I glance over my shoulder at the damp, moss-covered wall I’ve gazed upon for days on end. How high we’ve climbed.The altitude explains the cooler temperatures and why my ears have popped at least four dozen times since I awoke from my doze atop Furia.
As I roll my shoulders and stretch my neck, I cast my gaze off the derelict palace and onto the crow whose eyes are, for once, trained elsewhere than on my face. “Are the Regios unaware of this place?”
Oh, the Regios are aware of its existence. Why do you think they’ve buried it beneath clouds?
“Buried? Are you saying . . .?” My voice is drowned by the song of the wind twisting into my hair and icing the dried sweat along my spine.
That they’ve kept it purposely hidden from their people? Yes.
“Why?”
Spite. Fear. Jealousy.
I frown. “I’m not sure I follow.”
What cannot be destroyed or occupied needs to be concealed or it will undermine the ruler’s power. Can you imagine if the Lucins got wind that there exists a place in Luce the Regios have yet to breach?
“Howdidthe former inhabitants breach it?”
The former inhabitants could fly.
I crank my neck back and gasp, “Fly?” No one, not even the Fae with an affinity for air, can levitate, much less travel without their feet touching the ground. “People could once fly?”
Morrgot doesn’t answer, just flaps his wings to rise higher, eyes fastened to this neglected city.
“You aren’t speaking of people, are you? This was your . . .birddom?” Kingdom sounds too human for a nest.
The word wins me a hefty side-eye from Morrgot, who clearly disapproves of being zoomorphized. I’d have snorted had nostalgia not rolled off him and into me.
Every hour that passes makes me more attuned to the crow’s feelings. The same way I can sense Minimus’s pain, I can now sense Morrgot’s.
Me and my odd affinity to animals . . .
I stroke Furia’s neck, trying to get a read off him, but the stallion’s mind and heart remain impenetrable, which just adds to the conundrum that is my relationship to animals.
A thought strikes me then. One that has to do with animals but not with me. What if the den Minimus inhabits is as magnificent as this giant rocky nest? What if, like the Crows, he and his brethren have built an underwater empire?
I’m about to ask Morrgot when he breaks off into two crows. I’m just as startled as I was the first time I saw it happen. Well, the first time his two crows became one.
My pulse ticks faster, the sound drowned out by a low, liquid whoosh—water.
The trench we’ve been traveling narrows and turns shallower. Furia stops, snuffles, then paws at the damp rock.
“What is he—”
Before I can finish my question, the stallion backs up and then breaks into a canter that has me folding my torso over his neck.
He’s going to try and make the jump!
Again, we’re racing toward a wall, except this time there are no turns to make. He leaps, and my heart leaps in time with him. I don’t breathe until Furia clears the stone obstacle that’s as tall as he is, and his hooves clatter on the esplanade. Like the pillars, the ground is as smooth and shiny as ice and refracts every speck of sunlight.
“You crazy beast.” I clap and stroke Furia’s neck, who halts and lets out a satisfied whinny.
As my pulse quiets down, I look for the water I heard but cannot find its source. Is my body so weary and my tongue so parched that I imagined it?
Perhaps a cascade flows on the other side.
I cluck my tongue and wiggle the reins, but the stallion doesn’t penetrate the deep shadows lurking between the pillars.
