A protest melted on Roman’s tongue. He didn’t know if he had the strength to pull himself up, to sit on the back of the very creature that had played a part in his wounds. But his legs were trembling—I can’t walk to Oath—and his heart was striking his chest like a hammer. He was both exhausted and electrified, and he finally thought of the poetic justice. That an eithral would carry him and his map to the city, where Dacre was destined to lose.
An eithral was about to fly him to Iris.
Roman followed Val’s path, pulling himself up the eithral’s side to the slope of the saddle. He settled on what felt like impossibility incarnate.
“Don’t let go,” Val said gruffly. “It’s always a bumpy takeoff.”
Roman grasped the edge of the leather saddle with a white-knuckled grip, pressing his knees inward until they ached. He felt in no way secure enough to be lifting off the ground astride one of Dacre’s not-so-mythical creatures. A creature that had caused fathomless devastation and pain and death.
He clenched his eyes shut. He struggled to hold his last meal down. Cold sweat was breaking out over his skin, but then he firmly told himself, Open your eyes.
Roman did, taking in his surroundings again. He would have never believed he would be here, in this moment, months ago. Weeks ago, even. And he wanted to soak it all in. He would have never believed that he would be in the realm below, beneath layer after layer of earth, in a world made of starless night and languid smoke, about to ride an eithral.
In that moment before flight, when the air took on a hush of awe and expectation, Roman heard Iris’s voice in his memory.
I find that I am leaning more on the side of impossibility these days. I am leaning toward the edge of magic.
Her words grounded him. He envisioned Iris typing by candlelight, as if she were his gravity.
Val withdrew a small flute, hanging on a chain, from beneath his shirt. He blew three long silver notes—they shimmered in the air like sunlight catching rain—and the eithral jerked its head up and began to flap its wings.
Of course. Roman nearly laughed. They’re controlled by an instrument. By music.
The eithral was beholden to the flute’s three notes, even after they had faded into shadows. Its wings spun up the steam and flashes of heat and golden light until it felt like Roman was lost in a windstorm, the sulfur stinging his eyes and making him cough again. But then the eithral took a lurch forward. One lumbering step after the other, expertly dodging the hissing pools.
They took flight as if they had done so a hundred times before.
* * *
It was a bumpy takeoff, but once the eithral was fully in the air, the ride was smooth.
Roman was initially surprised that they never left the under realm. He hadn’t realized that this innermost world was so open and vast—an endless waste of landscape, pocketed with bubbling sulfur pools and veiled with steam. A few times, when Roman dared to look down, he saw something glittering through the haze. His eyes widened when he realized it was rusted chains and skeletons, the bones scattered across the rock paths. They looked like animal bones, until Roman undoubtedly spotted a human skull.
His throat burned as he glanced away. His mouth was parched and held a strange aftertaste, but he was relieved to discover that the warm, moist air eased his cough. Now that has panic had subsided, he could draw a deep breath here and not feel that awful pinch in his lungs.
Eventually, after what could have been half an hour of flying or three—time was impossible to measure without the sky and the sun and the moon—Roman noticed that in some places, the steam from the sulfur pools rose higher than others, as if there was a draft, drawing it upward. After the seventh instance of this, he began to surmise that those must be the places where the eithrals could emerge from the ground. More doorways, large enough to let the creatures pass from one realm to the next.
He wanted to ask Val, but Roman kept his questions captive. Val didn’t seem like a very patient individual, and if Roman wanted to press his luck, he thought he should wait until they had landed. But the roaring silence didn’t quell his imagination or his theories.
Val was obviously close with the eithrals. Perhaps he trained them, or was their caretaker? He also carried the flute beneath his clothes like Dacre did and knew all the melodies to play to control the creatures. What other commands did the eithrals know, and did they still obey musical orders when they flew in the world above?
Roman remembered his time on the front lines, how Lieutenant Lark of the Sycamore Platoon had said eithrals were rarely spotted flying over the trenches because the beasts couldn’t differentiate between enemy and friendly forces. That if Dacre had let them loose with bombs in their talons, they would have just as easily dropped them on Dacre’s soldiers as they would Enva’s, and therefore the creatures were used to bomb civilian towns, a good distance from the front lines.
Dacre’s tactics were to use the eithrals to not only strike fear into the hearts of people, but bomb, then gas, then recover wounded soldiers, so that he could heal them in what felt like complete measures before scrambling their memories to make them feel beholden and subservient to him. It was a terrible and ruthless way to build an army and a following, and Roman could feel heat rise beneath his skin.
But this thought remained at the forefront: surely the eithrals could still be commanded when they flew above. Surely Dacre wasn’t surrendering complete control of his creatures. There had to be a way he could still harness them, as Avalon Bluff had revealed. The eithrals had made two rounds over the town, carrying different materials each time.
Val shifted in the saddle in front of him. The flute flashed in the mellow light as he raised it to his lips.
Roman tucked away the anger and the wonderings when he realized they were preparing to land.
Val blew the flute again, this time two long notes followed by three short ones. The music claimed the air, spawning rings of iridescence that grew so large they faded from sight, and the eithral screeched in response. The creature tossed its head as if resisting the order, but began to angle downward, wings flapping in short but powerful bursts.
Roman clung to the saddle, rigid with dread. But the landing wasn’t as terrible as he expected, and before he could even catch his breath, the eithral had come to a halt—wings outstretched once more over the bubbling pools—and Val was dismounting.
“Let’s go,” Val said.
Roman half-slid, half-fell his way down, his right ankle hitting the stone floor with a painful jar. Val, thankfully, didn’t notice, as he was already walking along the pathway that wound through the sulfur eddies.
Roman hesitated, glancing at the eithral. It was watching him again, eye sparkling like a ruby. With a pang in his stomach, Roman realized it was just as captive as he was.