When she was gone, I glared at CK. “You’re really making this decision?” My question was venomous.
Cyph stood his ground, bracing his weight on the table. “I am, Tol. We need to know what we’re up against.”
“And you agree with this?” I asked Vale. After what she’d gone through, did she truly think Echnid wantedwhat was bestfor Ophelia?
Her lips rolled together, an icy glare landing on Cypherion that promised they’d be discussing this in private, but she said, “I don’t know what to believe. But I want to trust Ophelia that she wouldn’t lie if she didn’t think she and Malakai were safe.”
“Do youknowOphelia?” I blurted. “If she thinks it’s dangerous for us to get her back, she’d absolutely lie!”
“Not with Malakai there, too,” Cypherion said.
Dammit, he had a point. At the very least, Ophelia would tell us to get Malakai out and leave her there.
That acknowledgment siphoned the fire from my voice as I fell into a seat, still avoiding CK’s eyes. “I have to get her back,” I muttered. “I promised her.”
“She has every intention of returning,” Rina swore, sinking into the chair Jezebel had vacated and placing a hand on my arm. “She wanted me to tell you that.”
Ophelia shouldn’t have to fight her way out of there. She should be able to walk out the damn doors. To flood the entire city with Angellight and burn that god to ash.
For a moment, I’d felt so hopeful when Rina had said she’d found them. Damenal. A quick flight from here. I could have had her back in my arms in hours.
Now though, knowing that wasn’t what she wanted, I watched the pile of singed parchment I’d tried to send to her, hopelessness rooting in my heart.
I love you, baby brother.
“That’s the problem, Santorina,” I muttered. “Intentions aren’t guarantees.”
“I should have knownthis was where you went,” I said as I walked into the stables and found Jezebel lying on her back in the bank of sand beside the door. Zanox hovered beside her, a wing draped dramatically overhead to keep the sun slanting through the cracked door off her.
She lifted her head as I walked past, letting it thump back down after a beat. “I needed out of that room.”
I scoffed. “You don’t have to explain it to me.”
Scuffing my feet through the sandy aisle, I crossed to Sapphire’s stall. Luckily, this stable was old and not as well cared for as some on Meridat’s property, the stalls beaten up andpartitions broken enough that Sapphire and the khrysaor had enough room for them and their wings.
Dynaxtar currently occupied two combined stalls, sleeping, but Sapphire, Ophelia’s pegasus, extended her wings when she saw me.
“Hey, pretty girl,” I said as I grabbed her brush.
We kept our warrior horses in a different stable, and I visited Astania every day, but Sapphire was duller since Ophelia had been taken. I’d spent long afternoons at her side, ensuring she was fed and cleaned. Ensuring she got to fly when she wanted and wasn’t alone when neither of us could be with her rider.
“How can they expect us just to leave them?” Jezebel said after a long period of only the scrape of Sapphire’s brush filling the silence.
“I don’t fucking know, Jezzie,” I sighed, and Sapphire echoed the sound.
Setting down the brush, I leaned against the wall and sank to the ground, facing Jezebel. Peeking out from beneath Zanox’s wing, her eyes were so wide, it struck a chord of terror in my own chest.
“I’m scared, Tolek,” she whispered.
“Me, too,” I confessed. So fucking afraid of what could happen to Ophelia while in a god’s grasp.
“For Ophelia, but also because of this,” she said. And the shadows around her flared a silvery-blue with her light. “I still don’t know what this magicis.”
“It’s the mythos. The ability to destroy legends.”
She laughed. “Oh, is that all?”
I understood her point, but I didn’t have any concrete answers for her. We knew the bare minimum of how their magic worked but had no idea what lengths it could go to or the purpose.
