He snorted, gripped Azriel’s arm, and we all vanished into a dark wind.
Stars and blackness, Azriel’s scarred hands clenching tightly around me, my arms entwined around his neck, bracing, waiting, counting—
Then blinding sunlight, roaring wind, a plunge down, down—
Then we tilted, shooting straight. Azriel’s body was warm and hard, though those brutalized hands were considerate as he gripped me. No shadows trailed us, as if he’d left them in Velaris.
Below, ahead, behind, the vast, blue sea stretched. Above, fortresses of clouds plodded along, and to my left … A dark smudge on the horizon. Land.
Spring Court land.
I wondered if Tamlin was on the western sea border. He’d once hinted about trouble there. Could he sense me, sense us, now?
I didn’t let myself think about it. Not as I felt the wall.
As a human, it had been nothing but an invisible shield.
As a faerie … I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it crackling with power—the tang of it coating my tongue.
“It’s abhorrent, isn’t it,” Azriel said, his low voice nearly swallowed up by the wind.
“I can see why you—we were deterred for all these centuries,” I admitted. Every heartbeat had us racing closer to that gargantuan, nauseating sense of power.
“You’ll get used to it—the wording,” he said. Clinging to him so tightly, I couldn’t see his face. I watched the light shift inside the sapphire Siphon instead, as if it were the great eye of some half-slumbering beast from a frozen wasteland.
“I don’t really know where I fit in anymore,” I admitted, perhaps only because the wind was screeching around us and Rhys had already winnowed ahead to where Cassian’s dark form flew—beyond the wall.
“I’ve been alive almost five and a half centuries, and I’m not sure of that, either,” Azriel said.
I tried to pull back to read the beautiful, icy face, but he tightened his grip, a silent warning to brace myself.
How Azriel knew where the cleft was, I had no idea. It all looked the same to me: invisible, open sky.
But I felt the wall as we swept through. Felt it lunge for me, as if enraged we’d slipped past, felt the power flare and try to close that gap but failing—
Then we were out.
The wind was biting, the temperature so cold it snatched the breath from me. That bitter wind seemed somehow less alive than the spring air we’d left behind.
Azriel banked, veering toward the coastline, where Rhys and Cassian were now sweeping over the land. I shivered in my fur-lined cloak, clinging to Azriel’s warmth.
We cleared a sandy beach at the base of white cliffs, and flat, snowy land dotted with winter-ravaged forests spread beyond them.
The human lands.
My home.
CHAPTER
23
It had been a year since I had stalked through that labyrinth of snow and ice and killed a faerie with hate in my heart.
My family’s emerald-roofed estate was as lovely at the end of winter as it had been in the summer. A different sort of beauty, though—the pale marble seemed warm against the stark snow piled high across the land, and bits of evergreen and holly adorned the windows, the archways, and the lampposts. The only bit of decoration, of celebration, humans bothered with. Not when they’d banned and condemned every holiday after the War, all a reminder of their immortal overseers.
Three months with Amarantha had destroyed me. I couldn’t begin to imagine what millennia with High Fae like her might do—the scars it’d leave on a culture, a people.
My people—or so they had once been.
Hood up, fingers tucked into the fur-lined pockets of my cloak, I stood before the double doors of the house, listening to the clear ringing of the bell I’d pulled a heartbeat before.
Behind me, hidden by Rhys’s glamours, my three companions waited, unseen.
I’d told them it would be best if I spoke to my family first. Alone.
I shivered, craving the moderate winter of Velaris, wondering how it could be so temperate in the far north, but … everything in Prythian was strange. Perhaps when the wall hadn’t existed, when magic had flowed freely between realms, the seasonal differences hadn’t been so vast.
The door opened, and a merry-faced, round housekeeper—Mrs. Laurent, I recalled—squinted at me. “May I help … ” The words trailed off as she noticed my face.
With the hood on, my ears and crown were hidden, but that glow, that preternatural stillness … She didn’t open the door wider.
“I’m here to see my family,” I choked out.
“Your—your father is away on business, but your sisters … ” She didn’t move.
She knew. She could tell there was something different, something off— Her eyes darted around me. No carriage, no horse.
No footprints through the snow.
Her face blanched, and I cursed myself for not thinking of it— “Mrs. Laurent?”
Something in my chest broke at Elain’s voice from the hall behind her.