Antal appraised the cliff with a tail flick. “Instinct. We used to hunt from the trees.”
“Now your prey come on their knees.” Kashvi joined them, a squint on the cavern above. Then, back the way they’d come. “You saw that clearing we passed? With the hemlocks?”
Fi nodded.
“We’ll set up there. Give us half an hour.”
Kashvi, Yvette, and Mal slipped into the forest like phantoms. Fi and Antal crouched in a copse of firs to wait, hidden by dark needles pillowed in snow. She shivered. Antal wrapped an arm around her, a warm chest to lean into.
Aisinay stood with them, alert like a prey animal, ears perked toward the cavern overhead. Her soft snort spoke of perplexity, her nibble at Fi’s coat asking what in all the Shattered Planes they were doing waiting outside the lair of a Beast.
The Beast who took Boden from her.
“The derived daeyari,” Fi whispered, “do they know what they were?”
Antal’s tail swayed against her leg. “It varies. Reincarnation degrades cognition at different rates, depending on how well daeyari can maintain their energy within the Void before re-materializing. But in that Beast’s state, it likely remembers little of what it once was.”
Perhaps slaying the creature would be a mercy. Fi’s breath came out as a shudder of mist.
“Are you all right?” Antal asked.
Of course not. They could all die today, more bones for Verne to feast upon.
“In all my life,” she said, “this is the first time I’ve come for a daeyari of my own will.”
The silence beside her was so pointedly thick, she could taste it. Antal scrunched his mouth.
“To a daeyari,” he said.
“What?”
“The first time you’ve cometoa daeyari. You’ve comeforone. Several times.”
Fi swatted him. “This is a life-or-death situation, Antlers.”
“A shame to waste it dwelling on the death part.”
His grin was insufferable. Delicious. Despite Fi’s best effort to keep a stern face, she shared a laugh, quiet as snow off a pine bough, pruning the dread from her joints.
Half an hour passed. Time to move.
She climbed onto Aisinay. Antal mounted behind her, his chest a steadying presence at her back, an arm wrapped around her waist. What a sight that must make, a Void immortal upon a Void horse, though Aisinay adjusted fine to the weight. She offered a fiercer prance of protest when Fi lay a hand on her neck, urging her toward the cliff. With swiveled ears, the horse complied, carrying them out of the trees and onto an open scarp.
Not as prey. Never again.
At the base of the cliff, Fi looked up. The cave loomed like a hungry maw—the den of a predator, an immortal Beast from the depths of the Void.
“Hey!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Anyone home?”
Her voice echoed off the rockface, thunderous in the silent morning.
Antal stiffened behind her—not in the fun way. She felt his arm tighten first, heard him sniff the pine-laced air. Beneath them, Aisinay fidgeted.
Then came the eyes: two motes of pupil-less red, glowing at the mouth of the cave.
That wretched survival instinct knotted Fi’s stomach as the Beast slunk to the edge, claws like knives and pale skincamouflaged against snowy rocks. A growl rumbled over stone. The sound reverberated through Fi’s aching ribs, this creature that took her brother from her. All their hard work in Nyskya, the lives lost, yet not a scratch remained on its healed hide.
They couldn’t let it escape a second time.
