The tightness returns tenfold, as though I’ve slipped the brassiere back on and wrapped it twice around my breasts before knotting the laces. “Then why are we spending the day with them?”
Because it’s easier to move about unnoticed in the dark than in the light.
“Are Dante and his army still behind us?”
No. They’re ahead of us.
“Ahead of us? How?”
They boarded a ship this morning and will be docking in Tarespagia by nightfall.
“How do you know all this?”
I caught a few sprites discussing it while you were sleeping.
I blanch because by caught, he must mean— “Are they still alive?”
Morrgot swerves around a tawny-trunked tree with sprawling branches dotted in rubbery green leaves no larger than children’s palms.
“Did you kill them?”
I had no choice,he finally says.
“Everyone has a choice!”
Would you have preferred I let them fly off with the information of your whereabouts and the company you keep? Do you know what Marco would do then? He’d launch his whole army after you, and not to abduct but to kill.
“Dante wouldn’t let him kill me.As for the sprites, you could’ve”—I toss a hand in the air—“I don’t know, strapped them to a tree until we freed the rest of your crows.”
Dante is powerless.As for strapping them to a tree, they’d have gotten eaten before dusk by the wild cats that prowl this side of the mountain.
The blood which had started to return to my cheeks, drains right out of them. “Wild cats?”
Or Selvatins.
Bile bastes my throat as I swing my gaze from side to side, on the lookout for bloodthirsty animals and humans. “Selvatins are cannibals?” I whisper, afraid my voice will carry and alert them to a fresh meal traveling their way.
Not all of them.
That doesnothingto reassure me. “I slept enough to last me a full week. No need to laze about Selvati. I’ll just get a cloak with a hood and—”
You have nothing to worry about, Fallon.
“You just told me Selvatins chomp on people. I don’t want to be chomped on! I don’t know about you, but my extremities and limbs don’t regen—”
With a feverish whinny, Furia rears back, then lifts his forelegs off the ground, sliding my body and most of my organs so far back, they smack my spine. Clamping my thighs around the saddle, I seize a handful of the stallion’s mane.
When Furia’s hooves collide against the jungle floor, I catch sight of a woman tattooed in brown ink from hairline to cuticle.
She grins at me, exposing a full set of blackened teeth. “It’s her.”
Fifty-Three
The woman swings like the pendulum of a clock from the liana wrapped around one forearm and one ankle, her long dreads swinging in time with her agile, muscled body. A bib of layered chains hooked to both her neck and waist shiver against her hennaed torso.
“Her?” I hunt the dense foliage for Morrgot, but all I see are dozens upon dozens of men and women crouched on branches, chained and inked from head to toe like the black-toothed woman before me.
“The girl who talks to animals,” the woman continues.
