Relax, I told myself. It’d been weeks since we’d slept comfortably. I took a deep inhale, calming my nerves, and scanned the room. The soft light illuminated the lazy dust particles that floated through the air.
What was I going to do for a few hours? I craned my neck to peer out the window, noting Tempest and Anchor grazing in the small clearing, picking at bits of dead grass and muffling the dirt ground with their fuzzy lips. I supposed they were better company than the paranoid thoughts I couldn’t seem to shake.
CHAPTER TWENTY
LYVIA
Votruvians of old worshipped the floating island, but in recent centuries, its stories have shifted from holy to haunted.
– History of Votruvia, Kellan’s private library, theHydra.
Lyvia – Borva, Votruvia
Raucous laughter echoed as the doors to the tavern down the hill swung open, the joyous sound filling the crisp, evening air. I slid off Tiberius’s back, and my feet softly hit the muddy grass, wet and bright mid-spring. A young man and woman strode into the tavern, the warm golden light disappearing as the doors closed behind them. A wave of malty ale, enderleaf smoke and roasted potatoes flooded my senses, and my stomach let out a loud groan in response.
Do you want to talk about it?Ti murmured in my mind.
Not really. You?
Ti bristled in response, and I rubbed my hand along his withers. The voices of the creatures in the sea were on repeat in my mind.
His voice.
Tiberius had heard them too, but he’d heard something else. Something upsetting enough to elicit a tense reaction when I’d first asked him about it.
Aeriden will be all right. Get some food. Be with your friends for a while.
We’d left my brother to heal at Eghan House. AtKellan’shouse. He’d need a day or two to rest and recover before we could continue to the Arx and find the key to defeating the Embodied.
And where will you be?I turned to him, sliding my hand up the side of his face and under his chin to scratch the long tufts of hair underneath.
He turned his big head to the mossy hills in the distance.
Flying.
Tiberius nudged me with his nose before tucking his wings in and clomping down the road.
I moved to the stone path, cutting my gaze over the sweeping hills and rocky shores of Borva, Votruvia. My eyes caught on a large fountain in the center of the town square in the distance, the twisting stone necks of a Hydra stretching from the middle of the water. I looked to the opposite end of the square, searching for the wooden stage that must have been torn down. My stomach plunged as a flurry of painful memories from hell rushed forward.Kellan’s memories. Kellan’s childhood…
“There you are!” Isla called as she swung the door to the tavern open and waved an arm at me.
I took a deep breath, pulling myself out of Kellan’s hell as she strode toward me.
Sounds flooded my senses as Isla looped her arm in mine, and we stepped inside the tavern. Countless conversations, the clanking of glasses and the sloshing of their contents, the sizzle of meaty juices over a fire, the barked curse of a server, and the sharp rattle of a dropped platter... I closed my eyes, doing my best to shut out the noise.
“When it’s too much, find one sound, and narrow in on it. Like a target,” Isla murmured, her dark brows pinched. “I can’t imagine what the transition must be like for you.”
My transition.Yes, it had been…a lot. For whatever reason, the Transcindiel magic that had transformed me into a human as an infant had reversed after I’d traveled to the realm of the dead. Perhaps I could only enter this realm in my original form? I’d barely had a moment to process my new form, or why it had happened.
I closed my eyes and narrowed in on Isla’s sing-song voice, and somehow the background noise mulled together into a strange buzz. I blew out a breath.
“Thank you,” I murmured, turning and taking in the scene before me.
Mismatched tables were scattered throughout the multi-level tavern in a random pattern. An array of colorful drapes hung and crisscrossed along the walls, wrapping around the various wooden columns throughout. A round dance floor in the center of the tavern hosted a myriad of couples joining hands for a jaunty jig performed by a small band on a curved stage in the back.
Smoke wafted from the tavern’s occupants, puffs of it coiling and colliding in the large space before rising to the tall, slanted ceiling where a few wooden taper-bearing chandeliers hung.
My eyes snagged on the tall elf hunched over the bar, glaring in the direction of the barkeep. I suppressed a giggleas the patrons nearby gave Vulcan a wide berth, many of them throwing the ex-War Slayer fearful glances.
