Page 260 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

We all looked around and saw the real damage she’d made to the forest. For miles and miles, you could only see ice and frost, even the murky black mist had turned an ashen grey almost resembling snow.

Mal let out a low whistle. “The dire wolf indeed.”

“Told you,” my sister murmured, eyeing the rest of her long hair on the muddy ground.

“How did you do that?” Kilian asked, narrowing his attention on Mal. “They weren’t dead, brother.”

Mal’s body stilled. “It isn’t only the dead that I can command, Kil. Anything that has any fragment of life in it, I can control. Spirits, animal, flower. Everything that lives—humans too.”

First time I’d seen Kilian so worried. “You’ve never told me.”

“I’ve never told anyone. If I spoke it out loud, I was sure our father would rise from hells to come and have me command a whole army of the living. I don’t want to feel it, brother, the dead don’t feel, but the living do. I don’t just control their emotion, I feel all of their emotions as mine. All of them.”

“I would have never told him,” Kilian said and the pain in his voice broke my heart. “I would have never told anyone, Mal. You know that.”

The younger brother nodded. “I know, Kil.”

The four of us were breathless by the time we reached the lake Astrid shore.

Kilian kneeled before me, inspecting a cut on my leg. Untucking his shirt, he tore the ends of it and tied it around the slash. When he stood at full height, his hands roamed my face. “Did they hurt you anywhere else?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” My fingers went to the little bleeding cut on his cheek. “You?”

He kissed my palm. “Nothing beside that.”

Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved two pairs of ear plugs. After putting a pair on me, he put the other set on his. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear anything.

I shook my head to signal him that I couldn’t hear and he nodded. As long as we couldn’t hear, we were safe from the call of the nereids.

The surface of the water eddied. And beneath the glassy surface something stirred—coming in our direction. Shadows of a long form became more and more visible the closer it came. A fin broke the murked grey surface, curving as the nereid reached us. Her white head peeked out of the water, porcelain skin and violet eyes—the thing was ghastly looking yet the most stunning thing I’d ever seen. She opened her mouth to speak, but something made her seal her lips closed again. She regarded me curiously, crawling on the sandbank to reach us closer. Her white hair was long to the back, covering most of her naked torso while a lilac fishtail managed to cover the rest. Or not? Would that mean it was naked?

She lifted a long lithe finger and then pointed to the grey sand before scribbling something on it.

A hand on my dagger, I kneeled to get a better look and made out a little drawing of wings. She pointed from them to me. “You know?” I didn’t hear myself ask, but the words did leave my lips.

The nereid nodded. She scribbled on the sand again, this time a crescent moon and pointed to Kilian before bowing to us with a hand to her chest.

“Where is the sceptre piece?” I asked, hoping that I’d hit the stroke of luck with this whole guardian thing.

She recoiled a bit, sinking back into the water, distress painting her delicate features. Lifting a finger, she pointed to the middle of the lake.

“Is it in the water?”

She shook her head and made a strange hand gesture cupping her hands together and then opening them repeatedly before pointing to the middle of the lake again.

Kilian kneeled beside me and drew something else on the sand.

The nereid crawled to land again and studied the rune Kilian had drawn. She drew something else back and Kilian’s eyes widened.

This silence was ruining the last strands of my sanity. “What?” I mouthed as exaggeratedly as I could.

“Portal,” he mouthed back. “Isjord.”

Another portal? Would there be another Ybris in there? Turning to the girl, I asked, “Could you take us there?”

She backed away again, looking between the four of us, before heaving what looked like a sigh. She swam further inside the lake and waved a hand, signalling for us to follow her.

The water was frosted, more than the normal type of cold that I was used to. Kilian followed suit and Mal helped Thora in before jumping in himself and splashing the rest of us in the process.