Chapter 7
The landscapeI’m glancing down at is the same one I’ve been staring at for the past centuries and centuries, yet flying feels different when I know I can land and make my wings disappear at any time. Where a palace used to stand, rubble and debris cover the large circular clearing. The gardens are devoid of life as is the scorched ground where the explosion hit. What I’ve called my home for longer than I care to remember has become a wasteland at the center of magical greenery.
Turning my eyes from the site of destruction, I lead the flock across the thicket of the Seeing Forest, letting my mind drift to the lands I cannot reach—the ones that lay beyond what my bargain with the King of Askarea allows. I no longer care for that bargain. The wards on the borders have long been unwoven by the unique magic of my people, and the ancient magic working such bargains hasn’t fried the Crows who left, or we’d long have been rid of Ephegos and his treacherous ass. All I care about is finding a trail, anything that will tell me where they took Ayna.
My chest aches at the thought of her name, right where my friend’s blade pierced it, and I try not to allow myself to think of the sensation washing through me when she told me she loves me.
Of course, I fail miserably. The pain intensifies one hundredfold at the mere memory of her voice, desperate and full of the redemption I’d been craving for longer than I can think. I’m a marked child of an era of wars and destruction wreaked by my own people. There is no such thing as peace in my heart. But with Ayna, I had a glimpse of what it could be like to finally let go, to forgive the ones who made us unworthy of Vala’s absolution or Shaelak’s forgiveness.
Below, movements catch my attention, and I bank right, into the treetops, my cousin following suit, as do the five other Crows who came on this trip to scout the location where the era of Vala’s curse was ended by the only creature in this world who will ever have my heart.
A fissure runs through said organ at the thought of Ayna in Ephegos’s claws, and the pain is no easier to bear in my crow form than in my fae one.
Royad flutters ahead with a few powerful wingbeats, his focus honed on where mine should lay, but I’ve been a shadow of myself since my death and resurrection. Like there is a hole in my body that’s dripping energy into the nexus between realms. Royad darts through the branches before he lands on one high up in a nearby tree, head cocked and beak pointing down to where two males in brown leathers are sneaking through the forest. It’s the third time we’ve seen this particular pair. Like all Fire Fairies, they wear slender blades at their hips. What’s new are the crossbows they carry in their gloved hands, ready to shoot something from the sky within a heartbeat. I assume I’m not wrong in guessing that they are on a hunt. A hunt for large, black-feathered birds. Shifter ones in particular.
Nodding at Royad, I land beside him while the others settle a few branches up. In our bird forms, we are small enough to blend in with the trees, still difficult enough to kill with our magic and smaller targets, but we’ve come across dead crows—the real birds, not shifter ones like us—lately. Looking at the sharp bolts poised on the crossbows, the holes puncturing the bird carcasses make more sense. They’ve been systematically shooting crows from the skies, and it’s only a matter of time before they’ll catch us instead of some poor unaware creature who has no fault in the decline of the Fire Fairies or their residence.
While the previous times, we’ve simply followed them around, observing whether they’d drop any words of Ephegos or Ayna, this time, I’m too restless to simply wait and see. Giving a flutter of my wings, I signal the others I’m about to shift. Then, I let the magic wash through my body, let it eat up all the feathers but those of my wings. My weight pulls me out of the treetops, but I beat my feathered arms enough to break the fall while I send bonds of invisible power at both Fire Fairies, ripping their crossbows from their hands and shoving them to the forest ground where they wrestle the strength of my magic with an onslaught of flames.
I break the first one’s neck with a tug on my power before I even set foot on the rock-scattered moss of the forest ground. The second, however, I pin to the ground with a boot to his throat, menace raging within me at the mere thought that he is one of those creatures who took Ayna from me. My self-control hangs on a thin thread threatening to snap at one wrong word, one too-deep breath of the Fire Fairy.
“Where is she?” I shove the flames he sends my way back into his face, watching his deep brown eyes flare with terror as he realizes who is upon him.
“Myron,” Royad’s baritone sounds from a few steps ahead, a warning not to forget myself.
We’ve talked about that, since the land won’t give away which direction they hauled Ayna off to, it’s time to find a different source of information. I guess the Flame male writhing beneath my power is the lucky one.
Well… not really. The one I killed on the spot was. For there is nothing worse than the wrath of a Crow King who’s been robbed of the woman who saved him.
“I don’t … know … who you’re … talking … about,” the fairy stammers, gasping for air in between words.
I lean down, blocking his attempts at singeing me with his fire with half a thought now that my fae powers have been freed. By Shaelak, I still marvel at what I’m capable of. Had I thought I was powerful before, now that the curse is broken, it’s like someone lifted a veil on everything I am and everything I’m capable of.
My senses are sharper, my instincts more pronounced, my thinking quicker, and I’m not even starting on the physical strength. It took me a solid day to gain full control over that, and I’m still struggling with keeping my magic on a tight leash lest I hurt what few are left of my people.
“Don’t play stupid.” Royad is at my side, his steady presence calming as always. But the face he shows the Flame is that of the beaked monster he wore so bravely for all our lives. He crouches a few feet away from the fairy who’s still trying to free himself, and graces us all with a display of his violent side. “You heard my king. Where. Is. She.” He doesn’t even phrase it like a question, just a series of growls that could belong to a beast. Perhaps some of the monster is still left in all of us. Even when we’re free of the curse and redeemed of our ancestors’ wrongdoings, it doesn’t mean we aren’t ready to commit our own.
In this case, none of it is wrong. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to get Ayna back, so I don’t think as my magic curls tighter around the fairy’s neck. I merely pull back my foot and stand over him, watching his face turn blue while his flames snuff out at his fingers without any of them having touched Royad or me.
“I’ll spell it out for you because I’m having a gracious day.” Not exactly a lie. I was gracious this morning to let Royad have half of my breakfast, but the Flame doesn’t need to know I’m anything but gracious when it comes to my Ayna. “Where is my queen?”
The fairy moves his head an inch to the left, then to the right. That’s how far my power will allow it, but it’s a clear shake of his head.
“You don’t know? Or you don’t care to share your knowledge?”
The fairy shakes his head again.
“So, you don’t want to talk?” I loosen my hold just enough to give him a chance to prove me wrong.
It’s enough for him to grasp his blade and stab for my thigh. The tip collides with my leathers, right above my knee. A sharp pain runs through my flesh, and I tighten my magic around his throat before I yank him off the ground and throw him against the nearest tree trunk.
I don’t know who is more shocked, Royad or me, when the male slides to the ground, head lolling to the side at an odd angle and chest no longer heaving for breath.
“You killed him,” my cousin notes, and I can’t tell if there’s accusation in his tone or simply surprise.
“I didn’t mean to.” It’s the truth. I meant to force those words out of the Fire Fairy before I sent him straight for Eroth’s Veil, but my power is overwhelming, and it seems I have no control when it comes to Ayna. Finding her is the priority, and I’ve just destroyed our chances by accidentally killing a potential source.
Royad doesn’t say anything else, neither do the others as they land around us, shifting into their fae forms as they touch the ground. The sight of all of them bare-chested and bare-armed, no feathers, no beaks, no sign of bird other than the few tattoos some of them bear is something I yet need to get used to. I haven’t gotten used to how naked I feel without a layer of feathers protecting my arms and shoulders either, the sensation of wind and sun so much more intense on my skin than on my feathers, but it’s a good feeling. Proof that this is real. That the curse is broken.
Now, all I need is to find my wife, and I’ll never look back on the torment that my life has been.
If only I knew where to find her.
When we sit by the fire that night in the cave near the Silver Stream that marks the western border of the Seeing Forest, the twenty Crows still left of my people chew silently on their roast meat. We brought back a few hares from our scouting trip, and some of the Crows helped prepare them. With our magic fully returned, it’s easy work, and with our Crow urges lifted by the breaking of the curse, raw meat is no longer a craving any of us possess. My mind drifts back to my last wedding banquet, to the horror in Ayna’s gray eyes as she’d observed the way my people hacked away on bloody meat with their beaks. It’s a miracle she sat through that dinner without throwing up.
“Thinking of her again?” Royad nudges my leg with his knee where the thin cut is still visible in my leathers. The small injury beneath has long healed, but I didn’t bother to wash off the dried blood.
“We need to change our strategy,” I tell him instead of confirming my mind lingers on Ayna. Because we both know it always does. “It’s only a matter of time before the Fire Fairies find us here, and if they come in numbers, we might not be able to defeat them.” Even at our full strength. I don’t need to add that. We all know twenty normal Crow Fairies and two royal Crows don’t necessarily make an army. We are deadlier than ever, but we aren’t invincible, I’m fully aware of that.
“Glad you still have your thinking straight,” Royad jokes, giving me a wary smile that makes his scar tug awkwardly at the corner of his mouth. We try not to talk about how my father sliced his face open to punish him for being kind to a bride. Even when Crows heal fast, that wound had been too deep and brutal to seal without a scar.
He notices the stare, and a silent understanding passes between us. We’ve gone through all of it together, his scars and mine, but the curse was never his to shoulder. It was always my burden, even when he treated me like we were in it together, too. Under different circumstances, many of the brides might have preferred his humorous personality and warrior’s body. But my deal with King Recienne had left me the only Crow allowed to marry even when I truly didn’t want to damn any female to being bound to a monster like me—and by that, sentence them to die.
A shudder rakes through my body, the chill from the cave walls creeping along my naked back even when the fire warms my front.
“We’ll find her,” Royad reassures me the way he’s always reassured me that things will work out for the best.
Why is it that I have trouble believing him when he’s always proven to be right? He’s the one who told me to keep trying, to show Ayna some of my more charming character traits so she’d at least get the chance to see the real me.
The real me meaning bottomless darkness where countless deaths coat my hands with blood.
“We need to get out of this fucking forest to find her.” Silas inserts himself from a few feet away. The male is one of the oldest among us, having only a few decades on Royad and me. So, he had been still considered a child when the curse hit. He remembers more than all of us others as well. More of the violence from the first years after the curse, the way my people had sought a new home after Vala took everything from us to protect her humans.
The irony that it’s a human who saved us doesn’t fail to conjure the dark grin on my lips, which I’ve perfected to scare away my brides.
“He’s not wrong.” Royad gestures at the male chewing on a piece of meat, studying the harsh lines of his face visible behind a curtain of black hair.
That earns us the attention of the rest of the Crows. We’ve gotten used to the lack of privacy with twenty-two of us in the cave and all of us equipped with fae senses, but rarely do we pry on each other’s conversations.
I have to admit, I spent too much time, in those first few days after coming back from the dead, on sleeping off the exhaustion overcoming me on occasion and the rest of my time searching the forest for traces of my wife to know much of anything else.
“She’s obviously not in the forest, or we’d already have found her?” I snap, fully aware that those are the few loyal Crows left and that I shouldn’t get on their bad side, or they might abandon me like the rest—the ones who didn’t die in battle. But I don’t have enough air to breathe, knowing that Ayna is in Ephegos’s grasp. Time is running, and I need to act before that traitorous shit kills her.
Forcing my breathing to calm, I turn to Royad, intending to tell him that I’m ready to leave this place and turn over every pebble in Eherea until I find her, but a sharp pain sears my shoulder where the tattoo of a crow mid-flight spreads across my shoulder blade all the way to my biceps, and I release a hiss instead.
The look Royad gives me is a clear indicator he knows something’s up.
When I found the tattoo shortly upon my waking in the clearing, I thought little of it. Many Crows are inked in various ways, and I wondered if it might be a mark I’d been given as a baby and which had been hidden beneath a layer of feathers. But when Royad spied it, he made it clear that this was something different. One wing of the crow would have peeked out from under my feathers where it spreads up toward my neck, and there had been smooth skin before the curse was lifted.
Perhaps that’s what it is, a reminder of Vala’s punishment. But the way pain is lashing through my shoulder right now, I doubt it’s a mere image on my skin serving to never let me forget. Right now, this thing feels alive, like it’s clawing at me with sharp talons.
I exhale with my eyes closed, shutting out the murmurs and crackling of the fire, the shuffling feet of deer and rabbits out in the forest, and the occasional caw of a real crow, until the pain is fading and I can think again.
If losing Ayna won’t kill me, this thing on my shoulder just might.
“You all right?” Royad leans in, pretending to reach for his knife, which he dumped on the floor behind us earlier, and subtly checks on my shoulder.
When I give him a nod, he frowns. “You don’t look all right.”
Gritting my teeth, I breathe through the fading sensation in my shoulder and direct my mind into the shine of the fire in front of me. For a while, all I can do is count my heartbeats, convincing myself that not everything is lost, that I still have time to find my wife.
It’s when I decide that I’ll set out first thing tomorrow that the pain turns into something else, a tug directing me toward the cave wall that has my full attention. I stand, ignoring Royad’s stare as I pad to place my hands on the rough, moss-overgrown stone standing between me and the place the tug is pulling me.
It’s weak, but there is no mistaking whose magic is calling to me from what has to be miles and miles and miles away.
“Drop everything,” I tell what’s left of my people as Royad comes to stand beside me, his hand on my shoulder as if in comfort—or to caution me from clawing my path through the hard stone. “We’re leaving now.”