Something was waiting for me in my bed.
Chapter 13
Ryker
“He’s shifty.” Nadya paced in front of the fire, restless and casting a long, twitchy shadow on the plush carpet that extended all the way between my armchair and Geryll’s. “And his eyes. They’re like a Pathfinder’s.”
I hummed low in my throat, hand drifting over Geryll’s leg. I’d closed the skin wound back in the passage to prevent infections, but it would have taken months for the muscle and tissue to restitch. With my blood powers, we’d be done by the time the tea kettle hissed.
But the sliced bone…that would be harder to heal. At least by my hand.
Since the Calling, when I’d bled on the sacred Blood Brotherhood stones, my powers had been different than others’ in the Clan. I could close wounds, take aches away, and freeze people where they stood, but it had always been easier for me to bend natural elements to my will. Water, sap, blood, anything liquid, as long as it came from a living, breathing being.
Bones, however, were hard–and Geryll’s had been sliced too deep.
“Have you ever seen a Pathfinder?” I asked.
After living in Solkar’s Reach and feeling its Heart pulse underneath my fingers, I hesitated to call anything a legend. Yet Pathfinders sounded less like reality and more like beings whispered about by people who’d lost too much and those who wanted to profit off their desperation and grief.
“No.” Nadya stopped. “But I’ve read about them while Geryll dawdled in that library you insist on sending us to.”
“I do notdawdle.” Geryll gripped tighter onto the armchair’s leather. I slowed my powers down, simmering in his veins. “The greatest lieutenants spent as much time on the training grounds as they did studying tactics.”
“They do not,” Nadya argued.
“My father did,” he muttered.
“Knowledge will always be powerful,” I said. Geryll’s father had truly been a great warrior, but any mention of Durym tightened his lower lip and shoulders. I hadn’t been raised in the shadow of a great–or even decent–man, but I understood pressure and loss, and wanted to shield Geryll from them. “I’m asking what you know about Pathfinders because I’ve never seen one. Nor has anyone alive right now. It would have been quite a miracle.”
Nadya crossed her hands in front of her chest, as she always did when something clashed with her own ideas. Always ready for a fight, this one. “I don’t need to see a dragon to know they’re real.”
“True. But could you recognize a lone dragon bone in a field? Or know what its scales look like?”
“No,” she grumbled.
“Then how can you tell how a Pathfinder’s eyes look if you’ve never seen them?”
“I–” She clicked her tongue and began pacing again. “I just know he’s shifty.”
I grimaced. “That he is.”
All of Allie’s cousins were strange and suspicious, but this one paid more attention than he needed to. His gaze had known how to look for my weapons and assess how I moved. Those weren’t ballroom skills.
I didn’t trust him–but I couldn’t prove he’d done anything wrong.
“And the fact that he just showed up after the attack,” Nadya went on. Nothing short of a cataclysm could deter her when she set her suspicions on someone. I couldn’t decide if I’d trained her well or done her a huge disservice. “That’s wrong. It smells wrong, it feels wrong. It’s just wrong.”
“It could be,” I said evenly.
It was no coincidence that Dax had come to Solkar’s Reach now. Then again, he’d almost lost his life trying to show us that his contraption actually worked. A guilty man would have lied and shirked real proof.
A conniving man could have orchestrated the entire ordeal.
But the ice hadn’t broken in hundreds of years. Nobody could have planned that, not even Dria Vegheara herself, let alone her annoying descendant.
I hadn’t wanted to alarm Allie even more, but the ordeal at the lake had shaken me. Even now, the muscles of my back tensed as I remembered the dark water pressing against me. The ice shattering under my trembling fingers.
I’d felt the lake trying to pull me under.
