“Very good. Now tell me what I’m feeling.”
“Proud,” Sonara said. “But not of me. Proud of your own damned self, for thinking you’re the one who taught me this trick.”
His answering chuckle lit up the darkness.
Sonara sighed as she stoked the fire in front of her, suddenly hating her memories of Jaxon. Because, after all these years… he was starting to feel like Soahm. She’d lost them both to the Wanderers, to thesame exact ship.
The fire crackled merrily across from her now, embers dancing upwards to fade into the shadows of the towering cave. A pair of bright red eyes flashed as a wyvern pup hissed and scurried around to the dark side of the jagged stalactite hanging over the fire.
Sonara sighed as the pup faded from sight. Was the goddess of fate tangled up in all of this? She’d always thought the goddesses to be just stories. Lights in the night sky that cared nothing for the people beneath them, or a series of clever little tales to explain the strange happenings on Dohrsar.
But perhaps she was wrong, for there were too many threads weaving together and tying their knots tight.
And then there was the curse in her veins, a curse that had caused all of this in the first place, combined with some new, unknown power… and the threat was far stronger than she’d ever thought before.
“Damn it,” Sonara hissed as she tossed a stick into the fire. The embers danced skyward, causing more wyvern pups to scurry quietly after them, testing their new claws and wings. “Damn Jaxon for getting me out of there. Damn him for falling from Duran’s back. And damn my useless curse.”
She’d stabbed a Wanderer in the chest at the Gathering, succumbing to some new level of her curse as if she’d been a prisoner of her own. She should have been killed for what she’d done. And yetshewas the one walking free.
But Jaxon… he was her blood brother, her counterpart, as essential to her as the suns were to the moons. Without him…
“You should not call your gift useless, Devil.”
Sonara glanced to her right, where Thali sat leaning up against the cave wall, her Canis mask gaunt in the firelight.
“You’re wrong,” Sonara growled.
They’d resorted to hiding in the shadows, in a cold, forgotten cave just beside the Garden of the Goddess. It stank of wet earth and rotting bones.
And when she closed her eyes, Sonara could still imagine the sound of the screams from the prisoners in the Garden, and the small campfire Thali had made, crackling merrily, only served to remind her of the attack.
The deep eye sockets of Thali’s Canis mask looked hollow as she stared at Sonara from across the flames. “It took over your senses. It had the power to control you. A power that strong, a magic that intense, Devil, isnotuseless. You should learn to wield it like a weapon.”
“It couldn’t save him,” Sonara said softly. “It couldn’t save any of us.”
Footsteps sounded from the shadows as Azariah and Markam appeared, having returned from the network of tunnels carved out around the cave. There were miles and miles of them throughout the Bloodhorns, snaking all directions into the dark. They’d been carved out by miners that had passed through with shovel and axe in hope of uncovering priceless gold. But now these tunnels were abandoned, picked through as the search for gold had driven further north, towards Deadwood.
Sonara had sent Markam and Azariah out together with a torch and a sword, to seek food, blankets, or anything of real worth to help them survive while they came up with a plan.
And to talk through whatever cold tension hung between them, so palpable it made it impossible to be around the two.
But it seemed they had found only a single mountain rat, the carcass stinking and crawling with white maggots as Markam slammed it down beside the fire.
Azariah looked like she might be sick.
“Well,” the princess said, as she glanced away from the carcass, her lips pursed tight. Dirt was smudged across her smooth cheek, and her cloak was stained with smoke and charred holes from the attack. It made her look, for all the world, like a runaway.
A far cry from the princess who’d hired them mere days ago.
“Well, what?” Sonara asked.
Azariah put her hands on her hips. “The… the plan? Have you come up with anything yet?”
A plan forwhat,exactly, Sonara wasn’t sure. “There’s no way in hell we can get through that sort of power.”
Markam glanced over at her, eyes narrowed as he took out a small blade and appraised the rat’s torso. “Who says we’re going to try?”
She gritted her teeth and forced herself to speak, not snarl. “Your brother is trapped out there, Markam. And you’d sooner let him die than risk your own skin to save him.”
