“What just happened?” It didn’t sound like Helios was asking Ivy specifically. There was an awestruck quality to his question that made it seem like it was simply something he needed to vocalize for the sake of his own sanity. After all, it wasn’t like Ivy understood any better than he did.
The in-between had been acting strangely recently, but this…this was something else entirely. It was the difference between taking the wrong exit off the highway, and ending up in a bottomless abyss.
All those people. Ivy clamped down on the thought. If she went there, she wouldn’t be able to come back. It was too horrible to consider. Hundreds of people, lost to the void. No. Don’t think about it.
“I don’t know,” Ivy said helplessly. The woman’s words echoed in her ears.
It’s breaking apart. Breaking down.
The problem of the in-between was larger than any of them had ever dreamed.
“We have to tell the Ala,” Ivy said. It was the only thing that made sense. The Ala would know what to do; she always knew what to do. Ivy felt the need to cling to the Ala’s skirts in a way she hadn’t done since childhood. The Ala would know. The Ala would help. “Come on.” Now it was her turn to tug on Helios’s arm. “We have to go home.”
Helios stayed rooted to the spot. He peered at Ivy with a look of such supreme puzzlement, she would have laughed if not for the horror threatening to choke her. His voice was plaintive and deadly serious when he asked, “How?”
Ivy lost the battle against the hysterical laughter that had been threatening to spill out. It tumbled from her lips in a crazed cackle.
How?
They’d been taking the train because the in-between had been acting too unpredictable, and now this.
Ivy doubled over, clutching her gut, unsure whether the tears tracking down her face were from laughter or sadness, and not quite sure whether it mattered.
Madness and magic. Not far from each other indeed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“The world is falling apart at the seams,” said the Ala.
Echo paused, a doughnut halfway to her mouth. She didn’t know what kind and generous soul had delivered the box of assorted doughnuts to the library at Avalon, but she knew that she loved them and would gladly take a bullet for them if need be. She, Rowan, and Caius were the only ones eating. Ivy and Helios were still rattled from what they’d seen while waiting for the train the day before. Dorian was too stoic to enjoy the miracle of fried dough covered in eight kinds of sugar. And Jasper didn’t like eating things that were messy. His loss.
“Come again?” Echo said. Ivy wrapped her arm around Echo’s and rested her head on Echo’s shoulder. Ivy was shaking like a leaf. Echo brushed off the powdered sugar that had landed on Ivy’s feathers when Echo had reached over her for a doughnut. At least the sugar blended in with her feathers.
“The rift Ivy and Helios witnessed open on the subway tracks,” the Ala said. “The mysterious seals Caius saw that Tanith used his power to help break open. The increasing instability of the in-between. They’re all connected.”
“What exactly are the seals?” Rowan asked.
The Ala pulled books off her shelves so quickly that Echo doubted she’d stopped to give the titles even a cursory glance. Most of them were bound in earth-toned leather that was worn with age and use, dark in places from oil from readers’ skin. These were well-loved books. Well-read books. The Ala probably knew every groove and indentation in their spines. “The seals have existed for as long as anyone can remember,” the Ala said.
“Kind of like the war that has raged for as long as anyone can remember?” Echo was beginning to tire of things older than memory.
“They are even older than that. Little is known about their creation.” The Ala scanned the pages of one book before snorting in disgust and tossing it over her shoulder. Echo winced as it hit the ground, covers spread like wings, spine cracked. “Most of it has been lost to time. What we do know we’ve managed to glean from fragments of memory passed down through generations, though it’s been considerably gilded by myth over the years. The seals are as much legend as the firebird was.”
Echo spread her arms wide, jostling Ivy. “And yet here I am.”
That earned her a tight smile. The Ala began arranging the books on her desk in an order that made sense only to her. “Indeed. And as the firebird is every bit as real as you, the seals are every bit as real. And from what the young prince told me, centuries—no, millennia—of neglect have rendered them disastrously vulnerable.”
“Well,” Rowan said, “what do we know?”
The Ala sighed. Her feathers shivered with the rise and fall of her chest. “We know that they were created thousands upon thousands of years ago by a tribe that predates our modern notions of Avicen and Drakharin.”
Echo recalled the Oracle she had met in that cave hidden deep within the Black Forest. The feathers that had adorned her arms. The scales that had graced the back of her hands, dusted across her knuckles. She had not been one or the other; she had been both and neither. The Oracle had been something ancient and almost forgotten. A link to their past that had been cruelly severed before Echo had even begun to scratch the surface of her mysteries. Like the seals, the Oracle predated the division that had torn their ancestors asunder. Perhaps she had been the sole survivor of a time when hatred and mistrust had not so clearly delineated the battle lines. But since Tanith had brought the ancient creature’s long life to an end, they would never know. All they had was supposition.
“There are several variations of the story of how that one tribe split into two,” the Ala continued. “But there are a few consistencies that crop up in different tellings of the tale, which leads me to believe there is a kernel of truth hiding in them.”