“What do you need me to do in the meantime?” Aki asked. “Anything the Society needs, it’s yours.”
Glass Lady closed her eyes and exhaled deeply before she opened them again and spoke. “You only need to stay safe, Your Majesty. And pray.”
Chapter Seven
If the Imperial City was the eye of the tiger of Kichona, Takish Gorge was part of the tiger’s tail. For the last part of their Autumn Festival break, Sora and Daemon left Samara Mountain and rode south, through sparsely populated farmland and rice paddies to land not populated at all.
Now they raced through towering cypress trees atop the edge of a canyon, their horses pushing through dense green ground cover and soft soil. It was also a good thirty degrees cooler here, as if winter were creeping in early on the Kichonan autumn’s reign.
Daemon gasped as he looked up at the delicate, feathery pink clouds above.
Sora glanced up and smiled. It was as if the gods had cast an ethereal lace in the sky. “Welcome home,” she said.
He simply sighed. She heard the actual sigh as well as felt the echo of it in their gemina bond, the wisp of contentment like a shadow trailing behind the original.
Daemon closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath. Sora followed suit. The air here smelled evergreen, as though it had been kissing the dew on the trees for millennia. Breathing it in was Daemon and Sora’s ritual each autumn when they returned, a marker to the start of another school year together. And this breath felt more significant, because it was their final year before graduating.
They sat still on their horses for a few minutes, simply breathing.
When Daemon cleared his throat, Sora opened her eyes. He smiled at her, recharged, and it seemed almost as if the air around him buzzed with his renewed energy.
“Let’s climb some trees,” he said.
She laughed. “You know, sometimes I think you belong in the sky, not on the ground with the rest of us.”
Every night at the Citadel, Daemon climbed out his window and onto the boys’ dormitory rooftop to lie under the stars. He said there was something about the sky’s vastness—its possibility and infinity—that comforted him. There were too many limits imposed down on the earth.
Sora dismounted and tied her horse to a tree. “Shall we climb?”
“Yes, please. I’m itching for height.”
They hiked into the woodland. After a few minutes, he picked a tree, cast a squirrel spell, and quickly scaled the trunk, into the branches. Sora followed, and the crisp smell of the evergreens greeted her again. She watched as Daemon inhaled deeply before he pushed off and jumped into the next tree. He bounded from bough to bough, working his way farther down the canyon but higher into the treetops. Sora leaped from tree to tree in a path parallel to his.
Eventually, she landed on the tallest cypress in the area and climbed up until she was on the highest, thickest branch that would support her weight. She wrapped her legs firmly around the trunk and stood up, opening her arms and tossing her head back toward the sky. The wind blew her back and forth, as if she were a mere dandelion swaying in the breeze. Contentment washed through her.
“You see?” Daemon shouted from where he had also found himself a cypress towering into the sky. “This is why I love being up high.”
A raptor soared above her and let out a shrill whistle. Sora whistled back.
The bird jerked in flight and steered away from her, as if offended by Sora’s birdcall.
Daemon laughed.
“Oh, shut up,” Sora said.
She looked over in his direction. A waterfall came into view, crashing hundreds of feet to the whitewater pools below. And then, beyond that, the trees cleared, and she could see straight down into the bottom of the gorge.
What in Luna’s name—?
She leaped through the trees until she was beside Daemon. “I think there’s an Autumn Festival celebration going on down there.”
He squinted. “Really?”
Sora formed her hands into tapered oval shapes and chanted, “Eyes like a hawk. Eyes like a hawk.”
The skin around her eyes tightened, and her long-distance vision sharpened. She homed in on the canyon floor.
“Whoa,” Sora said. “There’s an entire encampment of red tents, with long yellow-and-green banners whipping in the wind. Thirty or forty people are dancing around a fire.”
Daemon tried to cast a hawkeye spell too, but a few seconds later, he muttered a string of half-intelligible curses under his breath. “Stupid mrphrk bumbling grffff magic never works . . .”
“I think we should sneak in and join the party,” Sora said.
“I don’t know. . . . It’s weird that there’s a celebration in Takish Gorge. No one ever comes out here. This is wolf and bear territory.”
He was right about that. Takish Gorge was far from civilization; Paro Village was the closest town, and because it was already one of the remotest parts of Kichona, its residents wanted to go into the heart of the kingdom when they traveled, not farther away. The canyon was also known for its unfettered wildness, home to a dense population of wolves, bears, cougars, and poisonous, camouflaged snakes. Takish Gorge was not the kind of place most people wanted to go, especially for a celebration known for its carefree, gluttonous, and drunken excess.
“Besides,” Daemon said, “I thought we just decided to get serious. Would the heroes in your mother’s stories crash a party?”
Sora paused to think about it. But then she grinned. Being mischievous and being renowned weren’t mutually exclusive. “The most legendary figures did all sorts of outlandish things. It’s part of what makes their tales worth retelling. So yes, if there’s a once-in-a-lifetime event in the middle of nowhere, I think it would be part of Kichonan lore. And we should definitely go.”
As they got close, though, Sora frowned. A wall of wood surrounded the camp, looming eight feet high above them. She’d seen it from far away, but Sora had been so focused on the party inside, she hadn’t registered that the beams were actually spiky protrusions, more like fortifications to protect from enemies.
“That’s . . . strange,” Daemon said.
Sora nodded. But then she shrugged. “Like you said, Takish Gorge is full of wolves and bears and other predators. It would really ruin a party if any of those got inside.” She walked right up to the logs and began to study them, figuring out the best way to get inside.
Daemon hung back a moment. “This isn’t an ordinary Autumn Festival celebration. Maybe we should rethink going in.”
“Nope. We already agreed that we should definitely go in if it’s not an ordinary Autumn Festival celebration.”
He chewed on his lip, then sighed. “All right. But let’s cast moth spells on ourselves before we go in.” It would mute their whispers to an ultrasonic level inaudible to the human ear, but which they could use to communicate while in the camp.
Sora laughed. “You really want there to be a hidden conspiracy so we can report something interesting to the Council, don’t you?”
Daemon looked so mortified, though, that Sora shut up. She shouldn’t have said that. They quickly formed finger-fluttering mudras and chanted the moth spell. Sora’s voice box tingled as the enchantment took hold. Daemon needed a few tries before his spell worked.
They slinked up to the edge of the camp and hoisted themselves over the wall of logs. Sora landed on the ground as quietly as a ghost—her near-soundless movement, after all, was why she’d been given the taiga name Spirit.
Daemon lowered himself from a nearby section of the perimeter wall, tugging on a wire that trailed him. He’d secured one end to a tree outside the wall and planned to tie off this end inside the camp. It would be easier to leave via tightrope on their way out than scrambling over these slippery logs again.
Lanterns on posts cast a dim red glow over everything. Sora and Daemon crept through the spaces between the tents, sticking, as always, to the shadows. After a few minutes, she found a tree they could climb to get a better view.
She glanced over her shoulder to confirm they were still alone before she wriggled her fingers in a mudra and whispered: “I am a spider, I am a spider, I am a spider.” Immediately, her fingertips felt fuzzy, as if there were hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs to help her climb and grip.
Then she jumped to the tree. Her hands and feet made quiet contact with the bark, and the spider spell adhered her to the trunk. She scuttled up the tree, limber and arachnid quick. Daemon followed, although he didn’t need a spell. He’d been climbing trees since he could crawl.
There was a sound below them, a rock skittering over the ground. Sora and Daemon froze.
A few seconds later, a pair of guards in light armor walked by. They didn’t look up.
She exhaled but spun to face Daemon. “Why would an Autumn Festival celebration require armed guards?” she asked, audible only to him at this moth level.