She was vaguely aware of someone calling her name, maybe Dara, and of other people moving forward, trying to talk to her. They lay hands on the red dragon and on her bootless foot, and Tamri whipped Watermight at them, forcing them to leap back. Then, feeling something enormous cracking to pieces inside her, she shouted at Rook to carry her away.
5
Tamri and Rook flew for hours. Time no longer mattered. Nothing mattered but the howling, screeching pain in Tamri’s chest. She didn’t understand it. Who would hurt Gramma Teall, an old woman with an illness in her brain and no power to her name? Who would think it so important for her to die that they killed her before they even set fire to the manor, just to make sure the job was done?
Tamri couldn’t think about that. Instead, she pictured Gramma Teall drinking tea, darning clothes, telling stories, scowling and laughing and lecturing and sleeping and blinking away tears. Images cascaded before her, some linked to specific memories and others flashing like lightning, formless and all-consuming.
Tamri’s hands ached from holding on to Rook’s harness, and her trousers chafed against her legs. Her eyes and throat were as dry as a Soolen desert. But she couldn’t stop flying. She couldn’t bear to climb off Rook’s back and set her feet down on the same ground where Gramma Teall lay dead. So they flew and flew, Rook obeying her orders to soar through the wind.
The world passed by below Rook’s scarlet wings. White waves crashed against black rocks. Tamri felt raw, her innards laid bare. Only a core of self-preservation kept her from loosening her grip and joining the waves. But that core was diamond hard and feral. She held on to survival, held on to the life that Gramma Teall would want for her.
Eventually, Tamri sensed Rook’s strength failing. The red dragon had been a thorn in her side often enough, but he’d become a friend too. She didn’t want him to get injured on her account. She directed him to land on a desolate rock pile that barely counted as an island. She climbed off his back and immediately threw up, the sour taste of vomit replacing the dust and ashes in her mouth.
When she’d emptied herself completely, Tamri tottered a few paces up the rocks and sat on an outcropping. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around herself, as if curling into a ball would fend off her grief. She still had a little Watermight left in her blood, but the magic didn’t make her feel strong for once. She tried not to move. She tried not to think. Merely existing was hard enough.
Rook clambered up the rocks to join her on the outcropping. He didn’t drape his feathered wings around her the way Laini would have. He simply hunkered down at her side and watched the sea with her.
Islands sprawled around them, some with harsh cliff faces jutting above the waves, others little more than hills rising from the water, their tops green with new spring life. Late-afternoon sunbeams danced across the surface of the sea, highlighting every swell and eddy.
A gentle breeze blew from the east, caressing Tamri’s tear-stained cheeks and ruffling Rook’s scarlet feathers. They sat like that, dragon and girl, until the sun set behind them and cloaked the sea in darkness.
Tamri wanted to stay on that island forever, but she knew Heath or Dara would come looking for her eventually. They shouldn’t waste a minute they could spend finding the person who had done that horrible thing she could barely put into words.
“Let’s head back,” she said when it was almost too dark to see the dragon at her side. Her voice sounded creaky and not at all like her. “The others will worry.”
Rook huffed out a breath and bumped her shoulder with his snout—probably the most affection he’d ever shown her. He got to his feet gingerly, as if his muscles were strained. Tamri shouldn’t have made him fly for so long. From the shape of the surrounding islands, she had guessed they were on Highcliff Isle, which was farther from Starry Cove than she’d been since all this began.
She strengthened Rook’s wings with the last of her Watermight for the flight home. The silver-white power stretched in glowing lines along his bones, making him look like a dragon skeleton against the night-dark sky.
The Watermight’s absence left Tamri feeling frail and sad. She hated this. She’d been weak for so long, fighting against forces she had no hope of defeating and caring only about survival—hers and Gramma Teall’s. Tamri had gained a little power recently. She had learned and grown and come to care about more people. She had started to see what she could become. But now Gramma Teall was gone, and she’d never felt weaker or more vulnerable than she did at this moment.
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and reached for Rook’s harness, not sure she even had the energy the pull herself onto his back. They had a long flight ahead of them and a harder task to face when they returned to Starry Cove. Sensing her struggle, Rook crouched lower so she didn’t have as far to climb. When she was seated, he trundled to the edge of the cliff, shale breaking off beneath his talons, and spread his silver-lined wings wide. He waited for her orders instead of hurling himself into the night sky—a true sign he felt sorry for her.
Tamri was about to prompt Rook to take flight when she felt it. A nudge along her senses. An electric shiver. A greeting.
She looked to the east. Only a few lights shone in the nearest settlement. The stars were coming out, and there wasn’t a storm cloud in the sky. But the presence was there—the Thunderbird Queen.
Tamri wasn’t supposed to open herself to that sensation even a little bit, but she didn’t care about that right now. She barely cared if she lived until morning.
She let that electric shiver into her mind, which was already so battered and raw that it barely took any effort.
“Hello again, Little Bird.”
“What do you want?” Tamri asked out loud.
Rook craned his neck to look at her and gave a worried snort.
“Not you.” She patted his neck, her attention on that fathomless presence.
“You are upset.” The voice hummed in her brain, at once booming and indistinct.
“Of course I’m upset,” Tamri said. “The most important person in the world to me just died. Why do you care?”
There was a chuckle, and a quiver went through Tamri, as if her skin were coiling up and lifting away from her body.
“I don’t care,” the dragon whispered. “But perhaps I can offer a solution.”
Tamri’s belly gave a sickening lurch. She scanned the dark horizon. “How? Can you heal—”
“I don’t offer miracles.”
“Then what?”
“You’ve tasted it already. A tiny little sip of the power I can offer you.”
“I’m not stupid,” Tamri said. “I know how you work. You tempt people with power and turn them into puppets, just like the thunderbirds.”
“You’re clever, Little Bird. But you are tempted by what I can teach you. You’ve tasted my power, but you haven’t even begun to see its potential. I am the only living being who knows.”
The creature sounded surprisingly articulate. She had been a mad, raging force in the skies above Sharoth. She had been fathomless and inscrutable, a presence that couldn’t be understood, only feared. But she sounded different now, more in control.