Two
Khayrivven
A fucking black wall.Again.
Khayrivven rested his head against the back of a tree, pretending to be asleep while Ycken kept watch on the third boulder from the left—didn’t need to open his eyes to make out the General’s exact location. Years and years of sharpening his senses had led him to a point where he could all butseehis surroundings even with closed eyes. Whether it was a fairy gift, he didn’t know and didn’t care. His Flame heritage had brought nothing but suffering thus far.
Tuning out the general’s heartbeat and the sounds of pending night, Khayrivven focusedon the one thing that held his world in place, the axis without which it would topple and spin out of control.
Lory,he thought into the night, willing his almost dream to go on a hunt for the most defiant creature he’d ever encountered.Lory?
Nothing but that black wall. Whatever it was, he hadn’t encountered anything like it in his years since his powers had awoken. Not even when the other end of his intended dream-encounters had left this world to prowl beyond Eroth’s Veil. That was a different sort of blackness—an emptiness that had nothing to do with the obsidian barrier locking him out.
By now, a certainty had settled in his heart that Lory was somewhere out there, and if she was, he’d find her—even with Ycken on his heels. They weren’t here to save Lory, really, not according to Ycken, but to destroy whatever weapon the cave she’d run to hosted that made the Master of Whisper’s astral projection snap back like an elastic band. The same thing that kept Khayrivven from reaching Lory now.
They had been combing the mountains for two days for any sign of the fire-gifted ashling, but so far, they hadn’t even found the place where Bellmont had died, where the corpses of more ashlings should be rotting or being eaten by the wildlife roaming the mountainsides.
Lory—
One more push into the solid barrier. And another.
Lory!
By the time he gave up, Khayrivven’s head was throbbing like the bell announcing breakfast for most and death for some each morning at Ashthorn Ward. He tore his eyesopen, gazing through the canopy of branches at the twinkling stars, wishing he’d told her what he felt for her. That would have to wait, though, and the guilt eating him alive would be his reminder to never leave her out of his sight again if he found her—whenhe found her.
“Anything?” Ycken turned his head so his profile was visible in the moonlight, his black eyes peering out into the night. His usually so meticulously groomed beard had grown out over the past days, since Lu’Shen’s, and his short, sun-bleached hair stood up in the wind.
Khayrivven shook his head. “Still can’t find her. But I think we’re close to the place where they tried to kill her.” The words tasted like ash on his tongue, and if Lory and her friends hadn’t ended the Ashthorn students who’d attempted to kill her, Khayrivven himself would have hunted them down and ended them in an inferno of gold and orange, restrictions on the use of his powers be damned—no one would have ever known. “Perhaps an hour south.”
With a gesture of his hand, he guided Ycken’s gaze toward the familiar copse of trees a little up the hill. “If we find something there in the morning, we’ll know we’re on the right track.” He tried to keep his tone casual, even when all he wanted to do was leap up and run to the piece of greenery he’d just recognized in the dark that didn’t cloak the world the same way it did for humans. He’d never wasted a thought on it before, but the general’s searching eyes were a reminder of how different he was. Different, not only in his magic, but different in the way his senses worked, in the way his mind worked. Did that make him superior?
It sure made him one of the most dangerous predators out there, not that it mattered with King Ulder of Brestolya holding his leash. All that power, all those keen senses… They were worth nothing if he couldn’t use them.
“We should go right away.” The edge in Ycken’s tone made Khayrivven wonder what made the general so eager to find the little Flame.
It wasn’t difficult to mask his own eagerness in the shadows of the night when he made a show of reluctantly getting to his feet. “If that’s what you want… I’m sure Lenya wants news of where his latest weapon went sooner rather than later.”
“Weapon,” Ycken snorted. “You mean a perversion of nature.” His nose crinkled in a grimace as he studied Khayrivven’s outline, probably all he could see of the Veiled Hand in the dark. “Just like you.”
Khayrivven didn’t even flinch. He’d gotten worse. Had been bullied and beaten for what he was. A few rough words of insult no longer chipped what was left of his self-worth, but to call Lory that?—
Swallowing the instant rage burning in his chest, he turned his back to Ycken. “I assume you mean theassetthe Master of Whispers clearly sees in Ashling Vednis’s skill-set,” he corrected with as much of a calm voice as he could manage. “The same asset King Ulder sees in me.”
Ycken trampled past, disappearing between the man-high rocks uphill. “The Guardians know why the King of Brestolya let you live.”
A breath shivering out of him, Khayrivven followed, no longer trying to reach out to the fire-wielder he couldn’t livewithout, but letting the solid black wall in his mind guide him while he avoided imagining what could await him beyond the next bend in the path. Lory wouldn’t be there, but perhaps a few other corpses.
No matter how many times he saw them die, he still couldn’t get used to the number of young lives wasted in the Amrin Mountains in a war that neither side had been able to win for a decade. And Lory’s trials hadn’t even been part of the war. They’d been a way for the Triad to kill her without getting their own hands dirty, even when they’d said it had been to test both her skills and her loyalty.
If they didn’t find her soon—dead or alive—the Triad might execute him for his foolishness to vouch for an untamable creature.
As he passed through the gap between rocks, a small voice at the back of his mind whispered songs of his worst fears to him like a lullaby.
At least the Triad knew nothing of the true reason Ulder had let him live and was unaware of who resided at the king’s court. Elina was Khayrivven’s burden to bear and no one else’s. The fewer people who knew about who she was, the better.
Yes, Khayrivven was anasset.Yes, Ulder had called him into his Ebon Unit after his magic had shown itself and the Triad had reported to the king. He was a tool, nothing more, nothing less. A tool for death, the king’s shadow hand, wrapping around opponents’ necks, slitting their throats in the dead of night. He was a walking graveyard, countless lives on his conscience whose reasons to die he’d never asked.
All for Elina. All to save her.
