Faron considered pressing the subject. There was no point in bringing him along for support if he wasn’t even going to come inside the building. But at the same time, she understood his hesitancy. Reeve generally approached the Iryan faith with a mixture of scientific curiosity and polite deference. One memorable summer, Faron had caught him reading a stack of books the height of her arm about Iryan summoning magic and ancestral spirits. Just because he couldn’t perform it, he’d said, didn’t mean he shouldn’t research and respect it.
But Reeve’s father had also given the order to burn several of San Irie’s temples to the ground. A Warwick stepping inside one even now would feel like a crime.
“Okay,” Faron said at last.Be carefulcaught on her tongue. Elara had told her about finding Reeve in Port Sol, about the shopkeeper who had spat in his face. The people of Seaview hadn’t experienced the visceral horror that those in Port Sol had, so it seemed unlikely that Reeve would be hassled in these streets. But unlikely wasn’t impossible. Faron couldn’t decide if she wanted to care or not.
“Are you actually going or…?” Reeve drawled, resting his elbows against the stone wall with an amused smirk.
Faron decided she definitely didn’t care.
“Empyrean,” said Irie as soon as the sunroom door closed. “It’s been a long while since you’ve summoned us—”
“Wemissedyou,” Mala interrupted. She stood between Irie andObie, the curly-maned, big-eyed emotional heart to their divine detachment. “Are you all right?”
“Reeve’s been doing research,” Faron said, focusing on a point over Mala’s head so she wouldn’t be distracted from business. “He told me that in one story the Gray Saint never died. That he’s imprisoned somewhere called the Empty. Is it true?”
Silence followed her question, a silence that said as much as any words would have.
Faron took a deep breath to control her temper. “What would have been the harm in just telling me that?”
“The reappearance of the Gray Saint, as well as your interest in him, worries us,” Irie responded. “Your situation has made the right thing to do… a complicated matter for you. We knew what he was likely to want, and we knew you couldn’t be coaxed into giving it to him if you didn’t know anything about it. Or about him.”
Faron’s cheeks burned. The fact that she’d spent the last month in Gael Soto’s company, under his tutelage, didn’t matter as much as the realization that the gods were still treating her like a child incapable of making her own decisions. When they hid things from her, they narrowed her choices and undermined her ability to make informed ones. She should not have learned about the Empty from Gael, whom she had no reason to trust.
And after all she’d done, she should not have been learning now that the gods didn’t trusther.
“Well, the Langlish might be planning to break the First Dragon out of there before I can be ‘coaxed’ into it,” Faron said with only a hint of the anger that coursed through her body like poison. “Elara thinks the commander has already begun the process with herbond and the Gray Saint’s reappearance. Tell me where the Empty is, so I can protect it.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Empyrean.”
“But the commander—”
“Hasn’t found it yet and can’t be led there by you accidentally if you don’t know where it is. The best protection is for its location to be lost to time.”
“We don’t even know where it is,” Mala added. “Truly. We know where itwas, but the world has grown and changed and shifted so much since then.”
“But you could find it, right? If I summoned you, you could—”
“Empyrean.” Irie narrowed those unfathomable eyes. “Your stubbornness betrays you. Why do you really want to know?”
The fact that she even had to ask made Faron’s temper flare hot once more. She couldn’t tell if they were being honest with her. She couldn’t tell if theywouldbe honest with her. And they had the nerve to stare atherwith suspicion, as if her problems were a mystery to them. As if they’d hardly thought of her since she’d seen them last.
She was their chosen champion. She was their connection to the mortal plane. She was the weapon they had pointed at the Langlish Empire and their beasts of fire, and what had she ever gotten in return?
A past, present, and future defined by blood and flame.
“What if,” she asked, “the Gray Saint has the power to break the bond between my sister and her dragon? What if he could teach me, and I could use that power on the First Dragon—”
Obie turned his head away as if he couldn’t bear to look at her. Irie’s expression was exasperated. And Mala was the worst of all,wavering between betrayal and pity. Faron’s mouth snapped shut, tears prickling at her eyes. She wasn’t sure if it was humiliation or rage that clogged her throat, but she swallowed down everything she wanted to say next. She was afraid of what would come out if she kept going.
“It simply isn’t worth the risk,” Irie said into the silence. “The Gray Saint and the First Dragon are so much more dangerous than you realize, and now that one has awakened, the continued existence of these dragons will likely only make them stronger. The time has come for you to meet your destiny, Empyrean. You must exterminate them before it’s too late.”
“What about Gael? Does he deserve to be exterminated, too?”
Another thick silence followed her words. A thick silence during which the last thread of doubt over Gael’s intentions shrank to nothing. Hehadtold her his real name. The godsdidrefuse to see him as anything but the Gray Saint, perpetually tied to the First Dragon. And they all agreed that the First Dragon was too large a threat to the world to be freed.
Which meant that he had told the truth about this power being the way to break Elara’s bond.
While the gods continued to keep her in the dark.
