Page 20 of Wild Reverence

XIII

Scales, Coins, and a Girl with Crimson Hair

VINCENT

There was a dead eithral at the top of the cliff.

It had been such an unlikely event that it had distracted us from the grief of the Poet Queen’s death. For nights, I dreamt of reaching the beast that had killed Adria and, with her, our hope. Of taking a scale within my hand not to wield it in any way, but to simply claim that I had touched magic.

I had taken hold of the impossible.

And so I fell prey to the same dream, night after night, and yet I never could reach the top of the cliff.

Most nights, my two older brothers were there; they passed me on the climb, making it to the top with ease, and called down to me, again and again, but not even their voices could rouse my courage once fear froze me to the mountainside.

Another night, it was Hugh Delavoy, our family’s ally, who was urging me to climb faster and was disappointed when I could not reach the top.

“Do you not see it, Vincent?” he called down to me urgently. “We need the scales. We could kill a god with one.”

“I do not want to kill a god,” I tried to say, but my voice was gone.

One night, he vanished after expressing his disappointment in me.

I was left hanging there, my fingers clinging to the tiny cracks of the cliff’s face, every muscle burning in an effort not to let go, the rain pouring mercilessly from the clouds.

If I glanced down, there was nothing but slick stone and mist that cloaked a deep darkness.

If I looked up, I could see the eithral, a distant white smudge in the rain, one clawed wing limp and torn like a sail.

I was too afraid to climb higher.

That is when Red appeared, as if by enchantment.

She held on to the rock beside me, close enough that our elbows touched.

“Hello,” she said, so bright and innocent that the dream nearly broke. “What a surprise to find you here.”

“Yes?” I winced, thinking I sounded daft. But ever since I had seen her in the waking world, my tongue had become knotted around her. “W-where did you come from?”

“A gate,” Red replied, as if this made perfect sense. She did not give me time to ask further questions. She tilted her chin upward, and the rain glistened in her long, unbound hair. “You are trying to reach the top?”

I nodded, my arms aching from holding the same position for so long. Fear crept across my skin, leaving gooseflesh behind.

“Then come. I will climb with you.” She began to shift forward, reaching for the next handhold.

My limbs felt heavy as iron.

“I… can’t,” I whispered. “I’m going to fall.”

Red paused, and then lowered herself down so that she was beside me again.

“Vincent,” she said, a warm whisper. “You are dreaming. Anything is possible here. It is yours to command.”

Her words slowly sank into me, and where once there was gray, cold rain, there was now sun and blue sky. And where once there was hardly anything to hold on to, there was now a rope.

This was my first time lucid dreaming. Suddenly, I possessed magic of my own. I felt like an echo of a god.

We climbed together to the top, where the eithral remained sprawled in death.

Her chest had been cleaved open. The god of war’s great obsidian sword was still buried there, its rubied hilt flashing in the sun.

But what caught our attention was the horrifying fact that the iridescent scales had been picked clean.

Only one remained on the beast’s shoulder, scabbed with silver blood.

Red seemed struck by this sight. She eased down to her knees, staring at it, face wan.

“It’s just a dream,” I reminded her. But when I tried to make the scales grow back, I came up empty. It was just a dream, but its taproot was truth. “Who do you think harvested them?”

“I do not know,” she said, a tense note in her voice. “But my mother tells me the Skywards want them. They use the scales for power and they pay a great amount for them on the black market.” She paused, and then murmured, “Do you want the last one?”

I thought I wanted it, but when I reached out to trace the lone scale, my chest felt hollow, strung full of webs.

“No,” I said.

“Then take us somewhere else. Take me away from here.”

I did not think I was strong enough to do it, but Red’s presence—her words—stirred something in me. I took her hand and the dead eithral became smoke, the cliff melted into ink.

We were standing in my bedroom. The fire was burning in the hearth.

The window was open, as I liked, for when the white owl visited me, and I could hear the river.

The chainmail and armor I had been begging for for years were laid across my bed, as if it was only now, in nightmares, that my father deemed me strong enough to earn my steel.

Red walked to the hearth, her fingers touching her moonstone belt.

“Do you want to see something?” she asked. “A secret my mother once showed me?”

I followed her, nodding. “Yes.”

She placed a strange coin on my palm. It shone with a sickle moon and a smattering of stars.

“What is this?” I asked, examining it closer. “A piece of the sky?”

“A Skyward coin.” A second one appeared in her fingers, the mirror of a sunrise. She tossed it into the fire, where I watched, amazed, as music wove through the flames.

We took turns after that, sitting knee to knee on the hearthstone, tossing enchanted coins into the fire until they were gone. She loved to hear them melt into strings and flutes, more so than me, but I think it was because music was rare where she came from.

“Red?” I whispered.

She looked at me with a slight smile, chin propped on her palm. The color had returned to her face, and her dark brown eyes were luminous in the firelight.

I hesitated. The answer I was desperate to know would break the dream, like it did every time I asked it. And yet something felt different this time. I was dreaming, but in some ways, I was not.

“I’ve been calling you Red because you were the girl with crimson hair,” I said. “But what is your true name?”

“Matilda,” she replied.

“ Matilda, ” I echoed. A waterfall of a name that suited her. “And your magic?”

“I am the herald of the gods.”

“A Skyward, then? I saw you vanish on the hillside.”

“No. Well, actually—”

She did not have a chance to finish her thought. Once, her presence had cut my nightmares in two. But this time terror rippled at the edges. From the shadows of my room, Uncle Grimald suddenly appeared.

“Grab her!” he cried at me, exasperated. “Prove yourself a man! Take hold of her. Did I not tell you that we could use her?”

Matilda jumped in surprise, but before she could escape, my uncle had grasped her arm, yanking her to her feet.

I stumbled upward, heart pounding. It felt like my ribs had cracked when I opened my mouth to shout, but my voice was gone. Water spilled out of me, tasting like a murky pond. I tried to lunge at them, to knock Grimald’s hands from her, but my feet were frozen, colder than ice.

“Vincent,” Matilda said, a hitch of fear in her voice. She clawed at my uncle’s hold as he began to drag her away. “This is a dream. Awaken. ”

I trembled from the sudden strain to wake myself. I curled my hands into fists until nails stung palms. I bit down on my tongue until copper flooded my mouth.

There was nothing else I could do but watch Grimald haul Matilda into the shadows.

Only then did my feet finally move.

I knew she was lost to me. If I chased after her, I would never find her.

Awaken.

I ran to the open window, a narrow, bright arch in the stone. I jumped, letting myself careen through the air, fear clawing my lungs. I fell into the boiling darkness of the river.

Gasping, I woke, entangled with blankets.

Matilda.

I said her name, over and over, until sunrise melted the last shadow in the room.