I looked down. Where my hands had been empty, now they held two pieces of parchment.
I unfolded one. At first, it was blank. Then words unfurled over it.
You are in great danger.
There are more coming for you.
And worse, for your people.
Max breathed a confused curse, and I couldn’t help but agree.
Move quickly.
Use the Stratagram on the paper beneath. I will explain.
“Absolutely fucking not,” Max said. And the next words came as if they could hear him:
I cannot make you trust me.
But they will be coming for you in seconds.
And your people need you now to stop something worse.
“I don’t understand,” I murmured, and Max let out a low scoff.
“Because this is insane,” he said, beneath his breath. “Utterly insane.”
He was right. It was insane.
But then we heard a dull thump, and both of our heads snapped up.
There was a shuddering sound, like the wind through the trees. And slowly, it grew louder, fuller. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I knew what we were hearing. Could feel more of them, coming.
“We have to go,” I said.
I dropped the other parchment to the ground and grabbed the one below it. On it was a delicate Stratagram.
“Can you do it?” I said, knowing how weak he still was.
“Of course I can,” he grumbled. He grabbed my hand in his.
Black, long fingers reached around the doorframe. A faceless head began to peer around it. The fire was overtaking the cottage. Across the hall, a fiery beam fell to the ground.
That was the last thing I saw before we were gone.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Aefe
We needed to move fast, so I drank Ishqa’s blood again. It was a little easier, now. This time, I transformed fully into a bird, which was slightly less challenging than the partial shift I completed in the House of Reeds. I was much smaller than Ishqa, and at first I despised the sensation of flying. If there was anything, after all, that a Sidnee was not built for, it would be the air — we spent our entire lives living beneath the stone.
Still, there was a certain freedom to it that I began to appreciate after I got used to it. Sometimes, when the sun hit me just right, when my wings were stable and the air cooperative, I felt so free, so weightless, that I could forget about the dying faces of Caduan and Siobhan and Ashraia. I could forget about my father’s betrayal, my shameful bloodline, even the fact that I very well might be journeying to my death.
Ishqa barely spoke during this journey, even in between our stretches of travel. I could not blame him for this, and I wasn’t about to complain. What good were words, anyway?
The meeting was to take place on a small island, farther away from the Fey lands than I had ever been before. It was so far south that we would be flying squarely into the territory of the human nations. When we were about two days away from the island, we flew over nothing but sea for the entire day, a prospect that made a knot sit in my stomach when combined with my uncertainty of flying and my sheer exhaustion. I didn’t know how to swim — and certainly wouldn’t be able to shift fast enough to do so, anyway, even if I did. If I fell, I would drown.
But thankfully, we made it to land shortly before sundown. We watched the ground below us carefully, and Ishqa did several laps around the area, scanning for life with his superior eyesight and confirming we were alone before we landed.
When we did, and I scraped myself up off the ground after shifting back into Fey form, I stood and looked around in stunned silence.
“It’s unfair,” I said, quietly.
“What?”
“That the human world is this beautiful.”
It was so beautiful that it hurt. We stood in the middle of a sea of gold, tall grass that reached my waist rolling out in all directions, bright as fire beneath the setting sun. The sky was bright red, like human blood had painted the clouds, and the reflection and the heat of the sun rolled over the landscape like dripping paint. It all shuddered beneath the breeze, as if the grass itself were breathing.
I wasn’t sure why I began to cry. But once the tears started coming, they would not stop. As I walked, I held my hand above the grass, letting the tips of gold tickle my palms and fingers in little gentle caresses.
I wished Caduan could have seen it. I remembered how he had looked at the city of Niraja, when we first arrived — the way his eyes went bright with wonder, even if everything else about his face remained subdued. I didn’t realize how much I had loved that look until now, when it was painfully absent. I wished I had savored it more.
We stopped for the night there, in that field. We hunted and set up camp. As dusk fell, the plains fell into silver shadow, a mournful inversion of their earlier intensity. It was just as beautiful, but eerily silent. I imagined the afterlife would look like this.
“Do the Wyshraj believe in life beyond death?” I asked Ishqa, as we ate.
“Life is, perhaps, a weak way to say it,” he replied, softly. “Our dead rise to the sky. They send us the winds and the sun. And they watch.” His gaze, golden even under the moonlight, flicked to me. “And the Sidnee?”
“We believe in a limitless place, where you are reunited with all you have lost. But to get there, your mark upon the world is judged. There is nothing more important to the Sidnee than the weight of our stories.” I looked down at my forearms. One covered in lines of tattoos. The other in stark black X’s. A wave of fear settled over me.
It was likely that
