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Five days…
That energy dropped all the way into my fingertips, tingling beneath my nails. What would it feel like to be so free? So untethered, you could reach the highest mountains and glide over the widest oceans, going wherever you pleased? Not for the first time, I harbored something other than contempt for the Ravens.
It was envy.
High-pitched laughter had my attention drift up to the parapet walk. A small boy stood there, red-cheeked and snotty-nosed, clinging to the wooden rail. He whimpered more the harder he braced against those little hands that pushed at his back.
“Don’t be so scared!” the girl behind him shouted, giving a hard shove to his shoulder. “Jump, Olivar! Maybe you’ll shift!”
My throat swelled shut.
Maybe?
My pulse quickened as the boy’s upper body drifted dangerously far over the rail. “If he doesn’t shift, he’ll break ten bones.”
“More like all of them.” Sebian came to a halt beside me. “It’s pretty high.”
I stared at him, flabbergasted, while the boy’s whimpers grew louder, digging a hole into my stomach. “Will you do nothing to stop them?”
A grin came over Sebian’s face. “Guess the rumor that Ravens make uncaring parents never reached you.”
My gaze wandered back up, guts tying into a ball when the group of children giggled and pushed harder. Then, with a half degree shift forward, the boy fell over the rail. He screamed. Gods, he screamed until my heart stopped inside my chest. Why wouldn’t he shift? Why didn’t he—
A burst of shadows wafted up to the parapet, black tendrils weaving together into four small ravens. They flapped their wings at the children’s excited claps and landed to sit on the wooden rail shortly after.
“Finally! Well done, Olivar!” Sebian’s shout pierced my ears before he looked at me, once more carrying a rather smug grin. “You look paler than usual, Galantia. Don’t tell me your heart’s growing soft for us. Your father would be so disappointed.”
My teeth clenched for a moment, because he was absolutely right. “He was scared.”
“It was his first flight.” With a sparkling wink, Sebian placed his hand on the small of my back, gentling me back into a walk. “My father shouldered me one fine Sunday, saying that he was getting tired of dragging me everywhere on foot. Tossed me straight over a cliff. I shifted right before I hit the waves. The instinct to survive is too strong for ourprimalto ignore, no matter how scared some children are of their first conscious shift.”
“He… tossed you over a cliff? Into the sea?” My core turned heavy, weighed down by the resonance of a dozen rules that had framed my childhood. “Sometimes, I snuck outside the walls and spent the afternoon watching the waves at the beach, flapping my arms, pretending to be a seagull that could fly far, far away.”
“Snuck out…” Sebian narrowed his eyes at the ground. “Sweetheart, Tidestone is rightatthe beach.”
His reaction added to that weight in my chest. What a terrible bore I was indeed. Nothing but a coddled little girl who knew nothing about anything and had seen nothing of anything.
I glanced back at how an older Raven girl climbed the ladder up the parapet, joining her friends. One after another, they jumped over the rail. Those who waited their turns all clapped and giggled.
All but one.
The girl who’d tended to my hair the evening of the feast leaned against the battlement. A breeze tugged on those sparse black wisps that hung over the burnt side of her face. The other side looked as though it wanted to melt downward along with the rest.
“Why is that girl just standing there?”
Sebian’s gaze followed my line of sight. “Her name is Tjema. She no longer has her unkindness.”
“Why not? Because she lost heranoa?”
“Ourprimalis the one allowing us to shift. She lost it when your father came through a camp of displaced Ravens that had taken her in,” he said. “His soldiers caught some of her unkindness in a net and set them aflame—made certain their feathers smoldered enough they could no longer escape before they stabbed them. She only survived because herudnas, the ravens holding her human form, weren’t killed.”
My stomach shifted uncomfortably. I thought back on how skittish Tjema had been that day. How I, a Brisden, had caused her visible discomfort. Perhaps even fear was more justified than I’d first thought?
“There has to be more to this story.” Something to smother that guilt surfacing in my core, that empathy I couldn’t afford. “She still had her gift then, I take it. Perhaps she wielded it against my father’s soldiers?”
“Wielded it against them? Doing what, exactly? Suffocate them under shadowcloth?”
So she’d been a weaver. Harmless. “She’s a Raven. Our enemy.”
