And when I wasn’t doing that … I was combing through more books, any and all Clotho could find me, all regarding the Ouroboros. How to master it.
The mirror was notorious. Every known philosopher had ruminated on it. Some had dared face it—and gone mad. Some had approached—and run away in terror.
I could not find an account of anyone who had mastered it. Faced what lurked within and walked away with the mirror in their possession.
Save for the Weaver in the Wood—who certainly seemed insane enough, perhaps thanks to the mirror she’d so dearly loved. Or perhaps whatever evil lurked in her had tainted the mirror, too. Some of the philosophers had suggested as much, though they hadn’t known her name—only that a dark queen had once possessed it, cherished it. Spied on the world with it—and used it to hunt down beautiful young maidens to keep her eternally young.
I supposed Keir’s family owning the Ouroboros for millennia suggested the success rate of walking away was low. It was not heartening. Not when all the texts agreed on one thing: there was no way around it. No loophole. Facing the terror within … that was the only route to claim it.
Which meant I perhaps had to consider alternatives—other ways to entice the Bone Carver to join us. When I found a moment.
Azriel sheathed his legendary fighting knife and examined the wings I’d spread wide. “You’re trying to steer with your arms. The muscles are in the wings themselves—and in your back. Your arms are unnecessary—they’re more for balancing than anything. And even that’s mostly a mental comfort.”
It was more words than I’d ever heard from him.
He lifted a brow at my gaping, and I shut my mouth. I frowned at the drop ahead. “Again?” I grumbled.
A soft laugh. “We can find a lower ledge to jump from, if you want.”
I cringed. “You said this was low.”
Azriel leaned back on his hands and waited. Patient, cool.
But I felt the bark tear into my palms, the thud of my knees into its rough side—
“You are immortal,” he said quietly. “You are very hard to break.” A pause. “That’s what I told myself.”
“Hard to break,” I said glumly, “but it still hurts.”
“Tell that to the tree.”
I huffed a laugh. “I know the drop isn’t far, and I know it won’t kill me. Can’t you just … push me?”
For it was that initial leap of utter faith, that initial lurch into motion that had my limbs locking up.
“No.” A simple answer.
I still hesitated.
Useless—this fear. I had faced down the Attor, falling through the sky for a thousand feet.
And the rage at its memory, at what it had done with its miserable life, what more like it might do again, had me gritting my teeth and sprinting off the boulder.
I snapped my wings out wide, my back protesting as they caught the wind, but my lower half began to drop, my legs a dead weight as my core yielded—
The infernal tree rose up before me, and I swerved hard to the right.
Right into another tree.
Wings first.
The sound of bone and sinew on wood, then earth, hit me before the pain did. So did Azriel’s soft curse.
A small noise came out of me. The stinging of my palms registered first—then in my knees.
Then my back—
“Shit,” was all I could say as Azriel knelt before me.
“You’re all right. Just stunned.”
The world was still reordering itself.
“You banked well,” he offered.
“Into another tree.”
“Being aware of your surroundings is half of flying.”
“You said that already,” I snapped. He had. A dozen times just this morning.
Azriel only sat on his heels and offered me a hand up. My flesh burned as I gripped his fingers, a mortifying number of pine needles and splinters tumbling off me. My back throbbed enough that I lowered my wings, not caring if they dragged in the dirt as Azriel led me toward the lake edge.
In the blinding sun off the turquoise water, his shadows were gone, his face stark and clear. More … human than I had ever seen him.
“There’s no chance that I’ll be able to fly in the legions, is there?” I asked, kneeling beside him as he tended to my skinned palms with expert care and gentleness. The sun was brutal against his scars, hiding not one twisted, rippling splotch.
“Likely not,” he said. My chest hollowed out at that. “But it doesn’t hurt to practice until the last possible moment. You never know when any measure of training may be useful.”
I winced as he fished out a large splinter from my palm, then washed it clean.
“It was very hard for me to learn how to fly,” he said. I didn’t dare respond. “Most Illyrians learn as toddlers. But … I assume Rhysand told you the particulars of my early childhood.”
I nodded. He finished the one hand and started on the other. “Because I was so old, I had a fear of flying—and did not trust my instincts. It was an … embarrassment to be taught so late. Not just to me, but to all in the war-camp once I arrived. But I learned, often going off by myself. Cassian, of course, found me first. Mocked me, beat me to hell, then offered to train me. Rhys was there the next day. They taught me to fly.”
He finished my other hand, and sat on the shore, the stones murmuring as they shifted beneath him. I sat beside him, bracing my sore palms faceup on my knees, letting my wings sag behind me.
“Because it was such an effort … A few years after the War, Rhys brought me back a story. It was a gift—the story. For me. He—he went to see Miryam and Drakon in their new home, the visit so secret even we hadn’t known it was happening until he returned. We knew their people hadn’t drowned in the sea, as everyone believed, as they wanted people to believe. You see, when Miryam freed her people from the queen of the Black Land, she led all of them—nearly fifty thousand of them—across the desert, all the way to the shores of the Erythrian Sea, Drakon’s aerial legion providing cover. But they got to the sea and found the ships they’d arranged to transport them over the narrow channel to the next kingdom had been destroyed. Destroyed by the queen herself, who sent her lingering armies to drag her former slaves back.
“Drakon’s people—the Seraphim—are winged. Like us, but their wings are feathered. And unlike us, their army and society allow women to lead, to fight, to rule. All of them are gifted with mighty magic of wind and air. And when they beheld that army charging after them, they knew their own force was too small to face them. So they cleaved the sea itself—made a path through the water, all the way through the channel, and ordered the humans to run.