The way he spoke about the crows threw me off, so casual and normal. Like he didn’t fully recognize who he was talking to. Though I was starting to realize that Caylus wasn’t very good at noticing things. He was also talking about the Sellas as if they hadn’t been gone for hundreds of years.
I, on the other hand, was having a hard time not noticing the hard lines of his body beneath the tunic or the specks of white scarring along the golden skin of his arms. Or the way his size made me feel small in a strange, safe sort of way, like the crows always had.
“…considering the crows showed a lot of elemental applications of magic, you know?” Caylus finished.
I blinked. Saints. He’d been talking that whole time. He didn’t miss my bewildered look, a blush rising in his cheeks. “I was rambling, wasn’t I?”
“Not really,” I lied. I peered at the title of the book. “Saints and Sellas? You’re reading a book of myths for information? You must be desperate.”
I hadn’t read the stories in years, but I’d heard them all. Some of the best memories I had of my mother came from when she’d tell me stories about the Saints and the ancient Sellas whose magic gave birth to the crows, according to legend.
“Myths are rooted in history and culture,” Caylus said. “They may be distorted retellings of fact.”
“Or entirely made up,” I said.
“Or entirely made up,” he agreed, dropping into his desk chair and pulling the kitten from his shoulder. He set it in his lap, where it curled up. “I’m desperate. People here don’t have much on record about crows or the Sellas.”
The stories said Sella magic had once blanketed the land, but humans did something to anger the Sellas. So they left, taking their magic with them. The religion around them was nearly extinct now, to the point that most people thought they’d never existed, that the stories were just that. Hardly anyone spoke the old language anymore, and there weren’t many copies of the book left.
I opened to a page with a drawing of the Wandering Wood, a beautiful forest of massive, colorful trees that looked like someone had spilled a bundle of dyes across their leaves. Pale spring green melded into buttery yellows and robin’s egg blues. There were even trees the bright pink of sunrise and the deep mauve of dusk.
The story said the Wandering Wood was an ancient well of magic that only appeared on the full moon. During that time, it allowed the chosen to come and go as they pleased, but you had to be out of the wood by sunrise, or else you’d be trapped until the next full moon.
Right now, that didn’t sound half bad.
Caylus set his cup on the desk. “You would have known the crows well, right?”
His question plucked at a heartstring, sending a quiver through my chest. “Yes.”
His eyes lit up, and for the first time, he met my gaze fully and unwaveringly. “Can you tell me about them?”
For half a second, I remembered Ericen asking me the very same question and the way my entire being had revolted against the idea. But with Caylus, the curiosity in his eyes, the light—it made my heart beat faster and my stomach turn in anticipation, an echo of the feeling that engulfed me moments before a flight. To my surprise, Iwantedto tell him.
I leaned against the workbench. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
So I told him. I told him about the types of crows, from how a shadow crow could deceive your perception of space, camouflaging itself in night, to the way a sun crow’s golden touch could heal a wound in minutes. I told him how a battle crow could turn its feathers to metal and release them on command and about the black-gold weapons the Turren masters made from it.
He asked questions, more than I’d ever been asked. He was quick, easily picking up on the patterns of their magic and remembering the smallest details.
“So a water crow could turn water to ice?” he asked, and I nodded. “Could they create mist then too?”
“Yep. On especially hot days, riders would drop mist from the sky to cool workers in the fields.”
“And your students at the riding school. Not all of them became riders?”
“Only about half.”
Becoming a rider took a lifetime of dedication. Even before contenders entered Kalestel, the riding school, crows would have been their lives. They’d have been raised working with them, learning their strengths and weaknesses, the extent of their abilities, the history of their wings. And after all that, less than half of them would become riders.
Typically, it was a mantle passed down from parent to child, uncle to niece, staying firmly rooted in familial lines. Anyone could apply to Kalestel, and they frequently took students outside of established rider families, but it was rare for a crow to form a connection with one.
In the end, they became involved in other ways. Working at Kalestel, turning to wing-specific trades focused around the crows, like the Garien leatherworkers who crafted the finest saddles.
Caylus tapped his fingers on his leg, absently moving them about for the kitten to pounce on. “It’s strange that it stays mostly in families. I wonder…” He trailed off, his brows furrowing and his head tilting in a way I’d come to understand meant he was faced with a problem he couldn’t solve.
“Wonder what?” I asked.
