Chapter Twenty
Chapter
twenty
Soren boosts me up onto Zephyr’s bare back, then settles behind me with a fluidity born of long practice.
He’s practically vibrating with excitement, sharing none of the anxiety that thunders through my chest. But then, why would he?
By his own admission, he’s spent more hours flying atop Zephyr than he could count over the past two centuries, starting when he was barely tall enough to mount him.
This very morning, in fact, he was here clearing his head with a ride over the Cimmerians.
Despite the lack of saddle, my seat feels secure with Soren at my back, his long legs hooked beneath the shoulder joints, his arms caging my body as his fingers calmly grip the mane.
My own white-knuckled clutch only tightens as we break into a canter, then lift off the ground, propelled by the rhythmic pump of two colossal wings.
Soren laughs as I shriek, amused by my terror.
Had there been any breath in my lungs, I might’ve cursed him.
My stomach is left somewhere on the ground as the earth shrinks from view more rapidly than I would’ve thought possible.
In seconds, we’ve ascended high into the sky and are making slow orbits around the five summits of the Vale.
“Breathe, skylark!” Soren yells, barely audible over the roar of the wind. “Zephyr won’t let you fall!”
I suck in a desperate gulp of air, trying to get ahold of myself.
Tears gloss my eyes—no wonder the Paexyrian squad wear goggles—and I blink them away, trying to take in the scope of the view from this altitude.
There is the Avian Strait, far below us—a tapering pass through the mountainous boundary that divides the Northlands from the rest of Anwyvn.
Beyond, I can see the war-ravaged battlefields that characterize the Midlands, from Aranthon’s rolling plains to the distant forests that distinguish Eastwood to the boggy mires on the border of Westlake where I almost met my end with a noose around my neck.
In the east, the Endless Ocean sprawls down the coast, stretching from the southern shores of Daggerpoint all the way to the Southlands.
Though I cannot see it, somewhere beyond my sight line lies Dymmeria, that dark desert kingdom where Efnysien cowers.
We circle inland, looping one of the tallest summits, where the air is so thin the deepest breaths barely fill my lungs.
My eyes skim over the speckle of rooftops I know must be Coldcross, past the glacier-bound stretch of Frostlander territory, and finally to the indistinct outline of a plateau I can only just begin to make out at the farthest limits of my eyesight.
Dyved.
A violent pang moves through my heart.
Caeldera.
Another pang.
Pendefyre.
A third, this one strong enough to cause true pain.
I have not allowed myself to think of him, these past weeks. Not often, and never deeply. Worries that once plagued me relentlessly—How is he sleeping at night? Is he eating enough? Has his obsession with charging the wards waned?—no longer suffuse my every waking moment.
I do not let them.
I actively put them from my head.
At first, I did.
Now, as I squint toward the horizon, I realize actively is no longer the descriptor I’d use. I am not certain when exactly it happened, I only know I no longer guard constantly against such thoughts creeping in unbidden.
What at first was a deliberate matter of self-preservation morphed, at some unidentified point in time, into unconscious habit.
And for a surprising amount of days in a row, I have not sought out his maegic, nor tried to sense our thin-stretched bond across the vast distance that stretches between us.
A flush of horror furls through me when I think of the Remnant bond—not the one connecting me to the man currently pressed so tight at my back, but the one turned threadbare by circumstance.
Would it atrophy from lack of use? Would that tenuous connection from flame to air fade away? Sputter into ash and scatter irrevocably out of reach?
No, I assure myself, pulse pounding fast, breaths coming short. It cannot. Pendefyre told me so himself, a long, long time ago.
Whether we like it or not, the Remnants are eternally linked.
By power. By prophecy. By fate.
We are four weighted scales hung from the same beam, forever seeking a balance only the others can deliver. Independent, but irrevocably tethered.
Somewhere deep beneath my aching cage of ribs, a twisted string of flame still burns.
I can almost imagine it there. Can almost feel it, too, growing hotter with the renewed heat of unsettled emotions.
A stoked blaze that gathers in my blood until the cold wind surrounding us seems as far removed as the ground below.
“What is it?” Soren asks, mind to mind, sensing my distress. “What’s wrong?”
We’ve begun to channel subconsciously, the connection sliding into place so easily I do not notice our maegics merging together until his voice sounds in my head.
“Nothing,” I lie thinly, jolting out of my convoluted thoughts. “Nothing at all.”
He knows I’m not being truthful, but does not push the matter. He distracts me instead with a lesson on flight dynamics, engaging my mind with such a flood of information, within a matter of seconds I no longer feel my attention pulled toward troublesome western horizons.
Then again, with Zephyr banking at perilous angles and careening around mountaintops, it would be difficult to concentrate on anything but the present even if I tried.
We stay in the skies for a full hour—the final part of which Soren spends instructing me to really sense the wind currents flowing around us, so someday I might mimic them without a Paexyri mount to ferry me along.
The prospect of solo flight feels far out of reach—Queen Arianrhod, I am not—but I do as he says, honing my focus on the sky as it rushes by on all sides.
I am abuzz with pure exhilaration. My maegic sings through me, each pump of my heart in total harmony with Zephyr’s beating wings, as though we truly are connected at a spiritual level. I close my eyes to the realm below and channel all my energy inward, where my endless storms swirl.
My Remnant feels intensely awake. Awake in a way I have never felt before. For this is where it belongs. I simply had not known it until now.
Before I felt the breadth of the heavens at my fingertips, I did not realize how I longed to reach for them. Before I breathed the thinnest air, I did not understand how much my lungs craved its crisp relief.
This, here—in the wind, in the air, in the sky—is as close as I have ever felt to knowing where I come from. As close as an orphaned halfling from the shores of Seahaven has ever come to calling somewhere home.
Tears streak down my cheeks for the remainder of the flight, and they have nothing to do with the biting air in my eyes.
At some unspoken command, Zephyr guides us back between the five summits into the Vale’s circle of shelter.
Hooves clatter against the earth with a bone-shaking jolt as we touch down, galloping around the glade before slowing to a stop by the tree line.
Soren dismounts first, then reaches up to help me down.
His hands remain at my waist even after my boots hit the earth.
“Well?” His hair is windblown, his cheeks ruddy, his eyes warm as the Hylian hot springs. “What did you think?”
“It was a thrill,” I confess, hearing my own wonderment. “Truly. One of the most incredible experiences of my life.”
“I’m glad.”
“Thank you, Soren.”
His lips part, then close on a swallow. As though he wanted to say something, only to change his mind at the last moment. “Don’t thank me,” he says instead. “Thank Zephyr.”
With that, he steps away from me, turning to murmur words of gratitude to the King of the Vale.
I watch the two of them—how Soren rests his forehead against Zephyr’s nose, how his hands stroke gently along the strong sinews of the stallion’s neck; how a velvet muzzle butts insistently against the left side of his broad chest, where his Remnant sits beneath the fabric.
Their bond is plain to see. Witnessing it inspires a muddled mix of emotions. Respect. Appreciation. Awe. Even envy, for I have never been so deeply connected to another living soul in all my years. Nor have I ever been touched with such reverence.
A sad state of affairs to find oneself jealous of a horse.
Cheeks aflame, I tear my eyes away from Soren’s gentle touch on Zephyr’s flanks.
We do not return by portal right away. Instead, we sit for a time beneath a large evergreen, our backs propped against the rough trunk.
In my peripheral, Soren fiddles with a birch stick, peeling strips of white bark off in long ribbons.
Most of my focus remains trained on the clearing.
I thought Zephyr would immediately leave us, but he seems content enough to stay, grazing on the stubby grass and vibrant mosses.
“Why does he remain here instead of in Hylios with the others?” I ask eventually.
“Would you choose a stable over this open sky?”
“No. Probably not.”
“Each Paexyri has a different temperament. Some are more suited to saddles and battle strategies. Others, like Zephyr, do not answer to any commands but their own. There are times when he does not appear even for me when I visit this place.”
I study his distinctive lines for a time—the proud carriage, the keen eyes—and am struck with a distant chord of recognition.
“He looks a bit like Onyx,” I murmur almost to myself.
Soren chuckles. “He would. Onyx is his colt. So it would be more accurate to say Onyx looks like Zephyr, not the other way around.”
Head whipping to the side, I gape at him. “What?”