Page 157 of With Wing And Claw

Then she hears them.

Shouts behind her.

Mother whirls around. ‘No,’ she gasps, and something in her voice doesn’t sound like it’ll all be fine at all. It sounds like nothing will ever be fine again.

Thysandra wants to look, but Mother has already grabbed her by the arm. And now she’s being pulled along, faster and faster through the dark, voices shouting behind them. She wants to cry, but she can barely breathe, so fast are they flying. Someone is shouting Mother’s name.

‘Fly on,’ Mother says, and she lets go of Thysandra’s wrist. ‘Fly as hard as you can. Straight ahead, no looking back, all the way to Ilithia. Uncle Silas will be waiting for you.’

Thysandra has flown to Ilithia before, but never on her own. She says, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need to understand. Fly, Thys.Fly!’

Mother is crying.

Thysandra doesn’t understand. But she flies.

The ocean is so very large beneath her, and she’s so very small. Her wings are so very tired. She doesn’t look back, but she can see the reflection of colours on the waves beneath her – red, so much red. Red isn’t good. Master Hyras said she has to be very careful with it, and the people behind her are not being careful at all.

Something falls into the sea. She hears the splash.

Still, she flies.

‘The girl!’ a voice yells behind her. Ophion’s voice. Father never says it, but he doesn’t like Ophion at all. ‘The Mother wants the girl!’

There’s even more red.

Mother’s voice shouts, ‘Not my daughter! Not my—’

And then there’s a sound Thysandra has never heard before. It’s a gurgle. It’s a sob. It isn’t loud, and yet she hears it as if it’s coming from right behind her, as if for a single terrible moment, the entire night is full of it.

She looks back.

The darkness is full of wings, their movements blurs of grey in the moonlight. Beneath them, a single winged shape is falling. Falling. Falling. Like a broken butterfly, wings not even moving – wide and golden, the most beautiful wings Thysandra has ever seen.

There’s a splash, and then she’s gone.

Thysandra doesn’t fly anymore.

They take her easily, and she doesn’t even care.

‘Thys.’

A hand nudged her cheek. A voice pulled at her consciousness like a thread tugging at a seam.

‘Thys, come back.’

With a gasp, her eyes flew open.

Plants. Couch. Wall. Her own rooms, yet it took her a moment to recall whosheeven was – some creature ages away from that night, that moon, that deadly dark. The smell of fresh tea hadn’t been there, that night. The brush of linen and silk on her skin. All signs of here, ofnow, and yet each of them felt more like a figment of her imagination than that pair of wings still falling in her mind’s eye.

Tumbling and tumbling. A plummet that had lasted four hundred years already.

‘Thys?’

‘Bowl,’ she choked, and then she was vomiting, barely noticing the zinc bowl that was slipped into her lap with suspicious speed. Therewas little left inside her to throw up at all. Bits and pieces of two sesame buns, and then all that followed was sour bile and that sensation of mind-numbing terror – of a fear she’d forgotten but still felt, soaked into places of her that were more than memory alone.

‘You’ll be glad to know I did the exact same thing,’ Agenor said wryly, his hand holding her shoulder steady as she retched and retched again. ‘We came prepared.’