WE LEFT THE HollowCourt—and my stomach—far below.
I completely forgot about our destination, focused solely on not throwing up. Accidentally puking on Soren might shock him into dropping me.
The thunderous beating of wings filled the cold air, which whooshed past us.
It made my eyes burn and my cheeks numb.
In the dark, I could just barely make out the silhouette of Alaric holding Olive to one side. Thankfully, he seemed like the kind of guy who would choose duty over dropping someone he didn’t like, but I obviously couldn’t be 100 percent sure.
The others could’ve been ahead or behind for all I knew. All I could make out were a few black shapes blotting out the softly twinkling stars in the night sky and the rapidly fading light of the Hollow Court below.
I shivered in the winter air, missing my coat, which I’d left behind somewhere in Lore’s room.
Soren tucked me into him tighter.
The warmth of his throat against my bare cheek did a great job distracting me from the brisk wind.
Dad, Rissa, and Olive were probably freezing too. I could’ve sworn the Alaric-sized shape on one side picked up speed, moving ahead of us.
Maybe he was in a hurry, or maybe he’d felt Olive’s shivers too and wasn’t totally awful.
We traveled this way for what felt like hours but was probably less than twenty minutes.
The trip got so miserable that I didn’t care where we landed anymore, as long as we could get some relief from the biting wind. When lights appeared in the distance, I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering and prayed that was our destination.
It didn’t occur to me until we were much closer that the lights were far too high. Taller than any city skyscraper I’d ever seen.
“Hey,” I yelled in Soren’s ear, getting his attention. “You watch out for planes up here, right?”
In the dark, I couldn’t make out his expression, but he laughed. “That’s not one of your human airplanes.”
“Oh...”
As we drew closer, I glanced over my shoulder again, and my eyes widened.
It wasn’t one light. It was dozens... maybe hundreds. And while one of them shone extra bright, like a beacon for the fliers, others were sprinkled across what looked like a mountainside.They were fires.
In the firelight, tiny fae figures moved about in the distance.
“You all live ontopof the mountain?” I whispered to myself, too quietly for Soren to hear over the wind. I’d expected a village in a valley beside the mountains, not carved directly into the stony peak.
