“I know this is hard for you… Take your time.”
“Don’t speak to me like a child!” Vi shouted at her uncle. “I know he’s alive.”
“How?” His voice had hardened once more. She knew he was bracing himself for the tough love he thought she needed. Good, he should brace himself; Vi wasn’t going to give up this fight easily. The spark lived in her and she’d unleash it on them all if she had to, if that’s what it took to get them to stop saying her father was dead. “How do you know, sitting here in the North, far from everything, what has happened in the barrier islands? How do you know more than Elecia and her search parties?”
Her uncle had intended the questions to be rhetorical. Of that, Vi was certain. But he’d asked the right thing to give her an answer.
She knew how her father was alive.
“You said he died on the barrier islands?” Vi whispered. This time, it was not grief, but a delicate, quivering hope silencing her words.
“Yes.”
“On the waytothe Crescent Continent,notback from? He never made it there?” she emphasized.
“Yes. He was to make it to the Crescent Continent and send back word. There has been no word, and theDawn Striderwas sunk on the way.”
Her whole body was trembling now. She knew her father was alive. For she had seen a vision of him on the Crescent Continent, kneeling before a queen in clothes similar to Taavin’s, in a city that mirrored what he’d described.
If she’d seen the future with her sight, and saw her father there, that meant her father had somehow made it. Vi remembered her conversation with Taavin. Her visions were of things that would happen if the world remained unchanged. Had the world changed already? Changed enough, and in the specific ways that would have altered that scene?
There was only way to be even remotely certain—she had to somehow trigger another vision of her father. If she could see him again, she could squelch the doubt that even now threatened to smother her. But the only places Vi had ever received her visions were the apexes of fate.
In one frantic motion, Vi snatched up the sheet she’d been working on, turned, and ran.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Vi, wait!”Ellene called after her.
Her father wasn’t dead.
“What the—” Jayme and Andru were standing right outside of her main door, though Vi blew right past them.
Her father wasn’t dead.
“Jayme, Ellene, keep an eye on her,” her uncle called after sadly. Three sets of footsteps took up chase behind her.
He couldn’t be. There was no way he was.Her father wasn’t dead!
The words resounded in her, bouncing back and forth around her ribcage, puncturing her heart and healing it in the same action. The world could think he was dead. But she knew better. She’d seen it. She would be the one flame of belief protesting against their bleak darkness that could be a lighthouse to guide him home.
All she needed now was proof.
“Vi, wait!” Ellene tried again.
Vi didn’t even slow down to respond. She sprinted down the curving passageways and bridges of the fortress. Her feet knew the way in and around the trees, down a pathway she’d run countless times in her life to greet Jayme, her mother, and her father at the stables.
Rubbing her eyes with her palms, Vi forced her lungs to burn only from the exertion and not from sobs. She wouldn’t mourn her father until she knew he was dead. She would mourn when she had proof of that. Not before. Never before.
At the hard-packed earth of the stables, Vi made a hard right toward the noru pen. Her hand met the top of the fence and Vi hoisted herself over, landed hard, and was off again. She brought her hands to her mouth and let out a shrill whistle.
Gormon’s ears perked up and his head turned. On her command, he came plodding over.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Jayme shouted between labored breaths.
“Let us help you, Vi!”
“I have to go.” Vi hoisted herself up onto Gormon with giant fistfuls of fur. There wasn’t time for him to be saddled. If she asked for a saddle it would delay things, and someone would stop her.
