Page 74

C onsciousness doesn’t ease upon me gently; it slams into me with the force of a Divh’s mighty paw.

I awake with a violent convulsion, air bursting into my lungs and rushing back out on a scream. I jerk upright and instantly wish I hadn’t, as every muscle and joint shriek in agony.

Wildly, I get the impression of lush green grass and blue and white flowers and a distant vista of sparkling water hurtling toward me, then I pass out again.

The second time I open my eyes I can taste dirt and blood. My ears are pounding with the sound of my own pulse, and everything on my body hurts. But if it hurts, it means I’m still living, so at least that’s something.

I shove myself up on one arm, blinking around.

My sight isn’t quite working right. I can see the green hills and the mist in the air, so thick that it should be rain and yet isn’t, the sunlight arching through the sky, shimmering in bands of color.

I remain still for a moment, my hands braced on the earth, my legs crumpled beneath me, and try to take stock.

I can breathe. My legs move when I twitch them, my hands are sturdy upon the ground, my elbows locked. I can feel the earth beneath my fingers, the soft dew of the grass. I can smell a combination of loamy soil and fragrant flowers that I recognize…I recognize.

Hands shaking, I dig my fingers into the earth, scraping up the rich soil as I breathe in a shuddery breath, then exhale. I look up, but there is no Gent staring down at me, there are no mighty Divhs at all. But that doesn’t mean I’m fully alone.

With a chirruping pop and whirl, a small clutch of hummerlets flutter at the edge of the hill, at least four horse lengths from me.

I blink at them, still fully dazed. They bubble over with enthusiastic chirping as I focus on them but don’t move toward me while I’m too exhausted and in pain to stand.

We face off like this for two breaths, then three, then I collapse into darkness again.

The next time I wake, they’ve moved closer. I can tell because their whirring and chirping sounds like they’re practically breathing into my ear. I slowly, carefully open my eyes, not wanting to scare them away.

“Hey there,” I manage, but my voice comes out as a throaty croak and the words are more in my mind than spoken aloud.

The hummerlets predictably wheel back, but not so far this time—just out of arm’s reach. I huff a strained cough, then work my arms beneath me again, pushing myself up to an almost seated position.

“Where’s Kreya?” I ask, and from the chorus of coos and murmurs, I get only sadness, loss, and separation.

I smile a little. “It’s not your fault, Miriam had to go to the First House alone.

People don’t understand that—mmph.” I sit up a little straighter, drawing in a heavier breath.

There’s no one besides me and the hummerlets on the mountainside, not that I can tell.

I wonder for a moment about Fortiss and Szonja.

His thinking hadn’t been flawed. He thought that Gent was simply waiting on the other side of the separation between the planes, ready to catch me and make everything right again.

But why hadn’t he and Szonja come to find me?

How much time has actually passed since I landed on this grassy ridge?

Has the battle party moved on, pushing inexorably towards the First House?

The hummerlets offer no opinion on this last, but they’ve moved closer to me now. “I’m sorry you were left behind,” I murmur, and whether it’s my words or the emotion behind them, this elicits a chittering whirl of dismay. “But you’ll be reunited soon, okay? You’ll be…”

A strange, foreign smell wafts up to me, making my nostrils twitch.

It almost…it almost smells like burning flesh, but of course that can’t be possible.

I’ve never seen Divhs eat, on this plane or any other, but if they did eat, it wouldn’t be the charred carcass of one of their own. That just doesn’t make sense.

I shudder again, aware that the hummerlets are now spinning around in anxious concern.

“I know, I know,” I mutter, as I get my feet beneath me and push myself up to a standing position.

I wobble a little, my stance going wide as my hands go to my belt.

The stance of the proud warrior, only now it’s all that serves to keep me upright.

I take an awkward step, then another, my hands twitching for the edges of my cloak to wrap around me.

I’m so cold. Unreasonably cold. I don’t remember it being cold last time.

As if in sympathy, the hummerlets duck and weave around me, a living cloak of tiny Divhs.

With no particular direction, I trudge up the ridge, my heart beginning to pound with both excitement and a little fear as I near the top.

Maybe Gent is waiting for me on the other side, ready to snatch me up and dive into the great lake?

Or, far worse, maybe he’s hurt—broken somehow—needing me, and I never knew it?

I pick up speed. By the time I reach the top of the hill I’m gasping, but as I dash forward, trying to see everywhere at once, there’s no denying it. Gent isn’t here.

Disappointment squeezes my heart in my chest, and I stop abruptly, then stagger forward as the brightly colored hummerlets crash into me—first one, then another, their chirruping chorus growing more frenzied as I wave them away.

“He’s not here .” My words come out in a wail, but surely they don’t need me to tell them that. I glare at them, suddenly furious that I can’t connect to them like proper Divhs, can’t pierce through their chirruping pips, hums, and squeaks. “Where is he?”

They dance back and gyrate, their wings flapping frantically, but as I conjure up an image of Gent and try and press it toward them, they whoop and jitter, only growing more agitated.

The images that flood my mind are pure chaos.

Divhs soaring through the air, plunging into the water and out of them, Gent among them—but clearly this is from happier times, because sometimes I’m with Gent, sometimes I’m not.

Sometimes Gent is the mighty creature that I know him to be as my Divh, sometimes he’s far shorter, stumpier and more furry but still gloriously joyful—the Divh that he was for the long line of Tenth House warriors, ending with my brother.

But even as I implore the hummerlets to slow down, to focus and go back, they’re on to other images.

A mighty phoenix, winged lions, cats and lizards, everything we’ve seen over these past several days since Kreya burst into?—

Kreya!

The moment I form the name of their core Divh in my mind, the hummerlets explode in a frenzy of screaming dismay.

They shoot straight up, dart across the top of the ridge, then drop out of sight, only to rise again and hurtle back toward me, so frantically I end up crouching away from them, my hands raised over my head to protect myself.

“What are you doing?” I screech at them as they zip around me in dizzying circles and then crash into me, shoving me toward the edge of the ridge.

I duck and try to twist away, but two of them slam into me at once, grabbing my cloak at the neckline and dragging it forward, nearly strangling me.

“You can’t carry me, you idiots. Kreya can’t even?—”

Kreya.

They burst away from me, a tiny, mad flock, and dart over the ridge then up again, whirling back as they bob and jitter just off the range.

All thoughts of Gent slip away as I suck in a breath and head out after them, striding, then running across the grassy hill.

I can’t see over the ridge, but I remember this terrain from when Gent and I were here.

The hill drops away into a basin lined with trees and craggy rocks, until it opens into a wide curving bay.

It’s too small an opening for Gent to ever have fit into—at least not now.

Maybe Gent before he’d made the switch to me, but not…

I reach the edge of the ridge and finally see what the hummerlets have been trying to show me, then pick up the pace and launch myself over the other side of the ridge, toward the broken mass of trees and shattered rocks.

The hummerlets explode in a frenzy of movement as I half-scramble, half-fall down the hillside, barely able to breathe by the time I reach the fallen Divh.

“Blood and stone ,” I whisper as I reach Kreya’s tailfeathers, my heart in my throat as I take in the awkwardly broken wings, their soot-streaked tips. “What happened?”

The screeching of the hummerlets fades into the background as I come around her head, and I see her long, beautiful bill…wrapped tight with a leather thong.

Rage blasts through me, and I give up any pretense of caring.

I scramble onto the snapped-off tree trunk and run as far as it extends, then leap onto Kreya’s neck.

Her body shudders beneath me, and I realize she still lives.

She lives! Wincing at the pain I’m no doubt causing her, I grab handfuls of her feathers and pull myself over to where I can slide down her head and off to the right, crashing into the bushes near where the trailing edge of the leather strap is.

When I reach for it, I’m shocked anew as it wrenches away from me—then dives for my hand, spinning around my wrist in a living coil. It’s a warrior band, stretched beyond all recognition.

I gape, not even fully registering the pain as it shoots up my forearm to join the thick, multi-layered sentient band now pulsing around my left bicep. “Miriam’s band?” I stare in shock from the band to the hummerbill as it opens its mighty beak and caws. “She took it off completely ?”

The hummerlets screech and yammer in unison, and the hummerbill attempts to flap its wings, but its crash landing into the trees has trapped it.

“Wait! Wait—we can do this together. Just wait.”