Dawn in the Deep Sky truly was sublime.
The sun had just started to rise, the sky blooming pink and anointing the scene with streaks of gold and plum and lavender. The giant circle of aguir stone at the base of Gahn Thaleo’s mountain – which was usually a vivid, translucent turquoise under the high sun – glowed like red rosehip tea that had been freshly brewed, then frozen. Peaks ringed the round aguir clearing, crowding the shuttle we’d taken here with shadows at the far end.
I tipped my head back, breathing through dizziness as the mountains made their majesty known. Not just dizziness, I realized, but also a sudden, painful wistfulness. I’d always told myself that I’d get to see the Alborz Mountain range in person someday. It sprawled just north of Tehran, the city of my parents’ birth. Mount Damivand, Iran’s highest peak, was there,home to the hearts of poets and the mythological prison of the three-headed tyrant dragon Aži Dahaka.
I’d never made it there.
Instead, I was here, in this terrible, beautiful, alien mountain range.
Even with my friends around me, I was strangely lonely.
Then, I felt the eyes on me.
I yanked my chin down, my gaze immediately colliding with the cool stars of Gahn Thaleo’s.
I didn’t know when he’d gotten there. He certainly hadn’t been standing there a minute ago. But he was there now, a figure so imposing on that frozen rose lake of aguir that I almost thought he stood alone. I barely registered Warrek, the male beside him. And Warrek was not a small man. None of the Sea Sand, Deep Sky, or Bitter Sea males were.
But Gahn Thaleo…
Gahn Thaleo was different. He exerted a force of gravity all his own, a power that disturbed me. Like if I stopped paying attention for the smallest slice of a second, if I lost my footing, I’d find myself careening directly towards him, unable to stop. Maybe he sensed it, that sudden shuddering of my balance when he was near.
Maybe that was why he spent so much time watching me.
He and Warrek approached us now, the claws of their long, kangaroo-like feet clicking with a metallic quality on the aguir. Gahn Thaleo’s unwavering sight stars were two different colours. His right eye, unaffected by the violent line of scarring down the left side of his face, had bright teal sight stars, not unlike the colour of the stone beneath our feet when lit up with bright sun. His left eye, which sat in the centre of the ripped scar tissue that stretched from his hairline down into his cheek, had sight stars that were paler, and seemed to move a little slower – though they were trained just as relentlessly upon me. His longhair was loose about his shoulders and back, the white streak stark against the violet tint of his hide. Unlike Warrek, who wore a grey vest, Gahn Thaleo wore nothing on his upper body but his bow. The rising sun glanced off the brutal line of his jaw, the ruthlessly honed musculature.
His was not a body that made excuses.
Or, I thought, apologized.
“Good morning, Warrek. Gahn Thaleo,” Valeria said with a short nod.
Gahn Thaleo glanced her way, finally looking at someone other than me, and I took a slightly strangled breath. I hadn’t realized how shallow my breathing had been before.
“Indeed,” Gahn Thaleo said, his voice quiet but reverberating with effortless authority. “The morning of the vaklok. I trust you slept well?”
While I assumed he was asking the question of all of us, his sight stars had once again come to settle specifically on me. I mostly let the others answer, only giving a non-committal mumble that everyone else’s voices drowned out.
Gahn Thaleo didn’t respond.
Silence reined. Tilly cleared her throat. Grim scratched idly at the place beneath a ruby-like scale, and Valeria elbowed him.
“I trust you slept well?”
Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.
He was asking me. Onlyme this time.
He wouldn’t let any of us go or move on with our bloody day unless I clasped my hands together, batted my eyelashes, and thanked him for the very comfortable sleep I’d had in his beautiful prison of a mountain.
OK. Prison might have been a bit over the top. We had every luxury at Gahn Thaleo’s disposal available to us here. And I’m sure, if I’dreallywanted to leave, I could have…
Right?
“Yes,” I said, heat I couldn’t quite account for prickling in my cheeks. “Yes, I did.”
Gahn Thaleo hadn’t really reacted when the others had responded to his question. But at my reply, I saw the tiniest twitch in his scarred cheek, alongside the subtle flaring of his nostrils. He abruptly turned and said, “Come.”
A single word. A growl of command.Come.I shivered.
