“She speaks to you, doesn’t she?” Kinlear asked. He looked back and forth between the two of them. “I wasn’t certain before, but now...gods, it’s impossible to deny, the bond you share.” He wasalwayscertain about Ezer. But Six? Six was the difficult one. “Of course, I was hopeful before, when I first saw the beast standing before you in the Eagle’s Nest.” He’d never forget it.Not in all his days. “But now...well, it took long enough for her to do it.”
“To do what?” Ezer asked.
Kinlear grinned. “To choose.”
He explained it to her; the truth of how a bond was forged between raphon and rider. She just stared at him as he spoke, as if she were processing, as if she were deciding whether to scream at him or simply stare.
He wasn’t sure which was worse, but he knew,oh gods,he knew...
“She has chosenyou.”
23
She was furious...
As furious as a wet cat, and rightly so, for he could tell she wasterrifiedas she stomped after him, refusing to let the subject go.
Good.
Let her chase him, let her take her wrath out on him.
He’d relish it, because he deserved it, and because she needed to release the pain she’d carried – the pain she’d shouted at him while in Six’s cage.
He would be her mental punching bag.
He would take every hit.
“I’ll die!” Ezer yelped, as they reached the Aviary doors.
No, she wouldn’t. He’d seen it in his dreams.
“It perplexes me, Raphonminder, how you can think so highly and yet so utterly lowly of yourself in one moment,” Kinlear said.
Why didn’t she see the power she held?
One didn’t justbecomea Raphonminder. They didn’t just step into a raphon’s good graces. No, Ezer was born for this. Shewas made for this, handpicked from the Ehver to be sent here for a creature such asSix.
She laid into him, cursing him for the mission, the War Table, the secret he’d kept. All of it.
“We die,” she growled. “So that you can live.”
He’d been enormously gracious so far, butthatphrase?
It sparked a nerve in him.
“Careful,” Kinlear warned. “You don’t know what you’re speaking of.”
She stepped closer, her dark curls trembling as if a rogue wind had just whipped through the space. “Don’t I, though? Who’s the one that spent the past many weeks in the cage, while you were...” she waved a hand, searching for an answer that would probably hurt him.
“While I was what?” Kinlear challenged.
The front door opened, and a few Scribes walked in. Snow danced between their ankles as they shut it, and bowed to Kinlear, who bowed back.
And in that time, Ezer had finally chosen her next slew of words. “While you were galivanting about the castle in your silly little outfits, all prim and proper and?—”
He gasped. Howdareshe? “We needn’t bring the outfits into this.”
But she just kept going. “While you were reading books, lazing about in your plush quarters...”
