Once or twice, Kaïs stopped to catch his breath. They were utterly alone in these forests, and Linn could not stop looking all around them, trying to discern from the shape of a leaf or the pattern on a bark where in Kemeira they might have landed. They had been sailing for Ton’hei, the easternmost harbor, before everything had gone wrong. Hopefully they had not landed too far from there.
She would find out.
The forests here seemed endless, but soon, Linn felt it: a tug of wind against her senses. She reached out with her Affinity—and there, a dozen or so steps ahead, churning and roiling with breezes from high to low, was a large stretch of open air as far as she could feel.
“To your right,” she said to Kaïs.
The trees parted, andthere,right in front of her, was Kemeira,just as she remembered. Jagged mountains rising through weaving gray mist, crooked pines dotting the landscape as far as she could see. The winter sun, a distant white in overcast skies. The scent of rain, mud, and leaves dancing in harmony with the winds.
Gingerly, Kaïs dropped her to the ground. Linn stood for a moment, balancing her weight on her uninjured leg, simply drinking in the sight of the land.
They set to securing the straps of her chi. Finally, Kaïs drew back. “I will track your Affinity as far as I can.”
His words were simple, the unspoken trust in them speaking volumes. No doubt, no questioning, no coddling. This was the soldier’s way. Thewarrior’sway.
Linn nodded. With Kaïs’s help, she turned to face the cliff’s edge.
Her musty boots clung to moss and dirt; beyond that, there was nothing but wind and cloud. The fog below wove like a river, a living thing, swallowing the mighty mountains all around. In this moment, she remembered how very muchalivethe world was, how the wind moved in harmony with the mountains and mist around it. How small a part she played in the vastness of existence.
Here, she was a girl with wings.
Linn spread her arms and summoned her Affinity.
And the mountains answered.
As the wind crescendoed to a triumphant roar, her chi bloomed behind her like sails. With a jump, she was airborne, soaring like a bird. It became instinct for her to tug on the winds as one might tug on the strings of a lute, each shift a note weaving an endless, beautiful melody.
A feeling of pure joy blossomed in her belly, working its way up through her chest.
She could sense Kaïs’s grasp easing in her mind as she took control. Linn pulled her winds and turned back. She spotted him, a small figure below her, half-visible in the mist.
She flipped and twisted in a sleek loop so that he could see.
His Affinity tightened on hers for a brief moment—a mental nod—before it retracted.
And then she was on her own.
Linn pulled on her winds, and they bore her eastward, to the harbor.
As she flew, the currents around her shifted, bringing with them the scent of the sea. Briny, salty, yet so different from that of Cyrilia: Kemeira’s oceans were gentler, sweeter, almost. They were home.
The clouds began to thicken. The small white dot that had been the sun in the sky disappeared, and the air grew cold.
Linn began to descend. Wetness seeped into her clothes, and the world around her grew gray as she dipped into the clouds. When she burst out of them again, the scene below her had changed.
In Kemeira, the mountains spilled into the ocean, their bodies hulking over shores and plunging into turquoise waters. Yet today, crouched in their shadows were ships. She counted six. Their sails stood pale and stark, almost bleached of color in contrast to the cool teal waves of the Jade Trail.
From up here, the ships were no larger than her thumb, but the sight seemed to expand before Linn’s eyes until she could no longer hold the images flipping through her mind, faster and faster like the pages of a book:
Enn, soaring before her, hair and chi billowing like the feathers of a black sparrow.
Enn, falling, the wind whistling sowrongin the gash that had torn through his chi.
And those bone-white sails with the sigil of three lilies of the valley, leaves and stems sharp as waiting daggers.
Linn gasped. The wind slammed against her, the breezes growing erratic. Her chi rippled in protest; her momentum stalled.
For a moment, she fumbled through the air, a tangle of fabric and limbs and hair.
