Wren
The cloak spread.
One moment it hung from his shoulders like fabric. The next, it unfurled. Wings. Twelve feet across at least, maybe more. Bronze feathers edged in black, layered and gleaming, and when they caught the air I felt the displacement of it against my face.
Not his wings. The cloak’s wings. But they moved like they were part of him, responding to his will, alive in a way that made my stomach drop.
He turned to look at me.
His face was still his face. The same amber eyes, the same strong jaw, the same careful stillness. But something in the way he held himself had changed. More certain. More dangerous.
“You are afraid,” he said. Not a question.
“That cloak just turned into wings. So yes.”
His expression shifted. Surprise, maybe. Like he’d expected me to deny it.
“That is reasonable.” He moved toward me, and my body remembered itself. I stumbled back two steps before I could stop. He froze. “I will not hurt you.”
“Forgive me if I need a moment.”
“Take as long as you need.”
“We’re on the brink of the drop. I don’t think time is on my side.”
His head tilted. Bird-like. Assessing. “You are making jokes.”
“I make jokes when I’m terrified. It’s a character flaw.”
“It is not a flaw.” He said it like a fact. Like he was correcting an error in my accounting. “It is brave.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I ignored it.
“How does this work? The flying. How do I not die?”
He reached into the cloak and produced leather straps. A harness of some kind, well-worn, the buckles tarnished with age.
“You will be secured to me. Here.” He touched his chest. “Your back against me. The straps will hold you if you lose consciousness.”
“Do people usually lose consciousness?”
“Some.” He paused. “The height is significant.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It was not meant to be comforting. It was meant to be true.”
I looked at the harness. At his chest. At the wings spread behind him like a threat or a promise, I couldn’t tell which.
“What’s your name?” I asked. I don’t know why it mattered. Maybe I just wanted to know what to call the thing that was about to carry me into the sky. Maybe I wanted to stop thinking about those straps against my body.
“Tavrin.”
“I’m Wren.”
Something shifted in his face. That flicker again, the one I’d seen at the market. My name had weight he hadn’t expected.
“Wren,” he repeated. Slower. Like he was learning it. “A small bird.”
“My mother thought it was funny. A little bird who couldn’t fly.”
His gaze lingered. Something moved behind his eyes. Not pity, not amusement. Recognition, maybe. Like he’d heard something in those words I hadn’t meant to say.
“Then I suppose,” I said, “we should go.”
He stepped closer. I made myself hold still as he moved behind me, as his hands found the straps and began fitting them around my body. His fingers brushed my collarbone, adjusting a buckle, and I stopped breathing.
“This crosses here.” His voice was low, close to my ear. Professional. But his hands were warm through the leather, through my dress. Warm and large and careful. “And secures here.”
His palms pressed flat against my ribs, checking the fit. I felt each finger like a brand.
“Too tight?”
I couldn’t remember what words were.
“Wren.” My name again. “Too tight?”
“No.” It came out strangled. “Fine. It’s fine.”
His hands moved lower. My waist. The curve of my hips.
Straps threading between my thighs, buckles clicking into place, and I stared at the darkening sky and thought about numbers.
Thought about ledgers. Thought about anything except the heat of him against my back and the way my body was responding to it.
This was terror. That’s all. Terror felt like this sometimes. Like electricity under your skin. Like waiting for something to happen.
“Almost done.”
His arms came around me, checking the connections, and for a moment I was surrounded. His chest against my spine. His chin nearly touching my hair. The cage of him, inescapable.
And his heartbeat.
I felt it against my back. Fast. Faster than his calm voice and steady hands would suggest. Racing like something was chasing him.
I counted without meaning to. One hundred twelve beats per minute. One hundred fifteen. His pulse was pounding against my spine while his fingers moved with perfect control and his voice stayed level and calm.
He was afraid too.
Or something. Something that made his heart race while his hands stayed steady. Something he was fighting to hide.
“Hold here.” He guided my hands to the straps at my shoulders. His fingers brushed mine and I felt him tense. Just slightly. Just for a moment. “Do not let go.”
“What happens if I let go?”
“The harness will hold.” He leaned back. I felt the loss of his heat immediately, like walking out of a warm room into snow. “But your hands will want something to grip.”
He walked us to the edge of the cliff. I looked down and my stomach turned to water. Darkness. Endless darkness, and the distant sound of wind in a chasm I couldn’t see the bottom of.
“Close your eyes if you need to.”
“I don’t need to.” I did. I absolutely did. But I wasn’t going to give him that.
“Wren.” My name, softer now. “There is no weakness in closing your eyes.”
“And there’s no strength in lying to yourself. I’m going to watch. I want to know what’s happening to me.”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, there was something different in his voice. Something that sounded almost like respect.
“Then watch.”
His arms came around me. One across my chest, pressing me back against him. One around my waist, anchoring me. I could feel the muscles of his chest shifting as the wings rose behind us.
“Breathe,” he said.
I took one breath.
He stepped off the cliff.
Falling.
The world ripped away. My stomach slammed into my throat.
Wind screamed past my face, tearing at my hair, my clothes, my skin.
I couldn’t see. Couldn’t think. My hands clenched the straps so hard the leather cut into my palms and the scream that came out of my mouth wasn’t a choice, wasn’t a word, was just pure animal terror ripping itself free.
We were going to die. The darkness was rushing up to meet us and I was going to shatter against whatever was at the bottom and no one would ever know what happened to me, no one would ever find my body, I was going to die strapped to a monster in the dark.
The wings snapped open.
The force wrenched us upward so hard I felt it in my teeth. My vision went white. My body slammed against his chest, against the harness, against the straps that were suddenly the only thing keeping me from being ripped away into nothing.
And then we were climbing. Rising. The cliff face rushed past us, and then it was gone, and there was nothing below us but empty black air.
I couldn’t breathe. The wind was too strong, filling my mouth and nose, leaving no room for air. I tried to turn my head and couldn’t. Tried to gasp and couldn’t. My chest was burning. My vision was going dark at the edges.
The cloak folded around us.
Darkness. Different darkness. Warm and close and suddenly, blessedly still. The wind vanished, cut off by the wall of feathers that now enclosed us both. The artifact wrapped around me like it knew I needed shelter. Like it was responding to him, to his need to protect.
I gasped. Choked. Gasped again. Air. There was air in here, trapped between the feathers, and I sucked it in desperately while my whole body shook.
“Breathe.” His voice resonated through his chest into my bones. “Slowly. You are safe.”
“That was not...” I couldn’t finish the sentence. My teeth were chattering. “That was…”
“I know.”
“You could have warned me.”
“I did warn you.”
“You said the height was significant. You didn’t say you were going to throw us off a cliff.”
“I did not throw. I stepped.”
I laughed. It came out broken, half a sob, but it was still a laugh. “You stepped. Into nothing. With me strapped to your chest.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t see how that might have warranted more warning.”
“I find that warnings increase fear. The anticipation is worse than the act.”
“The anticipation of being dropped off a mountain?”
“Yes.”
I laughed again. Couldn’t stop. The terror was draining out of me and leaving something giddy and strange in its place, and I was wrapped in feathers in the middle of the sky laughing like I’d lost my mind.
Maybe I had.
“You are all right?” His voice was careful. Uncertain.
“I don’t know. Ask me when we land.”
His heartbeat was still there, pressed against my back. Still fast, though slowing now. I focused on it because it gave me something to count, something to hold onto in the darkness.
“Tavrin.”
“Yes.”
“Your heart is racing.”
Silence. A long silence.
“Yes,” he said finally. Quieter now.
“Were you afraid too?”
Another silence. I felt his chest expand with a breath. Felt him decide something.
“The harness has not been used for many years. I was... not certain I would remember how.”
I tried to imagine it. And tonight he’d strapped a stranger to his chest and stepped off a cliff and his heart had been pounding the whole time.
“You remembered,” I said.
“Yes.” I felt something release in him. Some tension I hadn’t known was there. “Yes. I remembered.”
We flew in silence after that. I couldn’t tell how much time passed. Minutes. Hours. The darkness inside the cloak was absolute, warm and close, and his heartbeat was slowing against my spine, steadying into something deep and ancient.
I should have been planning. Calculating. Figuring out what he wanted, how to be useful, how to survive whatever came next.
Instead I listened to his heart and felt the warmth seeping into my cold bones and didn’t think about anything at all.
It was the first time in eight years that my mind had gone quiet.