“Can you break the Vow with him being unconscious?” Treno asks me, and I freeze, remembering my failed attempt earlier.
“I don’t know if I can at all,” I confess, loathing the way it makes me feel as though I’m letting them down. “I tried earlier, I did what I thought I was supposed to do, but it didn’t break. I must be missing something, but I just haven’t had a moment to try and figure out what,” I tell them.
“We don’t have to keep him alive to break the Vow. I say cut his head off and then work on the rune later,” Zeph declares, and bewilderment sifts through me.
“We don’t need him to break it?” I question.
“No, he controls the Vow right now because of his bloodline, but Treno is just as capable. We can have Wekun remove the block on Treno’s Vow, and you can try to destroy it that way.”
“Wait. If we could do that, why the hell didn’t we do it before?” I demand, confused. I thought Lazza was the key in all of this, not just his bloodline in general?
“Because we don’t actually know for sure if that’s correct,” Treno interjects. “We think maybe it could work, but it’s not guaranteed. We all decided that going to the source and breaking it that way was the surest option. But if you can’t break it yet, I’m with Zeph; Lazza’s too dangerous to keep around.”
Ryn growls deeply, and I take that as his vote of agreement too.
I take a deep breath. “Let me try again, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll go with the gryphon way of kill first, figure the rest out later.”
Zeph studies my face for a beat and then nods. Relief washes through me at his silent vote of confidence, and we start to approach Lazza’s still prone body in the dirt. I feel as though I’m walking straight into quicksand as I get closer to Lazza. It’s like I know it’s dangerous, but I won’t know how dangerous until it’s probably too late and I’m being sucked under and suffocated to death.
I expect Zeph to toe him to see if he moves or if there’s any indication of some other possible threat, but instead he walks over and stabs him with a sword through the shoulder. Lazza doesn’t even flinch or make a peep, and as shocked as I am by the brutality of what Zeph just did, we know Lazza is completely unconscious now.
Zeph nods at me, and I tentatively make my way over to him. Lazza is face down, which makes this part easy, I guess, but now I just need to figure out what the fuck I’m missing. I kneel next to Lazza’s body and reach my hand out to cover the Vow rune on the back of his neck. I take a deep breath and close my eyes and try to piece together what it is that I might be missing.
I’m touching the magic, I’m saying the words… “Nusht fialow odreece tamod kle.” I’m willing the magic to break.
I wait again to see if what I just did will work this time, but again nothing happens. Frustration slams through me, and I tighten my grip on Lazza’s neck and try to figure out what the fuck is going on.
I flip through everything I can recall from Nadi to my dad and what’s been said about Bonds and the Vow and how they work. Nadi said I needed to speak it into existence. My dad told me I already knew how to do this, to think back to the lessons. I sift through the lessons I can remember. The first time I used my will and got in trouble for freezing the animals. The words I used to bind them to me and force them to listen. The lesson with Princess.
I pause and retrace my mental steps.
The words I used...
I focus on the memory of the time I froze the animals. “A word is never bad, but bad things can be done with words, and we must make sure that we keep ourselves and others from doing that.” My dad’s words bounce around in my brain, and I realize something. I didn’t get in trouble for using the word, I got in trouble for forcing my will on something and then using my magic to enforce it.
What if the language or the words that I’ve been taught have nothing to do with the magic?
I think through the lessons and the words that I was taught, but I can’t recall anything that tells me that the words themselves are anything more than the language of my dad’s people and that’s why he was passing it down to me.
Zeph’s deep voice rises up in my mind as he tells me about how the word tamod was used against his parents. But I can’t help wondering if, even in this case, the word was inconsequential, and the will of the user was what mattered?
It would make sense that the gryphons would think the words meant more than they did. It was the language of their oppressors. It would have naturally become synonymous with the magic that bent the Gryphons to the Ouphe will. It makes even more sense that the language of the Ouphe is practically dead. I’m sure anyone who spoke it in the presence of a gryphon was ripped apart right then and there.
The Ouphe and all that they represent has been all but destroyed, so of course the language would have been too.
It dawns on me what I’ve been doing wrong. I’ve been so focused on the words, thinking they were the key, but they were just words.
I’m the key.
My will and my magic are all that I need.
