“No,” I whispered.
“One of you must stay here as my guest until I have renewed all the monarchs. To ensure that Riordan does not move against another fey realm,” Rian maintained.
I looked at Orion who had paled as he glanced at me.
“You do not know my king. He does not respond well to his family being threatened either,” Orion hedged.
“That is only the first part. You must also help us get Sage back,” Rian added to me solemnly.
“Get him back? But I thought he was—”
“He isnot,” Ornella interrupted as if she could not bear to hear me say the word. “I still feel him,” she added as her arms tightened around her shoulders.
I knewskiácould not hear each other across worlds, butanamwere apparently like one soul. She could feel him even from wherever the Sylvan had taken him.
“How am I supposed to help with that?”
“You tell me,” Rian insisted. “How did you manage to make contact with the Sylvan in the first place?”
The stars will answer if you beckon to them with the one whose thread is split in two.
But mind the darkness does not swallow thestars…
I looked over at Ornella, clearly the one whose thread had been split, and knew what I had to do.
“I can take Ornella to the portal that we used.”
“Where?” she demanded, stepping toward me as if she would drag me there immediately.
“Spring Quadrant. In the Silver Moor,” I answered. “The portal appeared to us there. But we were warned about the consequences of Shadow consuming the Light. He cannot come with us,” I added with a nod at Rian.
Rian sighed. “I have no interest in anything—”
“Notyourshadow. The Destroyer,” I clarified firmly, and there was silence as they absorbed my chilling words. But Rian’s obvious discomfort at the mere mention of this entity made me feel much better that he took it seriously. And he was clearly not in league with such evil.
He raised his eyes to Ornella who stalked forward to stand anxiously over where he knelt with me. She was on the balls of her bare feet and ready to go and get Sage.
“How will you make them give him back?” he asked her with genuine concern.
“Oh, you know me, Rian. I have a way with words.”
“And we are doomed,” muttered the blond with a sigh, earning himself an offended glare from Ornella.
Before they could bicker any more, the tent flap parted around the final rider. The one who looked like an angel with silvery hair, fair skin that glowed as if with an inner brilliance, and eyes that shimmered like opals.
Behind him, I was shocked to see a mortal woman. Another fire witch according to my magic, which flared in recognition of her. Although she was unlike any other witch that I had ever seen before with dark wavy hair that was streaked with red and mismatched eyes: one blue and one amber like mine.
“Darragh,” Rian spoke to the man, clearly not happy at their arrival in the tent. I got the sense that he was being protective of the woman when he rose at her approach.
“She wanted to come, and I was not going to stop her,” Darragh explained himself with a shrug.
“Of course I had to come the moment I sensed there was another witch here,” the woman said to Rian as she strode by him to look down at me. Those eyes were rather unsettling, but she was actually very beautiful as she tilted her head down at me. “Well,youare an interesting find, daughter of ambition and mutiny,” she mused in intrigue. “Although you still reek terribly of Atropos.”
“You can…What?” I blurted in shock at her words, unsure where to even begin unpacking what she had said. Daughter of ambition and mutiny?
“Her greedy fingers have been all over your essence, plucking and strumming to listen to the tunes of your fate. My Sight is much less invasive,” she reassured me.
“That is debatable,” muttered Ornella with a smirk at the blond man who merely bit his lip to hide a smile.
