They traveled in silence for so long, venturing deeper and deeper beneath the snowy canopy that when Reeve spoke into her mind, she startled.
See if Mordred is tailing us.
She nodded. “Can I use your mind to jump?” she asked, looking up at him as best she could.
He shook his head.
“Then how?” she asked.
“Jump straight to him,” Reeve answered.
Maeve let out a frustrated sound as they moved between two massive trees. “You’re just set on watching me fail today, aren’t you?”
“You’ve done it before.”
“On accident.”
“Now do it on purpose.”
“If you’d known you were going to have me do this, you could have prepared me. I could have been practicing yesterday instead of listening to you ramble on about yourself—”
The hand splayed on her stomach compressed, bringing her impossibly closer to him. “Quit whining,” he said, but she could hear the smile in his voice, “and do it.”
He released his tightened grip, but his hold on her remained.
Jumping to Mordred, without already being inside a mind, without having access to the pathways between memories and those who shared them, seemed impossible.
Her free hand slid over Reeve’s, where he held the reins, a silent command. As instructed, he stopped their horse, and the soft sound of its hooves crunching into packed snow fell away.
Magic, she reminded herself, was merely the will of the mind.
With an exaggerated sigh, she tossed her head back against Reeve and looked up at the white canopy above them. It was terrifyingly serene. So soft and beautiful, but so deadly in its frozen nature. She let her eyes drift closed.
Mordred. How could she jump to Mordred without a connection, a shared memory? She thought of their first meeting, when she confessed the fate her brother faced as a wolf. Then, how his coat was smeared red from the blood of all those men he and his wolves slaughtered. She could still smell the metallic sting in the air—
Her eyes shot open, and she straightened.
Perhaps she didn’t need another’s memories to find Mordred; he was in her memories. They shared paths of the mind. Her eyes drifted closed once more as she brought herself back to her interpreted memory. Her skin prickled, and she clung to that metallictaste in the air, breathing it in fully as the feeling of Reeve behind her, and the saddle beneath her dripped away into nothing.
She allowed her mind to fall into the memory of his bared teeth and the sounds of flesh ripping.
Her vision flashed with a burst of bright colors and shifted into a long room at Castle Morana. Abraxas and Mal sat at a wide table, their voices hushed. Maeve’s heart jolted at the sight of her cousin. He’d lost weight, but he was alive.
She wanted to call out to him, ask him to verify his safety, to tell her where Zimsy was, if she was alright, but the only sound that made it out was a high-pitched whine. At last, Maeve realized she wasn’t observing them through her own body. She looked down, taking in the bright white mass of fur. Her attention shot back to Abraxas and Mal. Neither of them looked her way, or rather, neither of them looked Mordred’s way.
She yanked herself out of the wolf’s mind, knowing she didn’t need to risk giving herself away. Like moving through a current of water, she slid back into the bright white forest on Heims, back into Reeve’s gentle hold.
She did it. She did it with ease. The possibilities were endless for where she could jump, who she could see. She could jump to Zimsy!
If she’d ever acted faster, she couldn’t remember a time. She didn’t slowly dip into her memories with Zimsy. No. She let the world fall out from beneath her and plunged herself into endless falling darkness. Memories and time spiraled around her, twisting her body in every direction and way. She pulled, no, sucked them all towards her until she was drenched in the feeling of her ally, her best friend. The sound of her laugh, the smell of her cooking, the color of her eyes bled into the darkness, replaced with an infinite warmth of sisterhood that sat deep in Maeve’s chest. Irreplaceable and unmistakable.
She twisted her body, perfectly timed as her feet slammed into solid matter. At the same time, her eyes opened, and before her was a vast expanse of earth. Long dead and dark, blurred and fuzzy. Violent winds assaulted her at once. She could barely open Zimsy’s eyes to take in her surroundings, but she got enough of a look to understand.
Zimsy’s vision faltered beneath Maeve’s intrusion. Maeve looked down, Zimsy’s body barely strong enough to obey the motion,where she lay on rocky terrain. Her bones were still exposed, her skin torn. But, confirmed by the small rise and fall of her chest, she was alive.
“Zimsy,” she said, forcing the words out of the Elf’s mouth. Her voice was raw, cracked, and barely audible. “I am coming.”
She yanked herself back to the forest at Heims, twisting her torso and looking up at Reeve, triumph blown wide across her features. “He’s at Morana,” she said with certainty. “And Zimsy is on the Dark Planet.”
