Page 14 of Burn of the Everflame

With Luther, I wanted it all.

So I’d slid into the foliage, clutching the gold necklace he’d gifted me and weeping as I watched him mount and fly away. I vowed then that this pain would not be for nothing. For every tear I shed, I would demand a year in return—a year without war, without the endless attempts of this world to keep us apart, a year filled with the happiness we deserved. I let the tears fall freely that day, and I held on to that fragile, beautiful hope.

Today, however, it was a very different gryvern flying my way. And as for its rider . . .

I squinted through the rain, wondering if the isolation had gotten to me, but the closer it came, the surer I was.

There was no rider.

The gryvern was alone.

And I knew exactly which gryvern it was.

“Leave!” I screamed.

I shot out of the grass and bolted for the path. I had been dreading this day for weeks, praying it never came. Luther had warned me that a new Crown could not hide from its gryvern forever.

The Umbros gryvern soared toward the island, spearing like a creature possessed. In a way, she was. The bond that enslaved her to the Crown forced her to heed one command above all: protect your Queen. Unless I could get to her in time to contradict that order, she would find her way to my side—and die in the process.

“Turn back!” I shouted. I ran as hard as my feet could carry me, lungs and thighs burning with effort. I wasn’t going to make it. Even with the gryvern’s sensitive hearing, I would be too far away for her to hear me before she reached the perimeter of the island’s lethal spell.

But maybe she could see me.

I sprinted up the staircase that led to the dais of the Kindred’s Temple. I summoned a lifetime of climbing trees in the Lumnos forests to scramble up the intricately carved archway of the Umbros portal. The top narrowed into an obelisk capped with a cauldron of onyx flames, and my attempts to scale it fell miserably short. My nails slid against the smooth, rain-slicked stone.

“Go home,” I screamed, pointing east. “Go back to Umbros!”

The gryvern caught sight of me. Instead of heeding my warning, her wings tilted downward on a deadly course straight for me.

My arm thrashed in desperate waves. “Stop coming! Go home!”

Her head cocked at my strange behavior. If she could see me, maybe there was still hope.

My fingers burned, fighting to keep hold of the arch. I waved, I pointed, I bellowed, anything to catch her attention. Finally, her wingbeats stalled, and she slowed.

My heart leapt.

And my grip gave way.

Too numb from the cold and too wet from the storm, my fingers slipped, and I fell, crashing hard to the godstone floor. My knee bent at an unnatural angle, and my skull bounced off the rock, leaving me dazed.

Though the island’s spell stifled the bond that would normally allow a gryvern to sense their Crown’s pain, the Umbros gryvern didn’t need it. She’d seen my injuries with her own two eyes.

And a gryvern always came to aid a wounded Crown.

The stars were still clearing from my vision when I heard the high-pitched shriek of a gryvern in distress, followed by a strangled noise that I knew I would never forget.

Then silence.

A terrible, awful silence.

And the thud of a massive body colliding with soil.

For the third time in Emarion history, one of these majestic creatures, whose only mistake had been trusting their Kindred masters, met its final end.

I gasped for air as rain pelted my face, knocked breathless as much by the loss as my fall. I don’t know her name, I realized in anguish. I’d met her in Umbros, even begged for her help, then reluctantly fought her over the sea during our escape, but I’d never asked her name.

She died. For me.