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“Ash… ashanthy.” I stumbled around the word, the letters feeling heavy and warm in my mouth. “Bedayn. Grynolin. Peran–Pertanth.”
They were nonsense, utter nonsense. But as I said them, that feeling of starlight on my skin turned into something different. Something powerful.
The heat was wings against falling stars, it was the sensation of wind on a winter morning, catching fire in the clouds. I was sure I was glowing as I looked up from the page to Adain, who knelt by the tub with the Boy's head in her hands, his body floating in water that was no longer red.
It was gold.
A gold brighter and more beautiful than even what Batian could create. A gold that glowed and shimmered over everything. Just as he was glowing.
Just as I was.
Adain stared at me, something close to knowing in her eyes.
As though she was seeing me for the first time, and knew who I was.
Chapter 32
Caspyn
The loss of Ziah’s hero worship did not last more than a few hours.
When he brought me food alongside Lyani a few hours later it had returned. Worse, it appeared to be amplified. His eyes were glossed over as he stuttered and mumbled and lay food before me like I was a lord, even tripping over his own feet as he tried to back out of the tent in a bow. Two days later and that same intensity was still staring at me, this time from across the fire.
After that first night, Lyani had informed me I needed to eat my meals with the rest of them and stop acting like they were going to skin me alive.
So I was sitting with the rest of them, the firelight flickering over smiling faces and turning them ominous. As though they truly would skin me alive. My magic was still nothing more than a warm buzz under my skin as I continued to heal, but it didn’t matter, I would take them all with my bare hands if I had to. Even if I would have to endure Lyani’s wrath at the possibility of injuring myself.
I did not want to be this close to any of them, but it was either this, or I starve.
I would have preferred starvation. Seeing as I was still healing, if I wanted to get out of there and defeat the Queen, I would need sustenance. So, I sat around the fire, digging into a goat stew that was far better than it should have been considering how stale the veggies were.
The last two nights that I had been forced to eat with them had been without incident, no howling, no dancing, barely even a song. Possibly because Ryndle had gone missing. I hadn’t seen him since Ziah had gone to report me as a Fae hunter. He had turned, vanished, and no one seemed to know where he had gone.
Now he was back, and my luck to evade the religious zealots and their oddities had worn out.
“Tonight, I would like to revisit a story from the Book of the Goddess, a story that I believe will give us a clue into our path and the future that waits for all of us,” Ryndle said from where he sat across the massive fire from me, Ziah only two seats away from him. The boy only broke focus with me to agree to hearing the tale with as much fervor as the rest of them. Agreements, excitement, and low cheers circled the group at Ryndle’s suggestion.
I, however, grumbled my disdain before tucking back into my stew. There was no way I was going to be subjected to a sermon from an ancient book that they liked to tattoo themselves with. The quicker I could eat my food, the quicker I could escape back to my tiny tent.
Unfortunately, my grumble of frustration had been far too loud and now everyone in the circle was staring in horror. Each of their golden tattoos sparkled in the firelight as though those winding words were staring at me in abhorrence as well.
“Caspyn, do you have something against a story from our past?” Ryndle asked, as though he hadn’t vanished for two days. But there he sat, smiling as though he was enjoying this.
He probably was.
“A story from our past?” I asked, refusing to look away from the look he was giving me. “I thought you said it was a story from The Book of the Goddess?” It was either that or some other religious fallacy that I was sure they had been reciting each morning. Just thinking of being any closer to those prayer circles than I was forced to be was making my skin crawl.
Ryndle chuckled, his bright eyes seeming almost gold in the fire light as he leaned toward me, the echo of his laugh filtering through his followers.
“Aren’t they one in the same?”
I narrowed my eyes, “Religion and history?”
“Yes.” He nodded, sitting back on the log he had perched himself on. Every time he did that, he always folded his arms over his chest, the words that were inked there shifting and glittering in the light.
For some reason, with the firelight reflecting against the ink, I saw what I had missed before. One word stood out from the others, the lines tangled over one another so that it looked like a design rather than those foreign letters. Now, however, the word was clear.
Ryndle.
