At the end of the session, when everyone was yawning and curling up in their sleeping bags and most of the sylph had retreated around the cave to keep it warm, I found Cris.
“Thank you for your help.”
He nodded.
“Did you know we were looking for you?”
Yes.
“Do the other sylph know what happened five thousand years ago? How they became sylph?”
Yes. An emphatic yes.
“Did phoenixes curse them?” Meuric had believed phoenixes were responsible, but Meuric had also been in a lot of pain.
Yes.
Phoenixes. They were connected to so much, but no one had seen one in centuries. “Will you be able to tell me what happened? Or the books?”
Yes, and yes.
“Were any of these sylph responsible for chasing me last year? Or burning my hands?”
Cris nodded, hesitantly, and then there was something like an apology, or an excuse. I couldn’t quite understand the way his voice rose and fell, and he cut off whatever he was trying to say with a soft, frustrated keening.
“It’s okay.” I held out my hand for him and tried to smile. “I know you won’t let them hurt us.”
He hummed irritably.
“Or they wouldn’t anyway.”
He nodded.
“I know you’re here to help.”
Cris surged forward, shadowy tendrils winding around my forearms as he tried so hard to express something. I could almost catch it. Almost.
-We are your army.-
12
CHOICE
THERE WEREN’T WORDS, really. It more like a melody, a song with lyrics half-remembered. It was the notion of words, the way music tugged inside me and made ideas bubble up from a deep and forgotten place.
A spiral of shock kept me from responding. Sylph could speak. They loved music. They had language. How, in thousands of years of people running from the sylph, had no one ever noticed the sylph communicated?
Cris shifted, and his song sounded like a question. Like, -Do you understand me?-
“Yes,” I whispered. “I think so.”
Cris wringed himself into tight coils of shadow, then zipped from the cave faster than my eyes could follow.
“Wait.” But he was already gone. Everyone else was fast asleep. I almost left the cave to follow the sylph, but after the roc, the centaurs and troll, and the sylph’s arrival, I wanted to sleep for a week.
The lamps were all low, and Sam had chosen a dark corner to put our sleeping bags, where we were sort of alone.
I peeled off my shoes and coat, then crawled into my sleeping bag, edging closer to Sam, who was passed out, his dark hair fallen over his face. He looked so relaxed, all the lines of stressed erased as he dreamed. And when I caressed his cheek, my fingers pale over his tanned skin, he sighed and pulled into my touch.
With a heavy yawn, I pulled out my SED and took it inside my sleeping bag to hide the glow under the layers of wool and silk. I sent a message to Orrin, letting him know we were all safe here.
Have the sylph we sent arrived?
He was either up very late, or very early, because my SED buzzed with a reply.
Yes. Everyone was afraid, but the sylph just float around the camp perimeter.
They’ll keep you warm, too, if you let them.
That’s probably too much to ask most of us.
A few minutes later, he said he had to go, so I put in my earpieces and listened to music while playing around with maps of the land around Range, wondering what to do next. We couldn’t go back to Menehem’s lab until we had a plan. We wouldn’t have a good plan until we’d learned everything we could from the books—and the sylph.
We had sylph.
We had the poison.
We had four people who wouldn’t give up.
There had to be a way to stop Janan from ascending.
I drifted to sleep, walking dreams of fire from the earth and sky, and shadows flooding the world. I dreamt of birth and death and rebirth, and the overwhelming sorrow of one fleeting life.
My body felt sluggish when I awoke, but the scent of searing meat drew me out of my sleeping bag to find Stef on the other side of the cave, teaching a sylph how to cook.
“All right,” I said, mostly to myself as I ran my fingers through my hair, all wild with sleep. Sam and Whit were gone. “How soon for breakfast?”
“Not much longer.” She adjusted her baking sheet on a rock. There was no fire under it, just a sylph coiled around the metal, which glowed red. “And you mean late lunch. Everyone slept most of the day. The others went outside to catch a few more meals before the snow hits. Would you mind fetching them?”
I dragged on my boots and hauled our lanterns and solar batteries outside to charge while there was still light.
Clouds blanketed the sky and the cold air prickled against my face, but it didn’t look like the storm would be bad. A light snowfall. It would cover our tracks.
Instead of wandering the woods to find Sam and Whit, I sent a SED message and waited by a stream, absorbing what sunlight I could, too. The last couple of days had ruined my sleeping schedule. All this being awake in the middle of the night.