50. Chapter 46
Chapter 46
A bonded soul is not exactly the same as a single soul. Leaving the world of your bonded creates a separation between the two halves. It is not necessarily dangerous, but it is a strange feeling. That separation is not the same as your bonded dying. There is emptiness where your love should be in the former. There is nothing but pain in the latter.
~Maeve Arden, The Future of Magic and Dragons
Maeve
“There it is,” I say with a sigh. I’d been ready for a quick afternoon hike, but the sun had gone down, and the moon had come up long ago.
“Finally,” Echo groans. “I have never, in my entire life, walked that far. I don’t even know if Valinar is that large from one end to the other.”
A question to pose to my mother when we step through the mists. Then I hear Darian from behind me. “Where in Nyth have you been? We’ve been scouring the forest for the two of you, and shadow walkers have been looking for you in the void. Your mother’s furious that she can’t leave Valinar.”
I chuckle and shake my head. Then Cole appears from behind a tree, and he’s running toward me. In a heartbeat, he wraps his arms around me. “I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t feel you through our bond. It was a terrible feeling.” There’s so much worry in his voice. I don’t understand what happened, and I frown at him.
“What do you mean you couldn’t feel me? I hadn’t tried to reach out to you because I thought you’d be in Valinar, so it never occurred to me to even try. You’ve been in Nyth this whole time, and you couldn’t feel our bond?”
He shakes his head, and my frown deepens. “That’s troubling. I wonder what it could be.”
“Brenna would probably know,” he says.
She probably will. “We’re going to have a long talk with my mother when we get back to Valinar,” I say, but my mind isn’t there. It’s on his hand, pulling me tight to him. It’s on the warmth that I’ve missed, and I realize that there has definitely been a disruption in our connection because it’s not just his physical warmth that I’m missing. It’s the heat of his soul.
It’s exactly as my Da described when he was in Nyth and my mother was in Valinar. There wasn’t a hole in his soul, but he couldn’t reach out to her. “You feel good,” I whisper.
“I was so worried about you.”
“I was too,” a voice I hadn’t expected says from behind Cole, and I look up to where Lee is standing next to Darian. She looks… different. There’s the same wild smile and pristine clothes. Her hair isn’t tucked back into a perfect ponytail, though. It’s wild and free, hanging down below her shoulders in a way I can’t remember seeing her wear it before. Her eyes sparkle just the same as they had before she left, and her posture is just as relaxed as she stands next to her twin.
Yet something is different, and I can’t place it.
I break away from Cole and run to Lee. “When did you get back? It feels like it’s been forever.”
“I saw Darian when I was flying back to Stormhaven…” I don’t let her finish as I wrap her up in a hug, too.
“I’ve missed you, Lee. It hasn’t felt right since you left.”
Her body tenses, and I guess that no one else has welcomed her back quite like me, so when I step back, I give her a wide grin. “You’re still so human sometimes,” she mutters, and then she reaches into the rucksack that’s slung over a shoulder and pulls out a book.
The book.
It’s enormous and bound in thick black leather with no words on the cover. The edges of the pages look brand new, even though I know the book is older than anyone alive. “ A History of Magic and Dragons ,” I whisper.
“And me,” another voice says as a human crystalizes beside Lee. Vesta .
I don’t hug Vesta. Our last interaction hadn’t gone as well as I’m sure she’d hoped. Then again, I was a different person then. “It’s good to see you again, Vesta,” I say with the same coldness that she had for most of my life. No anger, but no love either.
And my reunion is completely ignored as Echo shouts with excitement and runs to Vesta. Vesta smiles at Echo and gives her a hug . I don’t know if Vesta has ever given me a hug in all the years that we spent together.
I can’t help the confusion that knits my brows together. I had thought it was just a Vesta thing, but it seems like she can care about someone. She just didn’t care about me.
“Vesta, you’re never going to believe who we saw in the void,” Echo says, not worrying about who’s around or appropriate timing. She’s just acting like the fourteen-year-old girl she is.
I can feel Cole’s eyes on me, and I turn to return his gaze. He whispers, “You talked to someone in the void? Who is in the void?”
“Not who. What.” The silence between us is filled only with nervousness. Cole didn’t know what was in the void. That was a secret that only the House of Shadows was aware of.
I turn back to Vesta and Echo. Vesta runs her slightly-too-long fingers through the girl’s white hair. “You met someone in the void?” she asks.
“The Darkness,” Echo responds immediately, looking up at the person I’ve thought of as my teacher for my whole life, and I see something in her eyes I’ve never seen before. Fear.
“The Darkness? We need to talk to Queen Brenna, young one. She needs to know.” Vesta’s words are soft and calm, but when she looks at me, there’s terror and desperation in them.
Echo nods and steps back. “We were going home already. It’s why it took us so long to get back. We didn’t think that it was a good idea to shadow walk with it so close.”
“That was a good decision, I think.”
I know it was. How much does Vesta know about The Darkness? I wonder how much she knows about everything, actually. If she hadn’t run like she did, maybe we would have had answers. Maybe she would have been able to tell me that Hazel hadn’t died. Maybe we’d know so many things.
She won’t run away now, though. We’ll finally get all the answers.
I glance at Lee and Darian, whose eyes never leave his sister. Then at Cole, whose expression is one of confusion. Vesta and Echo are already walking toward the Nothing, but I don’t move. I let them move past us, and then I pull Cole, Darian, and Lee together.
Whispering, I say, “I don’t know how far my mother can hear, but I need to say this now. Before we go back to Valinar. There are too many secrets. I know that none of you are keeping anything from me, but everyone else, my mother included, is hiding things from us.”
A flicker of fear flashes through both Lee and Darian’s eyes, but I don’t feel anything from Cole. I continue, “We are going to get answers from my mother and Vesta. All of us have experienced too much loss and too much suffering because of secrets, and we’re all on the same side. If you think someone is lying or keeping secrets, then you let me know. We want to return the world to the way it should be. Nothing else. We’re not vying for power or trying to control anyone. We just want to keep the world from dying. There’s no reason that anyone, including my mother, should keep information away from us.”
I look at the three people that I started this journey with, and they all nod in agreement. “Good. Now, just so none of you are blindsided, Zephyra, the drakeling you captured, and her friends threatened to drag me and Cole out of Valinar by our throats if we don’t leave in eight days. I just thought you should know.”
Their confused and awestruck expressions are everything I’d hoped for, and I just smile as I turn to walk into Valinar.