Page 156 of With Wing And Claw

Thysandra blinked. Then blinked again, at Agenor this time, and feebly said, ‘She lockedyourmemories?’

‘Oh, yes.’ A mirthless smile. ‘Of that time I tried to kill them.’

Her jaw sagged open.

‘He surpasses all expectations, doesn’t he?’ Emelin cheerfully said.

‘You …’ She shook her head, as if that would make the facts suddenly fall into place. ‘Youtried to kill her?’

‘After they blew up Korok to win the War of the Gods and sent most of the continent with him to hell. Yes.’ It turned out the smile on Agenor’s face could turn even bleaker. ‘Didn’t succeed, of course. They took away both my memory of the attempt and my memory of the events that had driven me to try in the first place, and I spent the next couple of hundred years having no fucking clue.’

Gods have mercy.

‘But she didn’t throwyouto the hounds,’ she said weakly.

He grimaced. ‘No. Apparently rejection is a significantly more severe crime than the occasional murder attempt.’

She hated how much sense that made.

‘Anyway,’ Emelin interjected, with a pointedness that suggested she knew damn well thatsomemembers of the company might object to the words she was about to speak, ‘we did find your binding in the halls of the Cobalt Court. I brought it with me, just in case.’

Agenor closed his eyes.

‘You have ithere?’ Thysandra stammered, gaze shooting to the linen bag by the girl’s feet. It didn’t look like it contained any fragile crystal orbs. ‘How did you—’

The object Emelin retrieved from her bag was not a fragile crystal orb.

A small, cubic piece of stone. A pebble, almost. It took a moment to make sense of it –yellow for change, and if the bindings had once been changed from humble pens into those glittering orbs that had been stored in the Cobalt Court, there was no magical law that said they could not be changed back into something sturdier again.

‘For full transparency’s sake,’ Emelin said as she cautiously placed the stone cube between the glasses on the table, ‘I believe I’m supposed to tell you it’s bloody unpleasant, getting hours of memories planted back into your mind in a matter of seconds, and also, that the memories themselves are likely not the most uplifting of—’

‘Give them to me,’ Thysandra hoarsely interrupted. ‘Please.’

Agenor let out a small, exasperated whimper.

Emelin, on the other hand, didn’t bat an eye. ‘Would you mind giving me an iridescent surface of some kind? I can’t change textures anymore.’

Something to do with godsworn magic – Thysandra was too numb to ask. With a single flicker of yellow from her dark green robe, the table surface turned into shimmering mother-of-pearl; in contrast, the little stone binding looked even darker, even more foreboding.

Emelin’s fingertips touched the tabletop.

Her right hand made a small, sweeping motion – as if to usher something out of the way that only she could see.

And—

It’s dark. It’s quiet. It’s far past her usual bedtime, and she’s never seen the island so still before, no lights burning anywhere around the court.

‘We need to be very quiet,’ her favourite voice in the world says.

Mother has said that five times already tonight.

Thysandra doesn’t understand. Mother has been crying. She pretends she hasn’t, but she has. Father isn’t here at all. He left after dinner, but first he held Mother longer than Thysandra ever saw him do before.

It’s a surprise, they’ve said. It’s a secret. It’ll all be fine, promise.

So she doesn’t ask as they fly, faster than she’s ever flown.

There’s only sea beneath them. So much water, all of it dark in the moonlight. There are no birds. No breeze. Just Mother and the stars, and they fly and fly and fly.