Great.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
FIND THE MARK
ADELINE
Getting up, I follow her through the ruined house, stepping over the corpses of the birds. Where did Roane find the venom? Did he retrieve the hydra’s corpse? How would he know to coat this knives in the liquid if he isn’t familiar with tales?
Am I mixing up stories? Or misunderstanding how stories work in this world?
“Let’s hope we don’t get attacked again.” Ardruna picks her way through the overgrown garden where more birds lie dead. “Do you still want to see where I first met Roane?”
“Yes. If you hadn’t guessed it yet, curiosity is one of my defining features.”
“That’s not necessarily a virtue,” Ardruna says.
“Neither is ignorance, and curiosity helps ask the questions.”
“It also killed the cat,” she grunts.
“Unless it’s a wildcat, that line doesn’t work here, so we should be safe.”
Her tail swishes back and forth. “Safe like we were inside that house?”
I wince. “You wanted to accompany me.”
“Yeah, blame this on me.” She’s quiet as we walk through the streets leading out of the city. “Great job I did, protecting you. Sometimes I wonder why Roane keeps me close.”
“You helped him fight the goblins.”
Her ears twitch. “He had it handled. Sometimes I think… he only wants company.”
“Is this where you tell me again that I am what he’s missing?”
She sighs. “We can keep arguing. I can tell you tales of his patience and kindness and you can tell me that it doesn’t erase his more recent behavior, and we’d both be right. So how about we stop talking and save ourselves the headache?”
“If it works for you,” I mutter, though she’s probably right. It’s not her fault I tend to overanalyze everything, seeing patterns and obsessing over them.
But after a while, as we walk past the last houses, I start to hate the heavy silence between us.
“This world has a lot of flying terrors,” I say, “I can’t help noticing.”
“And your point is?”
“It feels tied to its history.”
“You have your own flying terrors. You have dragons. You said so.”
“We do. Dragons and birds. You have griffins, phoenixes, stymphalians, and the Gods know what else.”
“Birds, of course.”
I laugh. “I’ve definitely met the birds. Not very friendly.”
“And then there is Talton.”
“Right. Then there is Talton…” I smirk and her deep growl sounds like laughter.
