“Are you heading into town after training?” I ask Ronan as he makes us some eggs and oatmeal for breakfast.
“No training today. I had something else in mind. If you’re feeling up for it, that is.”
Ronan has been posing as a commander under Taran, taking orders from him while they help train the Orsan soldiers along with refugees from Selara. I have joined one of the legions primarily composed of Selarans. Even Seth has offered some help of the strategic variety, on days when it doesn’t interfere with his other plans. The Orsa are still suspicious of the two of us, though we’ve managed to avoid outright hostility for a few months now.
There’s been little movement from Adria, who has spent most of the time rebuilding the city she destroyed and getting the gold alchemy up and running again. The word from the refugees is that she’s sending Selarans into the forest to harvest the phoenix cypress ash. Seth and Taran are there now, attempting to recruit more Selarans to our cause.
And searching for a certain magical sickle.
Our research has led to a few discoveries. None of them are exactly what we were searching for—the wording of the Shadowbound Prophecy or even what it implies—but we’ve pieced together a few ideas from the work my mother did.
First, we discovered that Mother was aware of the relics Cyrus told Zara about, although she was only concerned with the torch and the sickle. She never managed to locate the torch, even though she traveled to Brakkar in search of it during one of her trips away that I thought related to the war effort, but she did find the sickle in a temple in Minar.
Then she stole it and buried it somewhere. We’ve been searching the graveyards near Pyka, our home at the time, but either it doesn’t have the same sort of magical draw to it that the torch did, or she found a different hiding place. Hopefully, Seth and Taran manage to find it on this trip, although I’m not optimistic. They seem to have produced little from their various trips across Nithyria other than a handful of traumatized refugees.
Whether their trauma was from the war or having to spend days traveling with my brother, I couldn’t say.
Our second revelation was that the Selaran Queen Julia, the queen who reunited Selara and Nithyria following the first civil war, had been married to a shadow-born who was formerly her guard. Her name appeared in both the scrap of parchment Seth had stolen and the letter Cyrus sent to Ronan when the city fell, and my mother’s notes had speculated that Queen Julia and King Leander, her consort, had been assassinated late in life, possibly by the church for “shadowbound heresy,” although there was no indication of what they’d actually done. Cyrus’s note indicated we should find their tomb, but my mother hadn’t reached the same conclusion, and none of the remaining books in the Pyka library offered any clues to where it could be.
The third revelation was that all references to the Prophecy itself have been stripped, even from the palimpsests. We’ve tried a dozen different elixirs and every type of magic available to us to reveal it in the five different places we’ve found reference to it, but it’s as if it was struck from every record in the world by something far more powerful and permanent than anything we’ve seen.
The best plan we have now is to retrieve the sickle and take both the sickle and the torch to the location of the temple in Avaris and hope whatever connection we have to the Prophecy is revealed to us there.
Either way, we’ve exhausted what we can learn here. And the only other places that might have answers are in Faros: the Alchemists’ Guild and the Great Library.
Which means that we’ll have to retake Faros to find out.
The retaking Faros plan is further along than our prophecy plan, which has firmly become Plan B. Typhon managed to secure us support from Brakkar after a long negotiation, and Larus has enlisted his mother’s fleet to transport soldiers to Pykaand Minar for our siege and to engage Felix’s patrol ships at sea. It’s essentially the same siege tactics my sister used to take Faros in the first place, but with fewer escape routes and a winter-starved city half filled with a populace that wants to see their king restored. We’re hopeful we’ll succeed in even less time and with far fewer casualties.
But all of that is a few weeks out. The mountains are still treacherous with snow, and the soldiers have a long way to travel to reach Faros.
“What did you have in mind?” I ask Ronan as he serves me my eggs.
“You’ll see,” he says with a wink. “Dress for warm weather. It’s a beautiful day.”
After breakfast, I put on a blue Nithyrian sundress and follow Ronan from the cottage along a forest path. We visit the home Kira has made for herself on a rock outcropping, bringing her a bucket of her favorite fish and some fresh hay for her nest. She has loved the freedom of being here in Nithyria after being confined during the war. It took some time for the residents of Pyka to get used to her, but she’s become something of a mascot to them now. Ronan frequently has to disguise himself on the spot as the village children come to bring her treats.
Our path leads back into the woods, which are finally thawing and coming to life with green. Pairs of birds land on branches filled with tiny buds, their songs filling the air as we step over creeks swelling with clear snowmelt waters. The forest is bright at this time of year, but it’s still lovely. I regret that we won’t be here when the canopy is full. I’d love to kiss Ronan in the forest shadows, the place where I feel most at home.
Or where I felt most at home until I met him.
Finally, we reach a clearing, and I realize immediately why he’s brought me here.
The ground is carpeted in a thick blanket of bluebells, their nodding flowers spreading over the forest floor and filling the edges of the meadow, except for a spot just in the middle where Ronan lays down a thick blanket with blue and green stripes.
He takes my hand and helps me to the ground. He lays back on the blanket, and I lay beside him, draping my arm over his stomach and my head on his chest.
“This is so beautiful, Ronan.” I lean up and kiss him on the cheek.
“I wanted to have just one day to ourselves before everything begins,” he says, his voice soft and low. “Just one day where we can just be us. No plans, no training, no research.”
“No Seth.”
Ronan laughs. “No Seth. Just us, and these beautiful woods you love.”
“It’s perfect.”
But it isn’t, quite. There’s been something on my mind, something that I haven’t found the courage to say yet, but here, on the first beautiful day of the year, I can’t wait any longer.
