Page 114
I swallow roughly, then dip my head in acknowledgment.
“I left Aerilos the night she told me,” he continues, his voice dipping low. “Sphinx insisted on coming—she wouldn’t take no for an answer—and we prepared as best we could, but leaving…that wasn’t easy. I didn’t tell my kin, because if my aunt so much as suspected they knew, then they would have been punished for allowing it.
“I learned of the Aviary through the visions the Oracle shared, and I knew you were in the Sorrows. But when we were passing through Eretria, we were ambushed. Sphinx and I were outnumbered, and they had nets woven with binding magic that weakened us both.”
His gaze grows distant, his silver eyes darkening. “I don’t know how long I was kept in those tunnels before you arrived. I don’t know how I managed to hold on, truthfully. Perhaps it was desperation. Or maybe the promise of hope for the Harpaurai gave me strength when all else felt lost.”
A wave of nausea rises in my stomach as the pieces assemble in my mind with cruel clarity. He’d been captured while looking for me. And so had Sphinx.
“Lyxander…”
His story loops in my mind, each word a thread weaving into the larger picture. The Oracle’s vision sent him searching for me, a stranger he’d never met, with only fragments of what could be to guide him. He left his home, his kin, his safety—all for a prophecy. Was it fate that drove him, or was it his choice to believe in it?
And what of me?
If I trace each of my choices like paths on a map, they all lead in the same direction—here. To this ridge. To these harps. To Aerilos. To the place my mother left to spare me from the fate the Oracle had foretold, only for me to end up here anyway.
Maybe that’s what frightens me. Not that fate dragged me, but that I walked. That the lines were drawn by my own hand even when I didn’t know the picture I was making.
“I’d choose to do it all over again.” His words break through my thoughts.
He says it like it’s nothing. Like it’s not a truth that roots itself beneath my skin.
I want it to mean more than it does. More than a duty fulfilled, more than a promise to a prophecy or a people. I want it to be because of who I am—not the Daughter of the Tempest, not the Harpaurai queen I’ll never be, but me.
The thought catches me off guard, and I shove it down before it can take hold. He’s only saying what he believes, what he’s always believed—that I’m the answer to something bigger than either of us. That I’m the hope he was sent to find.
“I haven’t emerged, Lyxander.” I turn my face away, my gaze landing on his wings, still a wall against the wind. I reach out and trace the shape of a feather with my fingertips. It trembles under my touch. “I’m likely going to be banished. And in the end, I came here to learn about my magic, not to claim a throne, or let a prophecy guide my path. I’m not what you were looking for.”
Lyxander’s wing flexes, and I let my hand fall.
“You’re still planning to leave,” he says slowly.
“I need to. Nyssa could be in danger, and my brother—” I bite off the words as Kallias’s face flashes and my chest throbs in answer.
He’s silent long enough to draw my gaze back to him.
The muscle in his jaw tics. His silver eyes catch on mine, fall to my mouth, then flee to the horizon.
My heart stutters into an unsteady rhythm, and I can’t tell if it’s the aftershock of everything I’ve felt or the way he just looked at me.
“There’s still time for you to emerge.”
I laugh bitterly. “If all I’ve experienced and done up until this point hasn’t been enough, perhaps it’s too late.”
“And our bargain?”
I push to my feet and arch a challenging brow down at him. Lightning sparks in Lyxander’s gaze, and his wings draw back from where they’ve been shielding me. “It looks like you have your work cut out for you.”
Chapter 34
Nyssa
The walls of the palace feel tighter with every passing day, the air heavier, the shadows longer. I haven’t left since the night Raven cornered me. His warning and the motivations I still can’t make sense of lodge themselves in my mind like a splinter.
I’ve tried to distract myself—pacing the halls, running through plans in my head, even scrubbing the same patch of stone in the kitchens until my hands ached—but nothing helps. Maxim has been staking out the building on Inkora, moving pieces of the plan with Kallias, but I’ve been left here, waiting. Waiting for updates. Waiting for something to happen.
I hate waiting.
