Miriam stares at me, then wheels away. Shakily, she lifts her left hand high, forming a trembling fist. Then she closes her eyes, sucks in a deep breath?—
Almost before she is able to get her Divh’s name out, Kreya appears in a flurry of whirling wings and attendant hummerlets,bursting into our small group. A moment later, she’s surging upward again, only this time with Miriam in her clutches.
“Gent!” I shout reflexively, not sure at all that Kreya will have sufficient upward motion to carry Miriam anywhere, let alone to the Eighth House.
My Divh seems to agree with me. He roars and rips his paw toward me, sweeping me into his grasp. I try to breathe out my fear and fail as he pumps his arms once, twice—then he leaps up, wrapping a mighty arm around the squawking hummerbill midair. He pulls her close to his body as if he’s plucked flowers for the journey back to the Fated Plane. Then he touches down lightly on one of the craggy mountaintops he’s spent the day exploring and uses that as a springboard to leap again—this time far, far higher.
As the original bonded warrior to Kreya, for all that she wasn’t able to appear on the battlefield at the Tournament of Gold, I can hear the Divh’s thoughts alongside Gent’s. I expect her to be furious, but instead she coos and chirrups words of encouragement to her half-dozen hummerlets and a traumatized Miriam, wrapping her wings around them and cuddling close in Gent’s grasp as we rip through the storm clouds.
We break through a thick cloud of heavy mist. Around me, stars explode in a kaleidoscope, zipping currents of energy and pinpoints of brilliant light that I can barely see through Gent’s loosely clenched fist. No sooner do we arrive at this staggering space, than the stars seem to jitter and change direction—or maybe we do. The dizzying blur of them blanks my mind and everything goes black?—
And then all I hear is screaming.
I jerk more fully awake, my skull nearly splitting with the cacophony of voices jumbling in my head. I hear Szonja’s and Ayne’s roars, Marsh’s squawk, Wrath’s imperious scream—but their actual words are lost beneath the roar of Divhs of all types and sizes. Sandworms and flying lizards, four-legged and six-legged beasts covered in fur or leathery hides, chitin-covered winged insects—we all burst out of the sky over a vast, sundrenched landscape of high plains, grasslands, and mountains that stretch up-up—then sheer off at the top, looking more like manmade walls than any purely natural barrier. But I can only peer at them for an instant as the entire lot of us—nearly forty Divhs strong—land in the great open bowl of grasslands an hour’s slow ride from an imposing fortress of red-and-gray stone tucked into the base of the mountains.
For a moment, everything is silent. Then I hear Caleb’s shaky groan. “Let me down, Marsh. I’m so gonna be sick again.”
“Same,” I gasp, and pound on Gent’s palm.
My Divh opens his hand and drops me onto the thick, waving grass, while Kreya nudges Miriam out beside me. I stagger over to the councilor, trying desperately to regain my equilibrium as the hummerlets soar skyward in squawking joy. Miriam’s fully passed out, but she’s breathing, and I lift a shaky hand to shade my eyes as I peer at the Eighth House.
“Where did all these Divhs come from?”Tennet’s exasperated voice explodes in my head, as loud as if he’s standing right next to me.
Then I realize heisstanding next to me. Of course he is. He doesn’t speak in my mind, only Divhs speak in my mind. That’s the way that works—the only way.
I turn to explain everything to him, and he glares down at me for half a moment before his eyes go wide with shock. “Talia!”
I collapse into his arms.
Chapter 24
“I’ve got her. You deal withthem.”
I feel oddly disjointed, like I’m no longer rooted in the earth, and yet definitely not caught up in my Divh’s mighty grasp. In fact, I don’t sense Gent anywhere near me at all, and yet I’m definitely not standing, not lying down, I’m?—
I blink my eyes open and stare up into Tennet’s laughing eyes. “Well, hello, Lady Talia. Glad you decided to rejoin us.”
“Put me down.”
“Not yet.” To my surprise, it’s Fortiss who issues this order, and I realize he stands next to Mirriam’s still-collapsed body, while Caleb kneels beside the councilor, dabbing a folded sash at her brow as if she’s bleeding.
“The warrior distracts and lulls his opponent into false thinking,” Nazar says, drawing my sharp focus. I crane my neck to see him better, and Tennet obligingly shifts me toward Nazar. The priest’s eyes are on the far distance—where I’d seen the Eighth House. “We arrived like a battle party, forty Divhs strong. Before the Eighth House could even open the gates, we’d sent our Divhs home and looked more like a troupe of bards in need of a rescue. Both presentations were useful, but the second willensure our safe passage into the house more quickly and easily than the first.”
“Miriam’s already down,” I argue. “There’s no need for?—”
“Nazar’s right.” The surprisingly strong voice of the councilor floats up from her huddle of robes. “Lord Daggar is the newest in a long line of leaders who don’t know what to do with capable women, and he’s trained his house to be the same.”
“Lord Daggar,” Tennet echoes, as if he’s rolling the name around in his mouth and finding it suitable. “I like him already.”
He clamps his arms around me tighter as I elbow him in the gut. “The Eighth House lost good men in the Tournament,” I grouse. “Those who survived would have told him who I am. I’m not weak or needing to be carried by an oaf.”
“Just a little longer,” Fortiss says, and his voice also sounds odd—everyone’s voices do—fuller and richer, more nuanced. Did the fall from the Divh’s plane damage my hearing or augment it in some way? “Curious warriors are easier to defeat than wary ones.”
“But why do we need?—”
“Hush, Lady Talia,” Tennet says, then—infuriatingly—he lifts me up higher in his arms, just far enough that he can lean down to brush a kiss over my ear. The move is so unexpected I barely avoid bleating in surprise as a shimmery shiver of energy rips through my blood, awakening every inch of me.
“Fortiss is injured,” he hisses urgently to me. “You’re the distraction from that. Go with it.”
