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“I don’t bloody understand,” he griped. “I can’t talk to him with my thoughts the way you two can. What does he bloody want me to do?”
“Focus on him, perhaps,” Oliver said, biting his lip to keep from laughing.
“Stop smiling.”
“Aren’t your eyes supposed to be shut?”
“I canhearyou smiling. Concentrate.”
They resettled. The chair creaked as Rune shifted his weight, dutifully silent, though goodness knew what he thought of them behaving like children still in the nursery.
Náli’s voice turned resonant again, a grasp at the proper ambiance. “Think of your drakes. Open your bond with them.”
That was something Oliver could do with little effort, now. The blue, pulsing place in his mind where Percy was linked to him was a familiar, safe place to visit, and he threw the door wide; welcomed in the purring, crooning gladness of a full joining, so often denied to Percy during the long days spent at the palace, and his nights wrapped up with Erik.
Sorry, old boy, he thought, with a twinge of regret.I’ll try to be more present when we’re not flying. But for now…
“Show them where you want to go,” Náli instructed.
Oliver pictured the Between, its hazy sky, and its waving acres and acres of dead-gray grass. Distant smudge of a mountain range, and shadow of a forest.
“You have to be certain,” Náli said, and Oliver wondered if their descriptions of the place would be enough for Tessa. She claimed to have been there, but had she? Or had it been a true dream?
No time to think of that, now. No time to doubt her, either. He felt another twinge of guilt.
A nudging from Percy brought his concentration back around.Focus, focus. He let the Between fill his mind completely, blue around the edges with Percy’s own vision of it. He allowed himself to want to go there, though it frightened him, a little; though there was no way of knowing what they might find there.
The world seemed to tilt around him, and his perspective flipped, suddenly. He’d been thinking of the grass crunching underfoot, the breeze playing with his hair, but then, everything shifted, and he was looking down at the plain from directly overhead. As if surveying a map laid across a table, he could see the tiny clump of forest, and a lake beyond, a black puddle. The ribbon of the river, twisting off toward the mountain range, the peaks naught but angular cones from above like this.
A bright swell of light radiated heat beside him, warmth like a summer day baking on a flat rock by the swimming hole in Drakewell. No, heat like a bonfire, much too close for comfort. He turned his head, and the light blinded him. Percy trilled, the sound inside his head – no, all around him. He couldn’t see, but he could feel the smooth, cool slickness of scales beneath his hands. He sat astride Percy, no saddle, no bridle; hot wind stripped his face, and he knew, then, that this was the doorway. The sun, always wreathed in cloud and dust, was the portal into and out of the Between.
The epiphany came with a chiming sound, a click of puzzle pieces fitting together inside his head, and a ring of bells.
Percy, go, he thought, sure now, and though he couldn’t see, he could feel the heave and flex of Percy’s sinuous body as he turned into the light, and dove through it.
Everything spun. He grabbed at Percy’s spines, fingers skidding along his scales, and pressed his face low to his neck in an attempt to hang on. He couldn’t draw a breath, thought he might be sick, couldn’t bear it another moment–
And then everything leveled off, and Percy’s wings snapped like sails as they opened, and the wind filled them. Oliver swallowed down his gorge, and blinked the tears from his eyes, and they were spiraling slowly down to the ground, where two white shapes awaited them.
Alfie and Valgrind, heads lifting as they shrieked a greeting that Percy returned.
Náli stood beside his drake, gazing up at them, shading his eyes against the sun. The portal? The doorway?
Tessa sat astride Alfie, and lifted a hand to wave at him.
Oliver sat up straighter, stomach still rolling over and over, and grinned. They’d made it through. All of them.
When he landed, he slipped down to the ground, thankful for the jar of impact, because it meant the world was no longer twirling around him. He was still swallowing convulsively, though.
“Is it always like that?” he asked Náli.
“Like being turned inside out, you mean? Yes. Let’s practice it again.”
15
“Refugees arrived in the night,” Edward said, leaning across the table to tap a place on the map. “From this town, here: Merryweather.”
It was happening more and more, civilians trickling into camp. Word was spreading, through their scouting missions, through falcons sent by the soldiers here to their loved ones back home, that the Inglewood manor had become a headquarters for the resistance.
