by Ivy Asher
Zeph studies my face for a beat and then nods. Relief washes through me at his silent vote of confidence, and we start to approach Lazza’s still prone body in the dirt. I feel as though I’m walking straight into quicksand as I get closer to Lazza. It’s like I know it’s dangerous, but I won’t know how dangerous until it’s probably too late and I’m being sucked under and suffocated to death.
I expect Zeph to toe him to see if he moves or if there’s any indication of some other possible threat, but instead he walks over and stabs him with a sword through the shoulder. Lazza doesn’t even flinch or make a peep, and as shocked as I am by the brutality of what Zeph just did, we know Lazza is completely unconscious now.
Zeph nods at me, and I tentatively make my way over to him. Lazza is face down, which makes this part easy, I guess, but now I just need to figure out what the fuck I’m missing. I kneel next to Lazza’s body and reach my hand out to cover the Vow rune on the back of his neck. I take a deep breath and close my eyes and try to piece together what it is that I might be missing.
I’m touching the magic, I’m saying the words… “Nusht fialow odreece tamod kle.” I’m willing the magic to break.
I wait again to see if what I just did will work this time, but again nothing happens. Frustration slams through me, and I tighten my grip on Lazza’s neck and try to figure out what the fuck is going on.
I flip through everything I can recall from Nadi to my dad and what’s been said about Bonds and the Vow and how they work. Nadi said I needed to speak it into existence. My dad told me I already knew how to do this, to think back to the lessons. I sift through the lessons I can remember. The first time I used my will and got in trouble for freezing the animals. The words I used to bind them to me and force them to listen. The lesson with Princess.
I pause and retrace my mental steps.
The words I used...
I focus on the memory of the time I froze the animals. “A word is never bad, but bad things can be done with words, and we must make sure that we keep ourselves and others from doing that.” My dad’s words bounce around in my brain, and I realize something. I didn’t get in trouble for using the word, I got in trouble for forcing my will on something and then using my magic to enforce it.
What if the language or the words that I’ve been taught have nothing to do with the magic?
I think through the lessons and the words that I was taught, but I can’t recall anything that tells me that the words themselves are anything more than the language of my dad’s people and that’s why he was passing it down to me.
Zeph’s deep voice rises up in my mind as he tells me about how the word tamod was used against his parents. But I can’t help wondering if, even in this case, the word was inconsequential, and the will of the user was what mattered?
It would make sense that the gryphons would think the words meant more than they did. It was the language of their oppressors. It would have naturally become synonymous with the magic that bent the Gryphons to the Ouphe will. It makes even more sense that the language of the Ouphe is practically dead. I’m sure anyone who spoke it in the presence of a gryphon was ripped apart right then and there.
The Ouphe and all that they represent has been all but destroyed, so of course the language would have been too.
It dawns on me what I’ve been doing wrong. I’ve been so focused on the words, thinking they were the key, but they were just words.
I’m the key.
My will and my magic are all that I need. Not the words. They couldn’t carry my will, because they’re not even mine.
I open my eyes and look up at the guys, understanding lighting up my eyes.
I know what to do.
Pain slams through my abdomen, and I gasp and look down to see Lazza shoving a dagger into my stomach. I hear the roar of my mates just as I see Lazza slowly flip over, another dagger in his other hand headed directly for my head.
I grunt against the sharp metal in my stomach and immediately get pissed with myself. I fucking knew this asshole would pull something like this, and still I kneeled down next to him and just sat here, giving his fake unconscious ass plenty of time to plan his next move.
Amateur move, Falon! You’d think it was my first war or something.
Lazza’s dagger gets closer to my face, and I pull on my source of magic and let it overtake my entire body, including my voice.
“Stop,” I order, shoving my magic and my will at Lazza like a bitch-slap of authority that will not be argued with.
He freezes mid swipe, and time picks back up as I hold a purple glowing hand up to the guys to keep them away. I have Lazza now, and I don’t want to take any chances that their interference will fuck with anything.
Lazza’s eyes fill with fear, and I didn’t even give him my practiced smile yet. I leave his dagger in my stomach even though it hurts. I’ve watched enough Grey’s Anatomy to know you don’t pull shit out of you unless there’s someone there to deal with the internal injuries.
Slowly I reach out for Lazza’s neck again, not because I technically need to, but because it makes me feel like a dominant bitch. I blame all those years I thought I was a wolf.
“You can’t,” Lazza tells me between clenched teeth as I lean into him.
“This is the reclamation, Lazza. But don’t worry, you won’t live to see the other side of it.”
I don’t give him time to respond. I may have pulled a rookie move and gotten myself stabbed, but I’m not going to monologue uselessly and give anyone time to fuck with what’s about to happen.
“I unbind this rune and all the magic in it. I demand that this mark cease to exist and crumble to dust, never to be used against anyone again,” I order, magic pouring out of my mouth, coating the words that I’m speaking, and sinking into Lazza one spark and flicker of power at a time.
Lazza starts to pant, and I wait until his aqua gaze once again focuses on my hard lavender stare.
“So I fucking will it, so it is fucking done,” I growl, and just as I feel the rune crumble to nothing under my palm, I call on a swoosh blade and shove it up through Lazza’s chin until it comes out of the top of his head.
I let go of the blade and the back of Lazza’s neck, and he falls away from me. Lazza’s dagger in my stomach disappears, and just when I think it’s all over, power slams into me like a lightning bolt. I’m hit by the magic that was in the Vow marks as they crumble to nothing on the thousands of gryphons who wore them. The magic forces its way to my center and lights me up as it tries to settle in my too small body.
I scream as it sears itself into all that I am again, and try to breathe through the pain that’s pumping in my veins. I feel Pigeon wake up inside of me, and we wrap around each other as we try to withstand the tsunami of agony.
I know I promised myself I would stop letting my body shut down, but I decide exceptions to every rule are a good thing as blackness begins to overtake my consciousness. I wave it over and treat it like an old friend, surrendering freely to the oblivion being offered. The pain starts to fade, and I give the bleak darkness two enthusiastic thumbs up as it swaddles me completely, and I pass the fuck out.
23
I groan as I come to. Wherever I am is quiet, but I know it will be safe, which is an unusual feeling for me to have in this world. I stretch out, feeling oddly rejuvenated, and realize I’m dressed. For some reason, that alarms me, and I open my eyes immediately and snap up.
“What the fuck?” I grumble, my voice gravelly.
“Whoa, what happened?” Ryn demands as he rushes over and crouches down next to the cot I’m now sitting up in.
“Why am I dressed?” I ask, confused, but that just seems to make Ryn even more confused. “I never wake up dressed. It’s freaking me the fuck out. Is Zeph okay? Treno? You?”
I look around, and I’m once again in a tent, but there’s nothing in here except me, Ryn, and the cot I’m lying on.
Ryn’s worried eyes warm, and he releases a relieved exhal
e. “Zeph said we should get you cleaned up, but the bath and water are still on their way. You woke up sooner than we thought you would,” he explains. “Zeph and Treno are fine. They’d be here, but they had to intervene between the fighting that was still going on. They’ll come back as soon as they can.”
I release my own deep breath and let the tension sluff off my shoulders. “Where are we?”
“We’re about a day’s fly from the Eyrie. We’re working on getting a temporary camp set up here while we try to smooth tensions over. Cree and her people have been bringing in and setting up tents.” He gestures to our current surroundings.
I give them one last look and then focus on where Zeph and Treno are.
“Fighting, huh?” I ask, and Ryn’s face grows solemn as he nods.
“Looks like getting rid of the Vow might have been the easy part. Bringing the Gryphons back together after everything both sides have been through is a whole other story,” I observe, and Ryn snorts. He sighs again, and I realize how tired he looks. I reach up and run the back of my hand over the scruff on his cheek.
“Hey,” I call to him as his exhausted gray eyes land on mine. “We did it.”
A wide proud smile stretches slowly across Ryn’s face, and he pulls my lips to his for a slow kiss before he rests his forehead against mine. “We did it,” he agrees.
We stay like that for a breath, just taking the moment in.
“It almost doesn’t seem real,” he confesses. “I’ve thought of what this day would be like for so long, and now here we are, and nothing is at all like I thought it would be.”
“How so?” I ask.
“For starters, I thought the fighting would stop when there wasn’t a Vow left to fight over, but it’s clear the wounds run deeper than magic.”
I nod and run my fingers through his hair. It was so much shorter when I first saw him, and now I’m not sure which I prefer.
“It’ll take time for everyone, I’m sure. Lucky for us, we seem to live for a fucking long ass time, or at least that’s the impression I got from the archives,” I tell him on a chuckle. “Holy shit, it was you!” I accuse, pushing back from him as I realize something. “You put the mating book right where I would find it in the archives. That’s what you were doing there.”
“I gave my word to Zeph that I wouldn’t tell you about the bond, but if you figured it out and came to me…” he says with a leading tone.
“But why would you agree not to tell me in the first place?” I ask, hoping to finally understand all the fucked up shit that happened between us.
Ryn hesitates, his gray eyes studying my face for a moment, and then he gives a defeated sigh. “Zeph suspected your bloodline. He wanted confirmation before completing the bond, just in case we...” His pause is weighted.
“Just in case you what?” I press.
“We had to make an impossible decision for the good of the Hidden,” he admits tensely.
An impossible decision? What the hell does that mean? Like they were going to kill me or something? I joke in my mind, but as soon as I think the words and scoff in my head, I freeze.
Holy shit, that’s really it.
“You know?” I accuse, as I put missing pieces together and get a good look at a shockingly clear picture.
“Know? Know what?” Ryn questions, befuddled by my reaction.
I shake my head, completely caught off guard. “You didn’t want to mate with me if you were going to have to kill me,” I elaborate, and the shame and silent assent I see in his eyes confirms my suspicions.
It all makes so much sense now. I was told the Hidden had been hunting down anyone who had Bond magic. I assumed they were making sure another situation like the Vow couldn’t happen again, but it’s also possible that they somehow knew killing the bloodline of the original creators of the Vow would end it too.
“It wasn’t as simple as that exactly; we really did suspect that you were a spy for a while, but then your potential blood ties became the larger issue. We weren’t sure what to do. We didn’t know about the gates or any other worlds, so we couldn’t be certain that if you died, you would take the Vow with you. But we couldn’t dismiss the notion either.”
He takes a breath and runs a hand over his face and shakes his head, while I try to figure out my footing in all of this. They knew I was their mate and that they might have to kill me. It definitely sheds light on a lot, but I’m not sure what to think about what I’m looking at now. What if Zeph and I hadn’t had that night and Ryn was able to confirm who I was faster. Would they have gone through with it? Can I even blame them for considering it, knowing what I know now?
“We didn’t know you, and we’d been fighting for so long for our freedom. If you were the last of the line, it felt like this gift, and yet we were calling to each other, so it also felt like a curse all at the same time. It was as though the moon and stars were torturing us, dangling you before us and forcing an impossible decision.”
He looks back at me, his eyes now beseeching.
“In the end, it didn’t matter, because you and Zeph mated, and by the time I had confirmation that you were a direct Sept descendant of the Bond Makers, and possibly the last one, I had mated with you too, and everything was different.”
I nod in understanding, feeling surprisingly calm. I might not have been so calm about this a couple months ago, but I’ve seen so much and we’ve all been through so much that I don’t see the world the same way. I can’t say, if I had been in their shoes, that I wouldn’t have done the same thing. I would have been way less of an asshole for sure, but I would have considered killing someone for the greater good.
That thought gives me pause, and I take a moment to reflect on just how much I’ve changed. I loved bikes and fixing cars and other things. Beers on a Friday were a favorite pastime, and the only thing I had ever killed was spiders and a cactus someone at work gave me once. Now, pants are a cause for celebration, I have magic and gumption and three semi reformed asshole mates. I don’t bat an eye at killing or doing whatever it takes to survive and thrive, and I don’t feel even slightly bad or remorseful about that.
I grew up.
The flaps to the tent I’m sitting in open, and several people back in carrying what looks like a large hammered copper kid pool. Behind them file in several other people with colossal steaming buckets of water, which they pour into the pool.
It appears my bath has arrived.
The sudden presence of clean water has me slowly becoming aware of how disgusting I am. I look down at the tunic someone has put me in. It’s crusted in blood and stiff with wrinkles embedded so deeply in the fabric that I doubt they will ever come out.
The bath carriers and fillers disappear back out of the tent just as fast as they came, and I don’t hesitate to strip out of someone’s dirty shirt and practically cannonball my stinky ass into the tub.
Ryn chuckles and then gets awkwardly quiet. He clears his throat, and I have to stop myself from smiling and teasing him for being weird. “I can go if you want some privacy,” he tells me, making no effort to actually go anywhere.
I shrug as I start to remove the layers of filth and death from my skin and hair. “There’s not room for two in here, otherwise I’d invite you in, but you can just hang out and watch if you want,” I offer, meaning it totally innocently even though it didn’t exactly sound that way.
The words room for two ping around in my mind for a second, and then it hits me like a kick to the face...Pigeon!
“Fucking shit!” I face palm and then dive into my center. I’m the worst body sharer in the world. I’m always forgetting about poor Pigeon. “Pidge! Pidge, are you here? Are you okay?” I shout at the top of my lungs, my voice frenzied as I look for her.
She holds up a wing and winces like I just flipped on the lights and she was trying to sleep. Only she flashes me an image of exactly that. Shit. “Sorry, Pidge, I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” She waves me off and curls back up in my chest. She�
�s better, but I can tell she’s still healing. I back away quietly as she flashes me an image of a child banging on a bathroom door, chanting mommy over and over again.
I snort. “If anyone is the annoying kid in this scenario, it’s you, you’re way needier than I am.” She rolls her eyes but makes that chuffing sound she does when she’s laughing. “Love you, Pidge,” I lob at her, and she rolls her eyes again and flashes me a meme that says thirsty on it in bright neon yellow lights. “Thirsty for your love, Pidge!” I agree, and she chuffs again and then shoos me away.
I come back to the bath and the tent, elation pumping through me, and discover Ryn is practically in my face, his eyes filled with worry. “Are you unwell, what happened?”
“I’m an ass and completely forgot to check on Pigeon when I first woke up. She’s good. Tired, but good.”
Ryn visibly relaxes. “The healers spent hours working to help her. They left completely drained. She was in bad shape.”
I send another little pulse of love to Pigeon as that information sinks in. We’ve had too many close calls. It will be nice to just take it easy and live that lazy gryphon life we’ve decided to live. Well, mostly I just decided that, but I feel confident that Pidge will be on board when she wakes up.
“So you’re not mad?” Ryn asks as he settles on the ground next to the kiddie pool bath. I turn to him, and water tries to slosh over the side.
“What? Mad that you and Zeph thought about killing me?” I consider it a moment. “I’ve thought about killing the two of you a lot, so I think we’re probably pretty even on that front,” I admit. “I mean, much groveling will be expected about the whole secret keeping thing,” I tease, trailing off.
“I did try to tell you in my own clever way,” he defends. “It’s not my fault you didn’t read it.”
I splash water at him and drop my mouth open in faux outrage. “Oh please, blame the victim, why don’t you. It’s not my fault the book you chose looked all boring and factual. I prefer a different form of book porn, thank you very much.”