Ash

But before I found her, I would have to deal with the Sylphs.

My left foot slipped and I scrambled, hanging from one hand for a heartbeat before I got another point of contact on the mountain.

“Keep your mind on what you’re doing or you’re going to fall,” Peta said from above me. She was almost vertical in her stance, head down and tail up, but she didn’t seem bothered by the positioning.

I grimaced. “Yes, Mother.”

Peta was right. There was no room to worry about what Samara would say, or what Lark was doing, or what trouble the Rim faced. There was only my body, the rock and snow beneath me, the next hand- or foothold. That was all I could feel, all I could do with the moment at hand and the slick rock as it tried to dislodge me with every move. Either I paid attention to what was in front of me, or I was going to pay a very steep price.

Finally, my feet touched ground that was not vertical and I took a breath that turned into a deep sigh. As I turned, I got a look at the direction we were headed. From what I could see, there were three mountains between us and the Eyrie. The missing peak that Lark had so recently destroyed had left a gap between two mountains, like the gap between a child’s front teeth.

My positioning of us from the Traveling room was poor at best. This was what I got for using a Traveling band under pressure. A half-assed move.

Hardly something I was going to brag about when I saw Lark . . . I stopped, my line of thoughts skittering off to one side.

“What’s wrong?” Peta butted her head against my thigh. I shook my head.

“Was thinking about telling Lark something, and—”

Her voice cracked. “You remembered that you can’t tell her anything.”

“Yeah.” I breathed the single word out, surprised at how much it hurt.

She pushed her head into my hand. “It’s like when we were looking for her when she was in the oubliette.”

I nodded. That was exactly the problem. “Almost like finding her was a dream, and losing her again, we’ve gone back to the nightmare and had to start all over. Only this time . . . we’re looking for the one who created the nightmare.”

Two years we’d spent looking for Lark, our every waking moment searching out corners of the world that she might have been stuffed into. In the beginning, I’d believed as Peta had that Lark was in an oubliette, and I knew we only had so much time. Weeks at the most, where Lark would survive as she slowly starved to death.

Those first few weeks had passed, and I began to lose hope. Not because I thought we wouldn’t eventually find her, or that I’d give up. No, I never thought that. We’d stopped in at the Rim more than once and I’d tried to find Lark on the globe in the Traveling room, and had picked up nothing. I tried to tell myself it was because she was in an oubliette, and not because she was dead.

I lost hope that we would find her alive. Oubliettes were designed to hold an elemental for a few days as punishment, a week at most if you’d been really naughty. They were the last effort before you were banished.

Most times, the dungeon was used, as it had been in my case. The theory was the same: cut off the prisoner from his or her connection to their element, and they were in essence cut off from the mother goddess and her grace. In those moments of despair, they were to be humbled and as such, come to their senses.

But in Lark’s case . . . the oubliette had been a death sentence, a horrible, torturous way to die, as well as a way to hide her death from the world and from those who loved her. So we’d searched the surrounding area of the four elemental families, we’d gone to the desert, the deep arctic plateaus, and solitary islands that floated on the ocean with no luck.

In the end, it had been Peta’s idea to check the jungle. “It feels right. I cannot make more sense of it than that.”

I’d agreed, thinking that it no longer mattered, not in truth, and we’d gone to the southern jungle. And we’d found Lark, against all the odds, we’d found her.

I shook myself out of my thoughts. They weren’t going to help us now.

“Peta, are you sure you can’t fly? Can you not shift into some great winged beast that could help speed things up?”

She dropped to the snow beside me, sinking up to her belly. “Not last time I checked.” She lifted her nose and scented the air. “What makes you think Cassava is alive? Lark buried her under the mountain. While she is certainly strong, do you truly believe she could survive that?”

I started forward, working my way down the slope. For the moment, it was smooth and easy enough that there would be no vertical drops if I slipped. “I don’t know for sure. But the way Raven talked about her makes me think she’s not dead.”

Peta grabbed me with a paw. “Wait, stop right there. What do you mean the way Raven talked about her?”

I blinked several times and then frowned. “I thought I told you about Raven?”

“You most certainly did not. What about him?”

I opened my mouth to speak and the words stuck in my throat. Almost like I was being kept from saying them. “Shit.” Well, at least I could manage that much.

“Ash, he probably used Spirit on you to keep you from speaking about him to anyone. Goddess knows what else he might have told you to do!”

“Then why could I even say that little bit?” I frowned, struggling to remember when Raven had given me any instructions.

She shrugged, the spotted fur on her shoulders rolling. “Probably because you weren’t really thinking about it. The words just blurted out.”