He almost smiled, then he dropped his gaze to the fire. “You tell me, Ivy Myriana.”
I wasn’t a witch or a mage. My only magic came from my Kiss. For all I knew, I did not have magical tears, for I had cried enough to know.
“I know nothing about Love, Zach, so you tell me.”
He looked up, brows raised. “You said you knew what Love was.”
“Only the Legion’s version of Love. Something tells me it’s different than yours.”
I thought he would’ve been happy to talk about the force he believed so strongly in. Instead, he looked uncomfortable. “It’s complicated.”
“I’m starting to understand that, but please try,” I said quietly, running my fingers through Brom’s light brown hair.
“Well, there’s Love between friends and family—Familial Love.” He tilted his chin at Brom. “Some people say that’s the best form of Love. It’s universal. Even Royals accept it—without calling it that. They understand it, because it helps them preserve strong bloodlines.”
I nodded, plenty familiar with that already. It was the Royal “bond” that I thought I’d always shared with Brom. Now I knew, it wasn’t strong enough to describe what I felt for him.
“But Romantic Love…” Zach shook his head. “It’s completely and utterly irrational. It can’t be understood, and it can’t be explained. It’s unreasonable—which is probably why the Legion doesn’t want to believe it exists. It’s falling for someone even when you know they can’t love you back.” At that, his eyes drifted to my face, and I looked away, my pulse spiking.
“Love is sacrifice. It’s painful. It’s wishing that you could have one more day together, one more minute, one more second together, and hoping it lasts a lifetime, and then believing maybe it could.” Zach was whispering now, watching the sparks in our tired fire die.
“That sounds absolutely foolish—”
He frowned. “Well, maybe but—”
“—and completely wonderful.”
He looked up, and his eyes widened.
I wasn’t sure what kind of expression I was making, because I’d never remembered feeling this way before. I lifted my hands to my mouth and sucked in a quick breath, holding back a tide of emotions. Terrified, excited, sad, and happy all at once—swirling inside me.
His mouth pulled up into a small half smile, and he looked at me with what I could only suspect was…well, love.
…
“How did you fall in love with your fiancé?” I asked Millennia later.
She stopped, and the stone steps she’d been raising crumbled. After a long rest for both her and Zach, we’d finally picked up the trail to the top of the ravine. While I’d been trying to focus on the path ahead, my mind kept going back to my conversation with Zach hours before.
Her blue eyes narrowed. “What do you mean—how?”
“I honestly want to know. I don’t talk to many Romantica. I don’t know how Love…happens.”
Her shoulders relaxed a little, and she stared off into the distance, as if lost in a memory. “That’s the thing. It just does. No reason at all. Or maybe it’s all the reasons.”
She was about to continue when Zach peeked his head from the top of the ravine’s wall we’d been climbing for the past hour. “Hurry, ladies, you have to see this.”
Glancing at each other, Millennia and I dropped our conversation and picked up the pace. She lifted the stone steps back up for me, and in no time we were at the top.
I saw why Zach was excited. We were very high into the mountains, but the stone had given way to life. Grass, trees, and other greenery decorated the side of the mountain we were now traversing. It was a nice change to see green rather than gray, and I was grateful for it. In a few months, this would all be snow. How lucky we were that it was late spring. Passing under a few trees, I found the pain in my chest and the weight in my shoulders barely tolerable, and rested against a large trunk.
Millennia stopped next to me, checking my face, then called up to Brom and Zach, “Go on. See what’s ahead. We’ll catch up.” She turned back to me, handing me her water flask.
“Thank you,” I said, then guzzled down the water. I handed back her flask. “You were saying about Love?”
She smiled as she took the water. “Where was I?”
“The reasons,” I urged.
She was quiet for a moment, flattening the grass with her boot in a small circle. “You find yourself looking at his faults, looking at yours, comparing them over and over in your head until you realize you just don’t care. For me…Tarren and I grew up together. We were childhood friends, and it just grew into something more, naturally. Not that it wasn’t hard sometimes. I once thought he was cheating on me, and I became so jealous.”
She paused, squeezing her eyes shut as if it hurt to bring up those memories.
Then after a few minutes, she opened her eyes and continued. “It turned out he was being secretive because he was trying to buy me a ring.” She shook her head and laughed, then her smile crumbled, and tears swam in her blue eyes.
I took her hands. “Oh, Millennia, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No, it’s all right. I just miss him.” She hurriedly wiped tears away, then looked back at me with a hardened gaze and held out her hand in front of my face. On her ring finger was a gorgeous band of braided silver. The ring Tarren had given her. “But it forces me to keep going.”
I couldn’t find any words to reply as we started back down the path.
…
Another sharp pain split my side, and I winced, drawing Brom’s attention from staring up at the great mountains ahead of us.
“You feel it more up here, don’t you?” Brom asked, sidling closer to me.
I scowled. Of course he noticed. Zach had, too. They had both been slowing down for me and taking more breaks since we’d left the ravine. Both could tell the pain in my chest grew worse and worse. Zach in particular kept hovering around me, the same expression of guilt he wore when he’d first learned I’d taken his Sense from him.
“I’m fine.” I kneaded my side, and the pain eased slightly. “Just tired of sitting in the same position for three hours.”
Brom rolled his eyes and rested his folded arms on his knees. “And yet you’ve never complained during watch before.”
Ignoring him, I turned my attention back to the sky. The stars and moon were no longer visible. Instead it looked like a dark charcoal blanket had been placed over the world. “The sun should have risen by now…”
My gaze focused in on the horizon. A cluster of black clouds had emerged between two peaks where the sun was supposed to be. With a jolt of horror, I realized they weren’t black clouds. They were sparrow harpies.
I jumped to my feet, my heart racing like I’d just run up the side of the great ravine. While sparrow harpies feasted only on the dead, I’d never heard of a swarm this size. A swarm that blocked the sun.
“Sparrow harpies. Everyone up. MOVE!” I yelled.
Millennia and Zach were up in seconds. We scrambled for our gear and raced toward the rocky outcrops, searching for shelter. Brom was the one to find the first cave. It was a small entrance, barely big enough for Zach to fit through, but he squeezed in between the rocks just as the buzzing sound reached our ears. In no time, the sound grew to the magnitude of a torrential downpour. It was like a tornado was whipping through the mountains, shredding the very stones.
On instinct, we backed farther into the cave, our boots slipping on the pebbles and loose rocks. Millennia produced a small fire, and its light bounced around stone walls, illuminating stalagmites and stalactites that stretched toward each other almost like the teeth of a great monster in the Seas of Glyll.
Brom leaned against the cave wall. “How long do you think we’ll have to stay in here?”
“However long it takes for the swarm to pass.” I cursed. “I just hope they stay in the mountains.”
“But sparrow harpies don’t feed on the living,” Millennia said.
I shook my head. “That doesn’t mean they’re harmless. There’s no telling what a swarm that size could do.”