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Helori draped himself over a branch as thick as his waist, and I did likewise a couple of feet away. He pointed toward the ground, and I looked to see a teeming mass of carnivorous ants as big as terriers tearing into a cow-like thing twice the size of an elephant.
As I watched the industry of the giant ants, I found myself grinning; somehow I didn’t think Mzatal would approve of me being in such a potentially perilous position after he’d spent so much energy and effort to retrieve me. My gaze slid to Helori. He wouldn’t let me be in any true danger. I knew that, deep in my essence.
“What’s going to happen to me after we return to Mzatal’s palace?” I asked.
“Mzatal will train you,” he replied, “though I do not know what terms of agreement he would set.”
I mentally recoiled. “I don’t want to be marked,” I said firmly. “I can’t—won’t—do that again.”
“He would not propose marking you now,” Helori reassured me. “It is a lengthy process, and in any case, Katashi currently bears his mark, and having a second is inadvisable. He will, without doubt, require an agreement.”
My brow furrowed. “Idris said something about that. What’s the difference?”
“An agreement is a short term arrangement—perhaps a few months to a few years—with specific terms negotiated,” Helori said. “Marking is long-term, usually lifelong.”
I gave a slow nod. “Okay. I’ll think about that.” I had yet to fully wrap my head around the notion that Mzatal wasn’t my enemy—at least, not at the moment. The idea of willingly working with him still seemed incredibly foreign. I peered at Helori. “Do you trust Mzatal?”
“Do I trust him to always make choices I agree with? No.” Helori said. “Do I trust him to speak the truth to me and follow through on what he says to the best of his ability? Yes.”
I took it all in, considered. Mzatal had certainly followed through on his promise to retrieve me. “I guess I can handle that.”
Helori’s golden-brown eyes met mine. “I have not known him to willfully break an agreement with a summoner,” he told me. “Dealings with other lords, however, have their own rules.”
“Some of those lords are batshit fucked-up.” I snorted. “I mean, did their mamas not hug them or something?”
Helori’s eternal smile faded a little, and he closed his eyes, as if in pain.
I grimaced. “Shit. Sorry. I was trying to make a joke. I guess a bad one.” But my brow furrowed. What nerve had I struck?
He let out his breath in a soft exhalation and looked back over at me. “In jest, you hit very near the mark.”
My confusion increased. “Why are there no female lords? Do they not have mothers?”
“Genetics and arcane levels determined gender,” he said. “Though it was possible for there to be a female of their kind, it did not occur.”
Questions crowded together in my head, but before I could ask any of them he reached and took my hand.
“My beautiful Kara,” he said, clear and ancient eyes on mine, “they do not know their origin. And I ask you to trust me that, for now, it is for the best.”
My cop instincts poked at me to find out more, to continue to question, but I regretfully slapped said instincts down. For now. “All right.” Damn it.
“It cannot remain thus for much longer,” he said, expression briefly shadowed. “There is so much in flux now.” He stood and nimbly leaped over to my branch, then pulled me to my feet. “And, speaking of flux, I am taking you now to the Zadek Kah—a polar atmospheric anomaly that acts as a kaleidoscope-type prism. The play of colored light over the landscape of ice is indescribable.” He grinned. “It is awesome.”
And before I could blink, we were off again.
Since we seemed to flit all over the planet, I lost track of time. Yet it was clear that Helori wasn’t trying to distract me from either the horror I’d endured or my post-traumatic stress. Each place seemed to be a new opportunity for contemplation or conversation or simple self-discovery—like therapy at super-speed.
That second night, we slept curled up in a den of skarl—hyena-like creatures as friendly as house cats. I was dubious at first, especially since the den reeked of skarl-musk, but it turned out that the skarl gave off a comforting vibe that allowed me the best damn sleep I’d ever had in my life. As soon as I woke, though, Helori traveled us to hot springs surrounded by ice and snow to bathe the thick skarl odor away.
After bathing, I lounged on a smooth rock, neck deep in the water. “If you can teleport pretty much anywhere,” I asked, “why did we take the grove to the beach that first day?” That first day—only two days ago, yet it felt like a century.
“It was so it could truly be your choice,” he told me. “You were not ready to tell me what you wanted, but you could tell the grove.”
That made sense. “The climate and terrain here is a lot like Earth,” I said. “The fact that humans can live here so easily, on a completely different world, is kind of mind-boggling.” I gave Helori a questioning look.
He ducked under the water to slick his hair back, then nimbly climbed out of the pool and crouched beside it, apparently impervious or oblivious to the subfreezing temperatures. “Earth and this realm are closely tied in many ways, like sister worlds,” he told me. “A very close family resemblance.”
My lips pursed as I considered that. “Is the geography the same?” I asked. “I mean, is there a North America and Africa and all that? But, you know, with different names.”
