Lore grips my wrist and carries my hand to his mouth, then presses a kiss to the center of my palm.Mine.
I was always yours.
But now, you areonlymine.
Eighty-Seven
The second we reach the Sky Kingdom’s esplanade, my mate morphs into smoke and lingers in that form until my talons scrape against stone.
Though I practiced shifting and landing a few times before leaving Glace, and I flew most of the way back, landing on Lore’s back in skin only once to rest, my mate still clearly worries about my technique. I do sport an impressive collection of bruises and cuts. Most from the fight, but a select few were acquired from pounding into packed snow and ice in this other, still foreign form of mine.
My grandfather dismounts from Colm’s back, and Meriam, from Aoife’s. Where the others were reluctant to offer her safe passage to Luce, Aoife squared her shoulders—well, wings—and crouched low so Justus could help the sorceress settle.
My father melts back into skin, the fur stole containing the runestone now clutched between his fingers instead of his talons, and glares at Meriam. I sense he wants to pitch her off this mountain, but Justus worried that the ward spell was too ancient and tenuous to erase on his own.Andhe worried that instead of erasing it, he’d alter it into something irrevocably worse. So before leaving Glace, Lore made Meriam swear an oath to him that she would remove the wards without ruse.
As Justus eases a still-weak Meriam down onto the bone-smooth floor, then positions himself behind her so she can use his legs as a backrest, Erwin flies up to the southernmost hatch to retrieve the two stones from the war room.
It takes him so long to return that I begin to worry something happened to them. What if Mattia, coerced by Antoni, stole those precious rocks?
I clutch my elbows, skin prickling with unease under my ruined turtleneck. The leather cord strung with my gifted seashell, that somehow survived my brutal freefall, feels as though it’s choking me.
Chewing on my lip, I squint at the gently brightening sky, impatient for black to smudge the pastel expanse. When minutes tick by, and still no bird reappears, my stomach begins to bind itself into knots.
Something happened to the stones.
I’m about to ask Lore to reach out to Erwin through the mind link he shares with all his Crows when a giant bird swoops back our way, a leather rucksack darkening the space between his gleaming claws.
The breath I release is so strong, it manages to flutter my hair, a feat considering the strands are clumped with blood and sweat.
“Will you be staying in Luce?” my father asks Meriam as he sets the stone retrieved in Glace in front of my grandmother. “Or heading home?”
Though the queendom is impossible to spot from our vantage point, like a compass, her tourmaline eyes turn toward her home before scrolling back over Lore’s vast kingdom. I wonder if she considers Luce a source of beauty or of pain. And then I wonder if she considers Shabbe a home.
She still hasn’t answered by the time my father takes delivery of the leather sack.
“So?” He unwraps the tight bundle. “Where will you go, Meriam?”
“To Shabbe, first. I’ve much forgiveness to beg for.”
Justus removes his gloves and pushes them into his jacket pocket before scraping his palms over his hair in an attempt to tame the blood-caked flyaways that stick out around his pale face. Like me, like Meriam, he’s in dire need of a wash.Andsome more Shabbin crystals.
He used up all his healing ones on my slashed thigh and Meriam’s cut neck and wrist, promising his headwound had already healed. From the way he moved, from the way his lips pinched and his wrinkles carved into his skin, I could tell he had other wounds that hadn’t mended, but my grandfather’s a proud man, so I accepted the crystals without insisting he keep some for himself.
Also, though I know it’s the combination of my blood on obsidian that can harm him, and only if it finds its way into his heart, I selfishly prefer not to bleed anywhere near him.
To think that, soon, I won’t have to worry about this.
My father finally lays the rock fragments in front of Meriam, fitting their jagged edges together until they form one large, unbroken brick. The crimson whorls Justus had magnetized to the surface must’ve sunk back into the stone, because the gray surface is unblemished.
Lore’s shadows settle onto my shoulders like that fur cloak he’d given me during our flight over Glace—heavy yet soft. Though Dante’s dead, and we’re now in possession of a Shabbin witch who doesn’t risk turning to stone—now that my Crow magic has been unleashed, I could incur that fate—Lore and I agreed that he’d keep hisunstakableform until the wards collapse.
Cheeks stained pink with animation, eyes blazing bright with hope, my father unfurls from his squat and crosses his large arms, vambraces creaking like the rest of his leather regalia.
Lore’s shadows firm at my back, spreading against my rib cage as though to hold more of me. I glance up to make sure he’s still cloaked in darkness. When I catch sight of his stormcloud face, I relax into his touch, pillowing my head against his hazy shoulder, so fucking bone-weary, I want to crawl into bed and sleep for days.
Lore presses his cool lips to my forehead and holds them there as Meriam detaches her palms from the folds of her golden gown and hovers them over the stone.
Her brow slickens with perspiration and color slashes her lofty cheekbones as she recalls her sigil. Though the air between the rock and her palms is dim, I don’t miss the droplets that run over the stone’s surface like dew before breaking off and rising toward her quivering palms.
