Page 105 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Skylash closed the last distance with brutal wingbeats, her shadow swallowing all three of them. Then lightning poured from her jaws in a torrent, and the sky went white.

CHAPTER 28

JASSYN

Humid air clung to Jassyn under the Everglow Rainforest’s canopy.

The trees breathed around him, and his pulse quickened before he could place why. Sweat slicked his palms. Every inhale came thick with damp soil and the sweet rot of fallen blooms, a familiarity his mind refused to name.

He had no memory of the hours before Elashor sent him to Farine. But his skin did.

Elashor might’ve stripped information from him and erased the memory with it. Or maybe Jassyn had severed himself from whatever happened during those missing hours. With nothing he could recall to contain the fear, his body spread it across every leaf and root.

But Elashor and Farine were dead. That truth should’ve loosened his shoulders, quieted the beastblood pacing through his veins. Yet his body still braced against hands that would never lay claim to him again.

He’d returned deliberately. Letting this place keep a piece of him would be one more theft, and the dead had already taken enough.

He sealed the rift behind him.

Lykor stood a few paces away, scowling up at the dim morning light filtering through the canopy’s crown. His gaze flicked to the closing portal, then to Jassyn. “So you’re an arch elf now?”

“No.” Jassyn exhaled a sound that wanted to be a laugh but fell short. “Though I may have taken certain liberties as First Keeper of the Ember Accord. No one argued when I said I wanted to borrow a portaling talent.”

Lykor grunted.

The wraith had torn those abilities from elves in the capital, and the alliance had only distributed a portion of the plundered power, the rest kept under guard in the caverns.

Jassyn wielded the stolen gift with full awareness of its wrongness. Yet when the rift had unfurled in front of him—air splitting, distance collapsing—his body recognized the freedom it offered.

“I didn’t know whether a memory buried beyond reach could open a portal,” Jassyn said quietly. The location had branded itself into his marrow, too deep for Elashor’s tampering to erase. “But this is where Saundyl’s soldiers brought me.”

“You shouldn’t be the one out here,” Lykor muttered. Every line of him had gone taut with vigilance, his weight angled toward the darkness between the trees.

The familiar argument offered safer ground, and Jassyn let his tone lighten. “So you agree with Kaedryn this time?”

“Yes,” Lykor snapped, turning to face him. “Portaling here was reckless. Elashor’s forces could’ve still been holding this position.”

“But they weren’t.”

The undergrowth beyond Lykor had been crushed into a broad corridor, branches hacked back, the mud churned from thousands of boots. A few glowbugs still drifted above the flattened fronds, their light trembling against the dawn.

Crimson burned in Lykor’s eyes. But he visibly forced the fury down, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “You could’ve sent anyone else to scout this morning.”

“I wanted to do it.” Jassyn heard the anger in his voice only after he’d spoken. “I wasn’t going to stay underground while everyone else risked their lives.” Safety had begun to sound like a gentler word for being kept where others wanted him. “I’ve had enough of cages.”

Lykor’s nostrils flared, but Jassyn didn’t wait for his argument.

“I can find the army without alerting it.”

Jassyn lifted his hand, drawing on Blossom’s gift. A vine unwound from a tree above to settle into his palm.

“Blossom taught me how to see with the earth,” he said as the tendril slid around his wrist. “We’ll trace the force Elashor sent north and learn its numbers and formation.”

Lykor stared at the vine, shadows coiling at his shoulders. “It would be faster to snatch one of the soldiers. Rip the answers out.”

“And reckless.” Jassyn met his stare. “I could’ve brought Vesryn if I wanted to do that.”

Lykor’s upper lip curled, baring the point of one fang. He held Jassyn’s gaze a fraction too long before he tipped his chin toward the vine, urging him on.