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Amelia rushed to meet her.
Dream world or not, Tessa was real enough, warm and so much firmer than Amelia remembered, when Amelia clasped her in a tight hug and felt the new smoothness of muscle in her sister’s arms and back.
“What’s this?” Amelia pushed her back and squeezed her arms. “Have you beenexercising?”
Tessa’s smile was so wide it looked like it must hurt. She giggled, and blushed, the sunburn going nearly as crimson as her dressing gown. “Well, yes. I’ve been training, some. Náli’s teaching Oliver how to sword fight best while being – well,slight, we’ll say. And Estrid’s been helping me, too, with bow and blade. And then there’s all the riding–”
So many words that Amelia was struggling to rectify with her sister, but a spiel interrupted by a sound that Amelia knew right away: the cry of a drake.
Amelia peered around Tessa and saw a pearly-white drake with blue eyes. Slightly smaller than Alpha’s females, but similarly formed, all smooth scales, elegant neck, and whiplike, spade-tipped tail. She was saddled, as Alpha was, and the chains on her bridle jangled as she shook her head, and then lowered it, snorting in defensive uncertainty.
Tessa glanced over her shoulder, and called, “It’s all right, girl.” To Amelia: “This is Alfie.” Her voice was proud, brimming with affection. And Alfie, in turn, was very worried about her mistress, stalking forward with her head low, and wings half-spread, fussing in a series of little growls and clicks and inquiring noises.
Belatedly, Amelia wondered if the two drakes might clash. She whipped around to see that Alpha was sitting up on his haunches, head cocked, gaze riveted on the white female…but posture otherwise nonthreatening. He felt superior, here, rather than worried.
Friend, she thought, firmly.Sister.
“This is Alpha,” Amelia said, stepping in front of him, and stroking his muzzle when he leaned down to blow warm air across her face. “And he’s going to be agood boy, isn’t that right?”
A forceful exhale blew her hair back, but he sent acquiescence through their bond.
When Amelia turned back, Tessa was cradling Alfie’s head, and stroking her behind her horns. The drake’s wings had folded, thankfully, though she still gazed at Alpha with open skepticism.
“This is only my second time coming here intentionally,” Tessa said, with the air of an embarrassed confession. “I didn’t expect to see anyone – and certainly not you! But what a happy accident.” She frowned at her drake. “I’d hoped our drakes might get along, when we finally meet again in person.”
“They will,” Amelia said, though she had no idea how the females would react to the cold-drakes. Alpha was very much, well, an alpha, self-assured and confident, and facing only a lone female now, besides. Who could predict what they’d think when all eight of them were together, family versus family, subspecies against subspecies? Most worryingly: male against male, between Alpha and Percy. But reassuring Tessa of uncertain outcomes was an old, hard-to-break habit.
“But what do you mean by ‘here’? What is this place? And are we really here together? Or am I imagining you?”
Tessa’s face lit up. “It’s real! Náli calls it ‘the Between.’ Apparently, it’s the realm of the dead.”
“Realm ofthe dead?”
Alfie settled down, lying upright with legs folded beneath her, like a horse. Tessa gave her one last pat, then moved away and beckoned for Amelia to follow, until they were equidistant between the two drakes. She settled down cross-legged in the grass, heedless of the beaded edge of her dressing gown, and patted the place beside her.
“Here, sit. I can tell you all about it. Or.” She rolled her eyes. “What Náli thinks I’m ‘fit to understand.’”
Amelia sat. “He sounds like a right wanker, this Náli.”
“He is,” Tessa said, and Amelia bit back a snort, because the Tessa she’d known pre-journey, pre-North, pre-wedding would have acted scandalized and protested calling anyone such a thing. “But that’s mostly a façade, I think,” she said, “and he’s not so bad once you get beneath it. According to him, this is technically the place where dead who haven’t crossed fully beyond the veil linger…”
Tessa talked, and Amelia listened, and it became quickly apparent that, though Tessa insisted Oliver knew much more than she did, that she still had much to learn, Amelia wasleaguesbehind when it came to magical understanding.
“But we’re not dead, and so we can’t see the dead who linger here,” Amelia said, once Tessa had worked through her explanation.
“That’s Náli’s theory, at least. He can see the dead – or could. Most have moved on, he said, since the emperor appeared.” Tessa rubbed at her arms, as if to chase away a chill, and peered up at the sky. “Not even Náli knows everything.” She looked back at Amelia, expression gone unusually grave. “That’s the thing that frightens me about magic: we can’t know exactly how it works, or how it might be used against us. Even what we ourselves are capable of.” She shook her head. “I never would have believed that I could do something likemagican object, the way we did with Ragnar’s torq.”
A vision of matched pairs of blue eyes reared up to the forefront of Amelia’s mind, a sharp grin, a stern frown, and she resisted the urge to chafe her own arms, and rub away the goosebumps that had sprung to life there. “Speaking of Ragnar…”
Tessa whipped toward her, eyes getting big. “Have they reached you? Have you met them?”
“Yes, and yes.”
Tessa’s eyes got somehow bigger. “Oh! Are they well? How is Leif? Is he injured? Oh, Erik and Rune will be so relieved to hear that he’s found you. They’ve worried terribly over him, and so have I, of course, and Oliver as well. I shall have to send a falcon back to Aeres to inform Revna – that’s Leif’s mother, my mother-in-law, actually, and–”
“Tessa.”
Tessa stopped talking, and her brows drew together. “What? What is it?”
