Chapter Twenty-Six #2
I nod, trembling. My body shakes as he helps me onto the griffin’s back.
It feels a bit like riding a horse bareback, something I’ve only done once or twice when I had to share a horse with my sister.
But her body runs hotter than a horse’s, and the feel of her long feathers beneath my hands as I grip her large neck is strange and somewhat alarming.
Ronan mounts the griffin behind me, her wings making it a tight fit. He wraps his hands slowly, luxuriously around my waist as he presses his body against mine.
“Hold on tight,” I say. My heart nearly explodes out of my chest from terror and excitement as the griffin takes to her feet.
The great eagle wings spread behind us and begin to flap.
Then, with a stomach-turning lurch, she launches into the air.
I scream involuntarily as the canyon floor recedes beneath us. I grip her neck, hoping I’m not hurting her, hoping Ronan doesn’t slip from her back as she soars through the valley.
Ronan laughs and cries out in joy as we come out of the canyon.
Selara lies before us. It’s a view no one has ever seen before, and it takes my breath away.
Even those that have climbed to the top of Faros’s tallest towers and the highest cliffs have never been this high.
From up here, I can see how unforgiving the land truly is.
The Serath Desert stretches on seemingly endlessly, the vast sand dunes reduced to mere ripples at this height, like ridges on a great golden feather.
In the far, far distance the Palador Mountains rise like a mirage, their craggy, forested peaks barely a silhouette against the sun-drenched sky.
The griffin flies towards the snaking River Mara, the glittering blue jewel flanked with strips of green. Faros and the cities along its banks reduce to dusty patches of brown amid the green, almost indistinguishable from the desert, only the temples rising in shining white marble above the dust.
It's shocking how small the palace seems from up here. How tiny and fragile all of Selara seems, more than a million people steps away from certain death at all times.
I wonder how small Nithyria would seem from up here if we could see beyond the mountains. I imagine it must look like the land swallowed us up, our miniscule structures nearly invisible beneath the dense canopy of the forest.
A gust of wind sends the griffin tumbling suddenly, her course veering sharply east towards the sea. My legs grip, but I feel Ronan slide behind me.
“Hold on!” I cry into the wind. My hair whips into my face like a lash as I feel Ronan scramble to keep his grip on my waist.
The griffin must feel his struggle because she fights against the wind, trying to right herself, and for a moment, he manages to regain his balance.
But then another gust comes, even more violent than the first. The griffin dives, looking for a place to land amid the cliffs. I cling to her neck, grabbing Ronan’s arm and trying to make him do the same, but I feel one of his legs fly up behind me as he loses his seat on her shoulders.
“No!” I shout, and I feel my power pressing into my palms. My shadows. I can feel them begging to be released.
I let them go with an anguished cry. They spill out from somewhere deep within me, somewhere vulnerable and full of terror. They don’t envelop us in darkness. Instead, they reach around us with whirring tendrils, binding us to the griffin.
They wrap around Ronan’s hips and push him down onto the griffin’s shoulders and forward against my body.
He wraps his grateful arms around me and around the griffin’s neck as her wings slow, the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea beneath us. She lowers us the final stretch deliberately, touching down with a softness that must be for our benefit.
My arms are numb when I pull them from her neck. The tendrils of shadow slowly retract, releasing us from their hold.
“Amazing,” murmurs Ronan, his mouth against my shoulder. I can feel the sweat on his skin, the thrashing beat of his heart against my back as he relaxes his grip.
He dismounts first then helps me down. We’re on a high cliff facing southeast, with the sea in front of us and to our left and Faros to our right.
Once we’re on solid ground, he takes me into his arms.
I jump up, laughing as my legs wrap around his waist. He laughs too, a relieved, shaking laugh that I feel all the way in my core as I hold him as tight as I can.
“See? We didn’t die,” he says, kissing my forehead firmly, like it’s the solid ground neither of us appreciated until this very moment.
“That was insane,” I say, my voice trembling.
Ronan slowly lowers me down to look at me. “But did you enjoy it?”
I nod, the energy flowing in my veins making it difficult to find the words. “A lot, up until the point you nearly died.”
“You saved me again,” he says, his hands still on my hips. “Although I don’t think she would have let me fall.”
The griffin is peering over the side of the cliff at the ocean below. She certainly seemed to be trying to help us. Maybe she really is as intelligent as Ronan believes.
“What’s she doing?” I ask, realizing that I trust him to interpret her feelings.
“Getting ready to hunt, I think. Shall we watch?”
I worry for a moment about whether she will return to carry us back—or how we’re even going to get her to carry us back, considering our communication with her is one-way—but when she dives to the crashing waves below, she returns with a large fish in her lion’s paws before I can even finish the thought.
She looks at us, and I could swear she’s offering us some. “No, thanks,” I say. I’m getting a bit hungry, but not enough for raw fish.
“See? She’s trying to take care of us. I know you can’t feel her, but you can tell, can’t you?”
He does seem right about her, I have to admit. Maybe it truly was Kerensa’s hand that led her to us instead of to any of the others, all of whom would have taken her life instead.
“I’m glad it was us,” I say. She begins to tear into the fish, and Ronan leads me to a boulder far enough back from the cliff’s edge that I feel comfortable taking a seat on it.
We look out together at the sea for a long moment, listening to the waves crash beneath us, the shoreline invisible beneath the cliffs.
“I missed the ocean,” I say.
“From when you lived in Pyka?”
“Yes. But it was different there. There are cliffs like these, but they’re covered in grass and moss. And the sand is dark.”
He looks wistfully out at the water, not meeting my gaze. “I remember. We visited a few times before the war. You were never there. I remember thinking they made you up.” He gives me a slight smile.
“They sent me away a lot.” While they were planning the war, although I don’t say that part out loud.
“To my aunt’s in Kalla, mostly. It was like a second home to me.
It wasn’t that hard for me to leave Pyka.
All the memories…most of them of empty rooms. Of closed doors and waiting.
Of training. I think what I miss the most isn’t what happened there, but what didn’t.
What could’ve, if things had been different. Does that make sense?”
He looks at me with deep affection. “Yes. Yes, it does.”
“I wish I had met you then,” I admit. “It would have saved me a lot of grief.”
“How so?”
I weigh what to tell him. I know I want to stop the plan Adria and Seth have put in motion, but if I tell Ronan about it, he’ll have no choice but to arrest them. They’ll likely be executed for what they’ve done, and Larus and Felix and everyone else involved as well.
But there’s a chance I can stop it from happening.
They need the Third Navy’s ships to blockade the harbor, and Larus has control of some of those.
There will still be time when he returns to stop them from coming.
From Seth’s latest message, his forces won’t be ready until after the end of the Great Festival, which is still weeks away.
All I need to do is get Larus on my side.
And he’s always been on my side.
“I’ve spent the past few years blaming you for everything,” I say. That’s true enough. “If I’d met you before, maybe things would have been different.”
“I doubt it,” he says with a humorless laugh. “I was different then.”
“In what way?”
“I was arrogant. Angry. I felt like the world belonged to me, that it owed me something.”
“Angry? At what?”
“The world. My father. The last time we came to Pyka, it was shortly after my mother died. I was sixteen. You would’ve been—what, nine? Ten? It was a year before the war started.”
“Ten. Your mother died of cancer?” Ronan has never spoken about Queen Calia to me before. I think of what Stella told me about how he tried to keep her memory alive after her death.
“Yes,” he says, his voice strained. “The visit was tense. It was easy to see why, later. But at the time, I thought I’d made it that way. I was so angry. My magic had settled, but it wasn’t enough to save her. There are some things beyond even light magic to heal.”
I can see the anger in him still, in the tension of his shoulders. I touch one of them, and he twitches reflexively. “Sorry,” he says, his hand brushing mine.
My heart aches for him. Ronan, just sixteen, blaming himself for not being able to save his mother. “You know it wasn’t your fault, right? You know that now.”
“Yes, I know that now. But I didn’t then. I had so much rage in me.”
“I did, too,” I admit. “Even then, when I was a child. And much more later.”
“At my father? At me?”
“Among other things. At my parents for abandoning me, for choosing war over their child. At my siblings for going with them.”
He nods and looks into the distance again. The sun is lowering in the sky behind us, bringing a golden tinge to the light as it meets the water. We should be heading back soon. But there’s something else I’ve been wanting to ask him.