“Isi.” Lexie launched into me like a bolt of sunlight, wrapping around me with a sob-laugh. “You’re alive. You bonded. By the fates, you bonded!”
More or less.
Derren whooped and grabbed my arm, pumping it. Kerralyn clapped my back, her usual reserve cracking into a tired grin. Even Maddox gave me a chin-tip, though his eyes darted warily toward the arena.
“She did it,” Bryson crowed, his usually stern and stoic voice ragged with relief. “Isi did it.”
They circled me with joy I couldn’t feel. The arms, the noise… It was too much. Too bright. I tried to smile, afraid they’d see how hollow I felt inside.
Where triumph should’ve sparked, I’d been emptied out.
“Where’s your little guy?” Derren asked, glancing around. “She looked weird. Like, uh, a squirrel and a butterfly had a baby.”
I shrugged. “Gone.”
“Where?” Lexie pulled back, her brows pinching.
“I don’t know. She flew off. After.”
“Oh,” she said, then brightened. “They come back. They find you later in their littler forms.”
What would my minxpip come back as then, a beetle?
“How do you know they return?” I asked.
She tapped her temple. “He told me.” A smile tugged at the edge of her mouth. An inside secret I wasn’t part of. “Well, more or less. They don’t talk to you in their minds; they kind of send impressions. You know what I mean.”
Because I didn’t, I looked away. My minxpip, if I could even call her mine, was not communicating in any way with me. Although, that wasn’t quite true. Her disappointment had come through quite clearly.
Nia appeared nearby as if conjured, her dark robes sleek and unmarred by the day. Regal, imposing, unreadable. Her tiny gray mouse rode on her shoulder, clutching a shank of Nia’s hair in one tiny clawed hand and an impossibly small flower in the other.
Her gaze landed on Kerralyn, and I swore she hid a smile.
“Time to bathe,” she said. “Rest, though only briefly. We have things to do.”
“Things?” Lexie asked. “We just survived the Rite of Bonds.”
“So did the remaining recruits. Warriors, actually. Congratulations.”
“What do we still have to do today?” Derren whispered.
“A celebratory feast is being prepared in your honor,” Nia pushed through pinched lips.
Who could eat after all this death? Although, my belly reminded me it couldn’t recall when it had last had food.
“We live. We eat.” Nia’s expression didn’t flicker.
With a twitch of her fingers, magic hummed through the air, and an archway opened behind her.
“This way.” She strode through the opening, and after sharing a heavy look, we followed, emerging into the castle’s main foyer. The same black-stone floor, the same columns etched with silver ornamentation. But this time, we weren’t herded into the dormitories.
Nia led us up the stairs. One floor. Two. Down a long hall and around a corner. Across yet another hall that led to a spiral staircase, where we ascended once more, exiting out on what I believed was the fifth level of the castle with a floor covered with etched tiles.
“You’ll remain a team,” she said as we followed her through a series of archways. “But you’re bonded now. One ofus. All the bonded have private rooms.”
Each of us was led to a door. A name shimmered across mine in curling silver script. “Isi.”
Lexie’s was on my left. Kerralyn’s on my right. The men were placed across the corridor.
