it may not have been a conscious decision, but more of a fleeting thought our new ability grasped onto somehow.
“Lazza had a tainted mind even when we were young. People don’t like to admit that about eyas, but sometimes you can see the rot early.”
I drop my head and nod in understanding. I had limited contact with Lazza, but I could definitely see that. I didn’t sense an ounce of compassion in him either of the two times I was in his presence.
“Issak found a nest of sparrow hatchlings in the training yard one day. He didn’t say much after we were taken away, but when he found the little creatures, and it was clear the parents weren’t coming back, he became single-minded in caring for them. I can see now that he was working through what had been done to us, maybe shifting his loss and hurt onto the tiny birds, but every day I saw more and more of my brother come back.”
Anguish throbs through me, because I can see where this story is going. I shove away from the wall and move toward Zeph as he stares at his hands blankly and continues.
“Lazza didn’t just kill them, he tortured them. Unlike his parents, however, he didn’t have the power to force Issak to just sit and watch like he had to with our mother and father. When Lazza broke that last little hatchling’s wings and then started in on its feet, Issak snapped. It all happened so fast; I should have helped him, but I was just so stunned. I didn’t move, not to help the little sparrows or my brother, and then…”
“They killed him,” I finish, and Zeph nods.
“I thought he’d be scared, and that was in his eyes when I pulled him into my lap and tried to stop the bleeding while also trying to get us away from the riots. But there was so much anger in his eyes too, anger and...relief. I’ve never stopped fighting since. Not against the Avowed, my past, the Ouphe...you.”
Zeph looks up, his golden, honey-colored gaze fixing on mine, and I’m taken aback by the regret I find in it. “I don’t know if I’m capable of putting aside the fight. It’s what’s kept me going for most of my life, but I don’t want to fight against you, little sparrow. I don’t want to destroy what we should have as mates.”
I stare into Zeph’s eyes as his confession sinks into me. His stare is filled with conviction, but I can see that he’s adrift too. That he’s just as lost as I am when it comes to figuring out how we all fit together. I question if what he’s saying is enough, enough to build on, to try to start fresh, but I need more than words. I need the kind of proof that only comes with time. I need to see the day-in-day-out kind of effort his conviction is promising me.
“Okay,” I concede after a while of us studying each other and trying to read into the other’s gaze.
“Okay,” he repeats, a ques
tioning lilt in his tone.
“Okay,” I confirm, my eyes and resolve sure. I exhale, and the concern and anxiety that felt like it had settled in my marrow abates. I look over and trace the lines of the window. An idea occurs to me, but I need to figure out how to get out of this room. “Come with me,” I tell Zeph as I move closer to the window.
Crap. It isn’t the slide open kind.
I reach for a lone chair that’s been propped in the corner and grip it by the back. I bring it up like I’m ready to hit a home run.
“What are you doing?” Zeph shouts out, grabbing for the chair and pulling it out of my hands.
“We have to get out of here somehow, and I don’t know how to use the slipping thing properly yet,” I defend.
Zeph reaches over me to a handle on the right-hand side of the window. He gives it one good twist, and what do you know, the whole frame opens out into the night, like a door.
“Oh,” I chirp in surprise, “...that’s a cool trick.”
Zeph shakes his head and snorts, and I just shrug as I call on my wings. The black as coal appendages shove out of my shoulder blades, and I bite back the smile that wants to take over my face when Zeph’s wings immediately pop out too.
“Show me Lazza’s house,” I ask as I climb out of the window onto a branch that’s as thick as a car.
Zeph doesn’t say anything as he follows me out, but he does step around me to take the lead. I expect him to question why I want to see it, or to maybe shut down at the thought of having to go back there, but he just walks out on the limb until the air is clear of branches below him, and then jumps off.
It’s like watching a graceful diver leap out into the air, ready to twist and flip his way into a perfect score. He spreads his arms like he was made to do nothing more than ride the wind, and his ebony-dipped wings flare out powerfully to catch a current that forces him to arc up into the air.
I smile as I watch him own the air, and Pigeon sits up excitedly inside of me at the prospect of flying. I chuckle at her.