The request was soft, vulnerable. Godsdammit, what Will wouldn’t give to tear this hole in the stone wider so that he could hold her. He settled instead for forcing his affinity across the small space between them.
She’d already lowered her shield.
His eyes burned as he poured every ounce of love he had into that small tendril of power between them.
“Always, Aya love.”
57
It had been a lonely journey without Cole—lonely, but necessary. With Aya and Will headed toward Tala, and Liam and Dauphine focused on the Midlands, they needed someone to make their case to Milsaio.
Not that Aidon expected much of a case needed to be made. King Sarhash was a reasonable man and a fair ruler. If he knew it was time to make a final stand, Sarhash would do what he could to join them—even if it meant leaving his island kingdom to do so.
But even still…Aidon had found it difficult to distract himself on the journey to Trahir. The skiff was small, with no other passengers save two Caeli that Aidon had paid handsomely to rush him across the Anath.
He’d added an additional fee to guarantee they wouldn’t turn him into the nearest Midlandian guard patrolling the small port. It was incredible how war loosened one’s morals.
He’d tried not to mull over how little he truly knew of such things; tried not to think of how he was a general with more skirmish experience than full-fledged battle.
Not true, his father’s voice filled his head.You have seen worse battles than most in the last few months alone.
That, at least, Aidon could agree with. Eteryium hadn’t faced destruction on this scale in over five hundred years. Perhaps that made him evenly matched with the rest of them.
Barring, of course, Evie.
Typically, he’d use training to silence his mind, letting the vigorous activity run him ragged until all he could think of was catching his breath and steadying his pulse. But the small skiff was hardly fit for it.
So instead, he’d spent his time calling his power forward and cutting it off, over and over and over, an exercise fit more for a Visya child than a fully grown man.
It did not bother him the way it once did.
In fact, it reminded him of the exercises he worked through as a young warrior, learning how to control his sword and train his muscles to mimic the movements he saw in his mind.
Burn me if you must.
Dauphine’s words were a soothing balm he silently repeated to his own fire.
He could no longer afford to fear his own abilities. His fire was a part of him, and so he would train it just as he trained every other muscle he learned to wield strategically.
It was those very exercises he was doing when he first saw the coastline of Rinnia.
Aidon felt something swoop in his chest as he clenched his fingers into a fist, his flames vanishing effortlessly. He gave himself a moment to simply breathe it in—the glimmering sandstone palace on the towering cliffs, the explosion of color that was the city center, the crescent moon beach.
The crash of the waves and the long call of the seagulls and the—
“Stop,” Aidon commanded the Caeli who was currently navigating the skiff. The excess wind died down immediately, the boat slowing with it.
He held his breath as he listened hard, his eyes closing as he tried to make sense of what he was hearing.
It was…
Shouting.
Shouting, and screaming, and beneath those, hardly audible from this distance, the all-too-familiar clang of metal against metal.
Aidon opened his eyes, his pulse ticking up as he realized what this meant.
Josie’s attack had begun.
