If no one comes for us by tomorrow, I’ll consider that,I lied to him.For now, we both should lie still and rest.
I didn’t want to alarm him by admitting that I didn’t think there was any way I could lift my head, much less pull myself onto his back. The rest of the day was lost in a haze of pain that made the edges of my vision dark. I drifted in and out of consciousness.
I was too weak to give it the attention it deserved, but one thought kept worming its way into my muddled mind:So this is what dying feels like.
Was this what it felt like for my father? Suddenly, all I wanted was to be with them: my father with his warm smile, and my mother with her gentle voice and kind eyes. My mother was far away, in our home in the mountains, but my father had been dead for a decade now. Maybe it wouldn’t be long until I saw him again.
Don’t even think like that,Neo snapped in my mind, but I couldn’t rally myself to reassure him.
As I lay on the ground, possibly dying, I kept thinking about what brought me here.
Neo and I were in the palace court again, facing the dais of the throne. The emperor—my cousin, Altair—stood in front of the throne, his eagle, Sky, at his side. But our attention wasn’t on Altair. It was on the creature masquerading as a man that joined him. Beside me, Neo spread his wings, a shriek escaping his mouth. Neo was a war eagle, too, hardened by battle. Anything that spooked him automatically put me on edge.
The man was bare-chested, clothed from the waist down in leather pants and fur boots. But it was what he wore upon his head that caused those closest to the doors to leave. On his head and back, he wore the skin of a coyote, and his face was hidden by a mask of leather, with slits for his eyes and mouth.
I’d never seen someone like him, but still I knew. We’d all grown up with the stories, the whispered tales in the dark.
It was the Devourer.
Two male servants staggered forward, each carrying the handle to a wide metal bowl. Liquid sloshed audibly within it as they placed it before the creature. I had the immediate sense that the bowl wasn’t filled with water—not with the thick sound it made. My stomach dropped when I got a better look. Blood.
The creature moved forward and bathed his gray hands in the blood until they dripped with red, and the people of the courtwho remained in the throne room released murmurs of disgust and dismay. It spoke, but its voice was something from the depths of the underworld: whispery as dry leaves, coarse as gravel, harsh and throaty as a raven’s call. It was all these things and none, and it covered my arms in goose bumps.
It fell silent, and the blood dripped back into the bowl, each drop hypnotic.
Then it began to sing, the sound hair-raising, the rhythm unusual and irregular. Its voice started out low and soft and quickly gained volume until, amidst his ululations and dripping of the blood, a dark mist spread through the throne room.
A red haze appeared before my eyes, like a veil of blood, and for one terrible moment, it was all I could see. The people around me gasped in shock, and Neo let out a screech. I knew then that we were all trapped in the same enthrallment. I expected to hear my cousin cry out loudest of all. Instead, he laughed.
“Yes,” he cried. “Yes! Now you will all see for yourselves what Ozul can do.”
The red mist faded; it wasn’t the throne room I saw before me. Instead, it was as if I were on Neo’s back, soaring high above the earth. I flew down from Crane Mountain, tracing along the spine just above the tops of the highest trees. Foothills spread out before me, and then, just over the flat grasslands of the Equnox Plains, was a small encampment. There was a pavilion—bigger than I’d ever seen—but before I could take a better look, the enthrallment ended as quickly as it began. I stumbled unsteadily as my vision returned to normal.
When I looked at my cousin, his face was one of triumph. “So close,” he said to himself. “They’ve been only a short flight away all this time.”
The High Queen of the Children of Earth—the one they calledtheir Queen of All Queens—had long eluded our scouts. She kept her camp hidden from view with magic. She shielded and healed her people and kept this war never-ending. And now, at last, we had her location.
It was she I had been sent to retrieve, to force a one-sided treaty that would benefit our people only, but I hadn’t expected to be blasted out of the sky.
Or for her to be so young.
The girl I encountered may have been the First Daughter instead of the queen, but regardless, my people had to be warned of her power. An ability like that threatened our eagles and could turn the tide of this war against us. I had to warn the emperor.
The next day,just as the edges of my vision took on a weird kaleidoscope effect of red and black, we were favored by the Lord of the Skies. A rider found us, thanks to the sharp eyes of his eagle. When we didn’t return that first night, the emperor gave it another day before ordering scouts to search for us. The creek kept us alive with its fresh water, but I was incapable of doing anything but lowering my face into it to drink. I couldn’t hunt or fish, and none of the animals of the forest dared venture close enough to Neo to allow themselves to be caught. By the second day, I couldn’t even get myself water. I lay helplessly, blood pooling in my gut, while Neo tried to will his wing to heal. The only good thing about the throbbing inside me was that it filled my stomach and made me forget it had been days since I’d last eaten.
“Commander,” the scout said to me. I was too busy dying to look up and note who he was. “I’ll have to leave you again for a moment so I can locate the other scout. We’ve brought a cot that will enable our eagles to carry Neo between us. She wasn’t far. Iwon’t be gone long.” His tone was irritatingly urgent when all I wanted to do was lie here and drift off.
Talon,Neo prodded when the scout stood there waiting for my acknowledgment.
“I’ll be here,” I finally mumbled, giving the scout the permission he evidently needed to do his damned job.
I couldn’t say what happened after that because I closed my eyes to rest them for a minute, and I didn’t open them again until I was in a bed in the palace.
A medic dressed in a crisp white robe leaned over me, and I sat up so suddenly I almost slammed my head into his.
Neo’s voice was in my head immediately, reassuring me that he was alive and healing.
“Commander, how do you feel?” the medic asked.
