Page 32

A fter an hour in flight, Arden forgot to be wary.

She forgot that if she leaned over, she could fall into the sea and would never be able to swim back to shore.

She forgot that the creature under her was a wild animal that could turn on her at any moment.

She forgot that humans weren’t made to soar through the heavens.

After an hour in flight, Arden could have sworn that all those obvious truths were in fact lies.

Because she felt no fear of falling, nor of the hawk.

And never in her life had she felt more alive, more whole, more right than she did with the wind whipping her face, the ocean stretching out endlessly beneath her, and the heavens stretching out above.

For moments at a time, she could even forget why she was flying. She could forget the knot pulled painfully tight in her chest. She could forget that if she failed, it wasn’t just her own life at stake. She could forget that she was only having this unheard-of experience because Jade was missing.

She’d changed back into a set of her normal clothes before she left home again, and the tan and white of her leggings and open skirt blended well with the hawk’s golden feathers—not an exact match, but better than the blue of the Guardian uniform, for sure.

And the sound of the skirt whipping out behind her like a pennant brought a smile to her lips.

There was nothing happy about why she was out here—but even so, there was joy to be found in the horrible situation. And with joy came hope.

She’d find Jade. She would. How could she not, with the hawk on her side? With the skies open to her? No one in the waves below would think to look up in the heavens with suspicion. To the surface of the water, yes, but no farther. They would see the shadow of the hawk as nothing abnormal at all.

She, on the other hand, could see down into depths she’d never beheld before. Past schools of fish. Into the darkening deep. She could see sunlight flashing on marine green mer tails, watch hair flow through the water as the people below swam at impossible speeds.

People, Seidon had said. Just like them.

But not like them. She knew no family on land who could swim hand-in-hand like the family below, their bodies undulating through the water.

She knew no family on land who could stay underwater as long as those three had—they’d been under at least thirty minutes, possibly more.

She had no idea how long they’d been submerged before she spotted them, here along the border between Seidon’s territorial waters and those of the mer.

The hawk let out a piercing cry, and it resonated through her body. True, she’d only been on the bird’s back an hour this morning, plus however long it had been last night, but still she fancied that she understood what the cry meant. We’ve been out for a while. Turn back?

Was the hawk growing weary? They’d flown much longer last night—but then, this creature wasn’t used to carrying someone on its back, and a second flight so soon after the first could be too much for it.

Arden craned her head around to look as far as she could in each direction.

They’d guessed as to where the Daryatlean border was exactly, but most of their flight had been along what she fancied marked Seidon’s territory, and she hadn’t seen anything to report aside from that one small family of mer.

Which was good—she wouldn’t have to report military forces amassing or anything—but still left her wondering if she was not in the right place.

“All right,” she granted with a stroke of the bird’s feathers, though it felt like defeat. “We can turn back. Do you think there’s any way to—?”

Before she could finish her question about somehow marking how far they’d come, the hawk let out another cry, this one sounding like pain in Arden’s ears. Pain that soon lanced her own head like lightning. She screamed too and held on tightly when the hawk climbed, wheeled, flipped.

Behind and below came a horrible sound that defied any words she knew. A screeching. A whooshing. A snapping. It was electricity and tidal surge and thunder and the groaning of a ruin too disturbed and ready to tumble into the sea.

“Wait!” The water below them rushed and curled, and Arden craned her neck to see the source. It was almost as if…as if something enormous was…was rising from the ocean floor.

The hawk circled back, its cry weaving through Arden’s gasp.

It wasn’t one something rising from the water. It was countless somethings, all rising at once, directly in front of them but also stretching north and south as far as she could see.

A ship, enormous and ancient, more rust than metal.

Another to the south, but even older and made of wood.

To the north, a wall of what looked like a building.

Beyond it, some expanse of metal she couldn’t begin to identify.

And between them, along them, through them, sizzled what looked like lines of pure electricity, blue and forbidding.

“What is that?” She knew the hawk couldn’t answer, but even so, she had to ask. Because as the bird flew alongside this strange net-and-object wall, electricity pulsed in the air.

A barrier. Clearly it was some kind of barrier, and she didn’t need to touch a hand to those glowing, translucent fibers to know it would either hurt or kill.

They flew twenty feet away, and that was closer than was probably safe.

She turned her gaze downward, trying to get a glimpse of how far below the surface the barrier stretched, but the sea was still churning, displaced sand making the water a murky, impenetrable mess.

The mer family! Where had they gone? They hadn’t been Black Tails or anything—what if they’d been caught up in this? “Up? For a moment? I want to make certain those three mer are all right.”

The hawk rose high into the air, still flying parallel to the wall.

Arden’s concern unknotted when she saw the man, woman, and little girl in the water on the other side of the wall, far enough away that they hadn’t been sucked into the churn, close enough that she could see the shock and fear on each of their faces.

She turned her face back to the west, toward home. “We need to tell the king,” she said to the hawk.

The bird called out its agreement and turned toward the Banks, riding the wind kicked up by the new waves to fly even faster than they had on the way out. Arden leaned low over its head and neck.

And hated that she kept thinking of the hawk as it and the hawk . It certainly had a gender—did animals even have something like names, in their own languages? She wished she knew what this one’s was, if so.

Sunlight glinted off the bird’s feathers, making them look like delicately crafted gold.

Her lips tugged up. In her mind, Jade’s hawk had always been a female because she and Jade were.

And because it looked bigger than some of the other hawks, and the females of the species were the larger in general.

So then, she would call it she and she would name it for the gold of her feathers.

“Ora,” she said softly. “Is it all right if I call you Ora? So that I can call you something?”

The hawk—Ora—made a noise that was less cry than warble. It sounded agreeable to Arden’s ears, almost like avian laughter. Arden chuckled too. “All right then. I’m going to go with that, unless you decide to scratch your name into the sand in letters I can read.”

Another warble, and Ora flapped her wings faster.

The sandy beaches of the Barrier Banks soon appeared on the horizon, first as a miniscule line of tan against the blue-green of the water, then as bumps and rises, and finally as shores with their stilted houses speckled along in a line.

Two figures appeared at the shoreline. Papa, so familiar, his shoulders broad and strong even if they bore too much of a burden. And the king, standing as tall as her father, staring out at sea.

Briefly she considered asking Ora to fly to the northern tip of the island again so that she could remain out of sight.

But the image in her mind of that electrified wall of wrecks and ruins felt urgent—and what if Seidon left again before she got there, hiking home on foot?

No, she would take his presence there at this moment as a sign from the Triada that it was where she should go.

Even if that did mean showing her father her new mode of transportation without any gentle build-up or softening words.

“There,” she said to Ora, pointing to the two men standing at the water’s edge. “My father and the king. You can drop me there.”

Ora made a chwirk sound that Arden took as acknowledgment. Soon they were circling, descending, Ora angling her body to land on the beach close to where they stood.

Arden didn’t know whether to ignore the men and focus on not losing her seat as the hawk shifted beneath her or watch to see their reactions to her arrival. She tried to do a bit of both.

Seidon, of course, showed no surprise at her appearance or the mode of it.

Papa, on the other hand… She could tell the exact moment when his regard went from idle curiosity over the hawk that was approaching rather than circling high as it usually did to abrupt recognition.

His shoulders went back, his head snapped up, and she could have sworn she saw rage in his eyes even from where she flew.

By the time Ora had touched down and folded in her wings, Papa had outpaced Seidon in their strides toward her.

All the confidence Arden had felt in the air evaporated at the look of fury and fear in her father’s eyes. She dismounted, her knees shaking not from the long flight but from the coming confrontation.

Would it be cowardly to say it was all Seidon’s fault? Let him take the brunt? Yes. Worse, it was a lie, and she never lied to Papa. So she raised her hands in what she hoped was a calming, conciliatory gesture and said, “Papa, I know—”