"That's something we have in common," I muttered.
"You have nothing in common," she snapped, slamming her foot back into her boot and rising again. "You never did, First Ringer."
She took a step toward me and sneered as if in disgust.
"It won't matter where any of us sleeps tonight anyway," she said. "Gryfon will want to leave within the hour. Rest, hydrate, eat if you must. But be ready when he issues the command. I won't drag a half-dead Betrayer behind me all the way home."
With that, Zya stormed from the tent, leaving me alone in the quiet, shared space within. I glanced back over my surroundings, trying not to focus on what she'd said or the words she'd chosen.Home, I'd noticed, of course. It was how she saw Sanctuary, how Zya understood all of this. It wasn't a battle waged against the gods, conquering a city they'd occupied for millennia. It was going home. But there was another choice of words I'd found interesting as well.
She hadn't referred to him as the general.
She'd called himGryfon.
Chapter Forty-Four
Adrian
“In your desperation to defeat the Upper Ringers, you’ve forgotten one of the most important truths. The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.”
— As Spoken by Logan Harris to Dominic Hill at a Meeting of the Resistance
The great beats of the Zver's wings, when taken low to the ground and in great number, were powerful enough to whip up a dust storm in the proper conditions and if done in the right way. That was how the general and his men, along with the riders, had been shielding themselves from the Geist's scouts for generations. By creating what appeared to be a natural phenomenon that impaired visibility from a distance, they could move large groups of people completely unseen in the vast expanse of the desert. It was brilliant.
I'd seen it so many times throughout the journey already, every day we'd been walking and getting closer and closer to Sanctuary, but it still awed me. And it did so now as Rainier and his riders took to the skies, swooping low to disturb the sand and then flying higher and higher in a circular pattern. There was acharge in the air as well, a static of underlying power. I felt it sparking within my veins, coaxing the darkness to my fingertips, as I breathed in the ecstasy of the windswept breeze from the Zver’s wings.
"We're getting close," one of Gryfon's warriors announced as he strode up beside us, taking up our pace and marching along with us as he spoke to his general. "We'll reach Sanctuary by the afternoon."
I glanced out ahead at the gathering dust storm and glimpsed the scout returning from beyond, hands raised over his head and cloth obscuring his nose and mouth to protect him from the swirling particles.
"Do they know?" the general's drawl was low as always.
"Hard to say," his warrior, an accomplished officer named Mero, replied. "There's no indication they've sent out any more squadrons than usual but word reaches us slow in the desert and they'll be keeping at least a few squadrons outside of the city for defense anyway ever since…"
He trailed off, glancing at me.
"Since the wards fell," Gryfon finished for him with a grunt.
Mero nodded.
"Send Tamim and Reidar ahead," the general ordered a moment later. "Tell them to stay above, keep to the cliffs. I need to know what we're facing when we arrive. Tell the others it's time to rest. Set up a guard. We'll sleep here tonight and plan to arrive in the morning. We've travelled long enough. We'll need our strength for the battle to come."
Mero nodded again and then took off, catching the returning scout and relaying orders to him before waving his arms to call for camp assembly.
I turned away from the weary travelers pulling supplies from every part of our caravan and back to the general who was staring out at the swirling dust storm, arms crossed.
"They won't be able to keep that up all night, will they?" I asked, looking from the dust storm to Gryfon and back.
"They won't have to," he replied. "Only until nightfall. Then they'll sleep like the rest of us. We'll rise before dawn and press forward, fully armored and prepared for an attack."
My gaze swiveled to him again.
"It's time?" I asked.
He gave one curt nod. That was answer enough.
So we joined the others in helping set up camp under the overhang of the cliffs, hoping it would shield us even more from the Geist's scouts. The general believed we'd be safe come nightfall, that the Geist wouldn't send as many scouts out searching the desert and, even if they did, we wouldn't be visible in the dark. But I hadn't yet grown accustomed to believing in the inadequacies of the people I'd been raised to worship as gods. Their abilities still seemed so foreign and supernatural to me, so it was easy to believe them capable of anything, even when I knew they were not.
I ate my dinner with Kane and Zya by the fire. We tried to make normal conversation. Kane did his best to make us laugh with more tales of his life in the Underground but they only reminded us of Darius, Roxy, and Hugh who we'd left behind in Archi. So we mostly busied ourselves with talking about how grateful we were to finally have the tents again. We'd been traveling for weeks toward Sanctuary and hadn't stopped to set up a proper camp since we'd torn it down outside the walls of the human city. We'd slept for mere hours under the stars, spread out amongst the sands, with nothing more than a dusty bedroll for company. It would be nice to have a cot below and canvas above me again.
