I look over my shoulder at him as I lace my pants back up. “Thanks for the offer, but you go ahead.”
Argo seems to lift his wings in a shrug before he starts to devour it. Washing my hands in the snow, I turn around as he swallows the rest of it down.
With a shake of my head, I fill my waterskin and then straighten back up. “You good?”
He licks his bloodied chops in obvious satisfaction.
I smirk at him just as a lick of wind starts dragging in, and I frown and turn toward it. There’s something sharp in the air.
Smoke.
“You smell that?” I say to Argo, but he’s shoving his maw into the snow, digging it up and swallowing the flakes.
Scenting the air again, there’s no denying it, that is what I’m smelling. “We need to go up and see exactly where we are,” I say. “We must be close to Ranhold.”
Hopefully, it’s not burning.
I swing up and over his back, using the strap holding my pack to wrap around my waist, somewhat securing me in place. When my hands are gripping the feathers on the back of his neck, Argo leaps up. The second he gets the air beneath him, he travels up and out of the trees.
Clouds and smoke hang low, like bushy eyebrows pulled down tight to obscure the eyes. Yet even with the clouds acting like low-hanging fruit ready to drop, there are gaps where they thin out, offering a veiled view.
“Try to get us out of this,” I shout out.
Argo cuts through the clouds, flying much stronger than the night before, his energy obviously renewed. He juts up and then weaves down again when he finds a break in the air, and I blink through the haze until the landscape opens up below.
My stomach fucking drops.
“What the fuck?”
This isn’t Ranhold. This isn’t the space between Fourth and Fifth. We’re past that—further than the fucking Barrens. Because below us in the icy landscape, something unmistakably gleams despite the stricken gray of the daylight.
Highbell Castle. Right there, pinned to the side of the snowy mountain.
We’re not in Fifth Kingdom. We’re inSixth.
But that’s not what has ice filling my veins. It’s the fae army flooding the land below.
There arethousandsof them.
Lu said when she was fleeing, the army that sacked Highbell kept traveling straight through, marching toward Ranhold. But that had to have been days ago now, so eitherthey stopped just outside Highbell…or this army has been continuously flooding in with even more soldiers.
The thought grips me by the throat.
Nudging Argo with my knee, I direct him to circle, flying back in the other direction, trying to take in the full scope of their numbers and see how far they stretch.
My mind whirls, still trying to get a grip on the fact that I’m all the way in Highbell. Why wouldn’t Argo have turned around and taken me back to Fourth when I passed out? Or to Ranhold to meet up with Lu and Judd? Why the hell would he take me—
It dawns on me. What I said, right before my päyur bond solidified—when I thought I was about to die.
Just fucking get to her…
Argo was taking me toAuren. To the bridge.
But by doing so, he’s bypassed Ranhold completely. I have no way of truly knowing how long I was unconscious or how many days have passed. If I’m all the way in Sixth, everyone else will have definitely arrived at Ranhold by now.
Even if I flew all the way back, I’d be too late to warn them. And Argo can’t travel to Fifth Kingdom and then turn around, cross into Sixth again, and fly all the way to the end of Seventh.
I’m out of time and with too much distance, so I have to choose. Orea or Auren.
