There was nothing to do but wait.
The log cabin to which the Ala had given them directions stood alone in the forest, its walls half devoured by crawling ivy. On the roof sat a squat chimney, which, during daylight hours, would look perfectly charming belching up woodsmoke. The cabin was modestly appointed: two bedrooms, a small sitting room with a fireplace, and a kitchen that was empty save for a few pots and pans and a lonely box of baking soda in one of the cabinets. The Ala had possessed the foresight to send them with food, all of it healthy. The cabin provided a most picturesque place to wait.
Echo hated waiting. She hated it more than most things she hated: spiders, the texture of oatmeal, people who dog-eared pages in library books. Waiting rankled her in a way few things did. Especially when she had no option but to do it.
The wards that kept Avalon safe prevented the type of magic they were about to attempt. Locator spells didn’t work on the island for the same reason the in-between was inaccessible. The wards jammed the magical frequencies, and the new cloaking spells the mages had erected under the Ala’s supervision added an even stronger layer of protection. It was like painting a window black. No one could peek in, but you couldn’t look out, either.
“Don’t worry. They’ll be back soon enough,” Rowan said. With a wooden spoon, he pushed around the chopped vegetables frying in the pan he’d scoured for ten minutes before deciding it was fit for use. Rowan knew how to cook precisely one thing – stir-fry – and only because it required little more than throwing a medley of edible items into a pan and applying heat. He took an inordinate amount of pride in this feat.
Echo watched him cook. There was an ease to his posture she hadn’t expected, not after everything he’d been through. Not after being displaced by the in-between like that. Before they’d stepped through the gateway that led them to the cabin, he’d hesitated, but he hadn’t said anything. He’d simply gritted his teeth and plunged into the void, his hand clammy in Echo’s. Now he hummed a jaunty tune, one that Echo only vaguely recognized as a pop song popular last summer, as if nothing had happened.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Echo asked.
“I’m fine,” he said, words clipped. But his shoulders crept slightly upward. He kept his back to her, but she saw the relaxation drain from him, replaced by taut strings of tension. Rowan had been fine, and Echo had gone and ruined it.
Shit.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I just —”
“It’s fine,” Rowan interrupted. “I just don’t want to talk about it.” With a sigh, he glanced at her over his shoulder. “It was scary, and I don’t like being scared.”
“Okay,” Echo said, nodding.
Rowan turned back to the pan, wooden spoon pushing the diced vegetables around. Echo wished he’d start humming again. He didn’t. Seconds ticked by in silence. Then minutes.
“I have a new word for you,” said Rowan. The statement had the air of a peace offering.
Echo accepted it. “Hit me.” “Shash biza’azis hólóní.” Rowan enunciated each syllable with the careful precision that came only from practice.
“That’s a mouthful. What does it mean?”
“It’s the Navajo word for koala. It literally means ‘bear with a pocket.’”
Echo’s fingers ceased their restless drumming on the kitchen table. “I love it.”
And she did. But it was only a temporary balm. The restlessness returned. She got up. Paced. Sat back down. Chewed on a half-broken nail. Got up again.
She really did hate waiting.
“Will you stop pacing like a caged tiger?” Rowan glanced up from the sizzling pan. “You’re driving me nuts.”
“I’m not pacing,” Echo said as she paced. “I’m wallowing in the winter of my discontent.”
Rowan rolled his eyes and went back to the stir-fry.
Dorian and Jasper were off awaiting the arrival of one of Dorian’s contacts within Wyvern’s Keep. Thanks to the mirrored pendant Ivy had delivered to Caius’s network of loyalists inside the keep’s virtually impregnable walls, Dorian and those still loyal to Caius were able to communicate. The mirror was magically tethered to Dorian’s sword. If he wrote something in blood on the steel blade, it would appear on the mirrored side of the pendant within the keep. As far as Echo knew, Dorian and his allies were communicating via a kind of symbolic Morse code or Drakhar runes or something. She hadn’t paid much attention to the details.
“What if Dorian’s contact doesn’t show?” Echo asked. It wasn’t the first hypothetical she had posed in the hour since Jasper and Dorian had departed the cabin, and Rowan answered it with a magnanimity born of patient repetition.
“They’ll show.”
“Yeah, but what if they don’t?”
Rowan’s shoulders rose and fell with an inaudible sigh. He was probably counting to ten. “If they don’t show, then we try again.” Echo opened her mouth to pose another pessimistic question. She was full of them. But Rowan continued. “And if that doesn’t work, then we’ll find another way.”
There was no other way. They had spent weeks racking their brains trying to think of another way, but this was all they had come up with. Echo swallowed her objections and accepted Rowan’s determined optimism.
“You’re being awfully nice about all this,” Echo said.
Rowan placed the wooden spoon on the countertop and wiped his hands on a towel he’d thrown over his shoulder. He looked awfully domestic.
“You’re my friend,” Rowan said.
That was a gross simplification of the mess of their entwined lives, but Echo allowed it.
“And no matter what, I don’t like to see you suffer. I know you feel responsible for what’s happening to Caius, which I think is absurd, but I also know there’s no talking you out of something once you’ve decided to shoulder the blame.”
It wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation. They both let a long moment pass in silence, an acknowledgment of the back-and-forth they now knew by heart. There was no need to repeat it all out loud.
“And,” Rowan said, turning back to his stir-fry, which was sizzling quite happily, “even if I don’t like him, I can admit that Caius is maybe not a completely terrible person and he probably doesn’t deserve whatever his batshit insane sister is doing to him.”
That was the nicest thing Rowan had ever said about Caius.
“Color me shocked,” Echo said.
“I know,” Rowan said. “I’m really growing as a person.”
Before Echo could hit him with a witty retort, the phone in her pocket rang. She dug it out as Rowan stirred the vegetables with a studied fastidiousness. The Ala’s number flashed across the screen. Echo answered with a swipe of her thumb.
“Miss me already?” Echo said.
“I have a task for you.” The Ala’s clipped tones were all business. So not a social call, then.
“Well, hello to you, too,” Echo said. She thumped the heel of her boot on the floor to get Rowan’s attention. He turned the burner down and joined her at the table. Echo put the phone on speaker. “What’s going on?”
“Our scouts have come back to Avalon with some interesting reports. While you wait for your friends to return, I would like you to follow up on the reports. I do know how much you loathe waiting.”
Echo suppressed a sardonic grin. “Define ‘interesting.’”
“Drakharin,” the Ala said. “In Avicen territory.”
Rowan leaned closer to the phone. “What makes this incursion special? We have spies in their territory. That’s always been the case.”
“According to my scouts, these individuals don’t look like spies. Or warriors,” said the Ala. “They appear to be civilians. And aside from avoiding human settlements, they don’t seem to be hiding. It’s almost as though they want to be found.”
Echo frowned. “That’s unusual.”
“Most unusual, yes.” The Ala’s voice went distant and muffled as she spoke to someone nearby. When she returned, her voice sounded harried. “As we are short on numbers, I was hoping you would be able to track these Drakharin down and assess the situation. They might react better to you than to Avicen scouts.”
Echo wiggled her fingers. “Because I’m feather-free?”
“Indeed.” Another short, muffled conversation followed. The Ala sounded impatient, a trait she seldom displayed. “I’ll send you the location. I take it this won’t be a problem.”
The scent of smoke drifted through the kitchen. Rowan jumped up with a bitten-off curse. His vegetables were burning.
“Nope,” Echo said. Rowan was frantically waving the towel in the air to clear the smoke. The stir-fry was a lost cause. Maybe they’d be able to pick something up on the way. “Not a problem at all.”
Echo blinked against the beaming Cairo sun as she peeled off her leather jacket. Normally, she didn’t balk at wearing layers, no matter how inappropriate the climate – the leather jacket suited her aesthetic – but the heat was oppressive. When she said as much to Rowan, he merely shrugged and said, “Could be worse. At least it’s a dry heat.”
At least. Echo still wanted to crawl out of her skin and die.
The Ala had sent Echo a set of coordinates via text message. She had also appended a series of incomprehensibly selected emojis to the end of the text, as was her fashion. Echo didn’t know what an alien head, smiling poop, and a wineglass meant, but ever since she had shown the Ala how to send them, every text from her was punctuated with an increasingly incongruous and baffling array.
Echo had replied with a simple “Thanks. On it,” followed by her own emojis: baby chick hatching from a shell, fire, stars. She thought it made a good enough signature for the firebird.
The Ala’s instructions had led them to a bustling Cairo side street in a neighborhood teeming with tourists and locals alike. Sidewalk stands were packed from top to bottom with vibrant fabrics and hanging lamps in all colors of the rainbow. Echo wondered if they were authentic, or the schlock put out to tempt tourists’ wallets. Probably the latter.
“It’s weird that Drakharin would come this far into a city as populated as Cairo,” Echo said. “They’re usually a lot warier of humans than the Avicen. Centuries of isolation doesn’t exactly enamor them of being in close quarters with a race they don’t like.”
Rowan squinted at the map they’d picked up from one of the vendors. The compass on his phone had stopped working once they’d exited the in-between in Egypt, so they’d had to resort to analog means to track down the Drakharin the Avicen scouts had spotted.
“Maybe they were being followed,” Rowan said. “This is pretty much the last place their own people would think to look for them. Too many humans. That’s why the Avicen stayed in New York even after the population boomed way back in the day. We’re pretty much hiding in a crowd. Maybe they took a page out of the Avicen playbook.” He glanced up from the map to read the street signs. “We should be close.”
They ventured down a series of twisting side streets that led them farther from the tourist area. Stray cats darted between their legs, absolutely fearless in their hunt for their next meal. The windows in this part of town were either dark or boarded up. Graffiti in at least three different languages was splashed along the walls.
“Hey,” Echo said quietly, her voice hardly above a whisper. She came to a stop in front of a freshly painted section of graffiti, written in a language she doubted few in Cairo understood. “This is Drakhar. A protection rune, I think.”
She had seen Caius paint such runes on the interior walls of their warehouse hideout in London. Every few days, he or Dorian would refresh them with a new coat of paint. They’d used white paint, the same color as the wall, so the runes would be less noticeable, but this one stood out. It was in bright green paint, which had dried in rivulets as it dripped down the wall. The angular shape had been drawn in a shaky hand, so unlike the careful, clean lines of Caius’s runes. Whoever had drawn this one had been scared, in a hurry, or both.
A heavy metal door, plastered with peeling signs for events long since past, stood not too far from the rune. Droplets of the same green paint had splashed on the ground, and the doorknob was streaked with faint green smears, as if someone had hastily wiped their hands before using it.
Rowan headed toward the door, but Echo pulled him aside and shook her head. Better for her to go first. Rowan could pass as human to an unsuspecting eye, but Echo was human. For the most part. If there were Drakharin hiding in the building, they might be spooked by the sight of an Avicen barging into their safe house. The scouts had said they didn’t appear to be skilled at combat, but it wouldn’t take more than one frightened lookout with a sharp weapon to start a fight that could potentially end in tragedy.
The door was locked, but Echo made quick work of it with the small lock-picking set she kept tucked in the interior pocket of her leather jacket. She never left home without it. She was just glad the lock wasn’t a dead bolt or something else that would require more advanced tools. The door was ancient, but its hinges had been recently oiled, and it opened without a sound.
Echo entered the building, Rowan close behind her. A naked lightbulb hung from a chain in the middle of the room, casting a weak, flickering glow that didn’t quite reach the shadowy corners. There was nothing in the room save for a rickety table with a broken leg shoved into one corner and a pile of broken wood slats. Near the door was a can of paint. Green, like the rune outside. It was the only thing in the room not covered with a liberal coating of dust.
There was a door in the far wall that led to a staircase. Echo stopped on the landing, straining to hear even the slightest sound. There was none. It was quiet, but not a casual quiet. It was a deliberate quiet. There was a quality to the silence that made her think of mice holding their breath, waiting for the falcon overhead to fly away. The only way to go was down, so that was where Echo and Rowan went.
Their footfalls were loud as they descended, even though Echo tried to keep her tread as light as possible. Whoever was down there would hear them coming. She could only hope that they were the “ask questions first, shoot later” type. She had survived a great many things in the past several months, but she wasn’t sure she would walk away from a slug to the chest. The Drakharin shared the Avicen’s distaste for modern human weaponry, but there was a first time for everything.
At the foot of the stairs was a wooden door emblazoned with the same protective rune as the wall outside. Echo pressed a finger to her lips, gesturing for Rowan to stay silent. He mimed locking his lips closed and then throwing away a key. Nerd.
Echo took up position on one side of the door while Rowan mirrored her on the other side. She crouched low and slowly turned the knob. A shuffling sound came from behind the door, like people scurrying out of the way. Echo pushed the door open and waited for an attack that did not come.
She met Rowan’s eyes. He shrugged. Echo peered around the doorframe. The room was dark, but the smoky scent of candles recently snuffed out wafted through the air. A faint whimper broke the silence.
“Hello?” Echo called out, keeping her voice quiet. “We come in peace.”
Rowan arched a bronze eyebrow at her. She mouthed, What? It seemed as good a thing to say as any. And it was true.
When no reply came, Echo stood. With her hands held up to show that she wasn’t carrying a weapon – a visible weapon, unlike the dagger tucked into her boot or the fire that tingled beneath her skin at the prospect of being used – Echo entered the room. The dim light from the stairwell penetrated only so far, but she could discern a few figures in the darkness.
More scuffling. An intrepid soul broke away from the group to come to the forefront. A female voice said something in Drakhar that lilted upward at the end. The intonation made Echo think it was a question, but she had no idea what the woman had said.
“I’m going to turn on the lights,” Echo said, hoping they could understand her.
The fire inside Echo wanted out. It was easy to call a tiny bit of it forth. Less easy was stopping the flow once it started. Echo snapped her fingers and the candles she had smelled upon entering sprang to life, unnaturally white flames shooting from their wicks before settling into a more conventional tongue of fire.
Startled gasps shivered through the group. There were about a dozen of them, not counting the ones hiding in the back who Echo couldn’t see. Men, women, and children in tattered garb who looked like something out of the eighteenth century. All Drakharin. None of them armed. The one who had come forward was staring at Echo in open mistrust. When Rowan followed Echo into the room, the woman swore and grabbed for an iron poker resting against the wall beside her. A frightened child broke from the group to run toward the woman, throwing her little arms around the woman’s waist.
“Oops,” Rowan said. Echo shot a quick glance behind her. He’d taken off his hat, and in the candlelight his feathers gleamed in all their tawny brilliance. The Drakharin responded to the sight of an Avicen as Echo had thought they might.
“It’s okay,” Echo said softly. “He won’t hurt you. We heard you were here and we thought you might need help.”
It wasn’t entirely the truth – they could have been hostile, for all Echo had known – but their current state made it painfully obvious that they did need help. Desperately. Their clothes were dusty from travel, worn through in places and held together by careful mending. The adults looked gaunt, their cheeks hollowed in a way that spoke of long periods without adequate sustenance. The children didn’t appear to be as malnourished. The elder Drakharin had probably rationed their supplies among themselves, giving the children the lion’s share of food. They went hungry so the little ones could eat. Echo was no stranger to hunger. She knew the feeling of an empty stomach cramping around nothing, and she wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemy.
One of the Drakharin stepped forward, a woman of apparent middle age, though her kind matured like the Avicen. When they reached physical maturity, the aging process slowed considerably, depending on how powerful their personal magic was. At nearly a thousand years old, the Ala didn’t look a day over thirty, but she was easily one of the most powerful beings Echo had ever met. This woman could have been in her midforties, maybe fifties. For all Echo knew, she had seen five centuries in her life, not five decades. A little girl clung to her legs, and though one of the Drakharin men tried to pull her away, she refused to budge, burrowing deeper into the woman’s leg. She peered around the woman’s knee, her eyes as round as saucers. She couldn’t seem to decide whom she found more fascinating: Echo or Rowan. Her gaze bounced between them frantically. A smattering of barely visible scales peppered the bridge of her nose.
“The prince told us to find you,” the woman said. The child huddled even closer to her, hiding her face in the woman’s skirts.
“The prince?” Echo said. Pricks of unease marched down her spine. This was a trap. They’d walked right into a freaking trap. “Tanith?”
The woman shook her head rapidly, her eyes wide and pleading. “No. The true prince,” she said in a rush, tripping over her words. “He said that you would help us.” She eyed Rowan with a wary look. “He said the Avicen were not our true enemy. Not many believed, but we had no choice. The prince” – she shook her head as if dislodging something stuck – “the false prince, his sister … she has gone mad with power. It is not safe for us there. There is nowhere safe for us now.” She lowered her gaze to the floor, then dropped to her knees in a gesture of supplication. Her companions followed suit. “We are at your mercy, Firebird.”
Echo stepped toward her, but stopped when the woman cowered and pushed her child behind her. “Echo. My name is Echo. You don’t have to call me Firebird. And you really don’t have to grovel.” The woman didn’t budge. “Please stand up.” She didn’t. “Pretty please? With a cherry on top?”
The ragged group of Drakharin rose, uneasy, as if they didn’t trust her not to punish them for not showing the appropriate respect. It made Echo wonder just how badly Tanith had been mistreating her own people, to have drilled that level of fear into them.
“Caius told you to find me?” That Echo managed to formulate the question coherently was nothing short of a small miracle. A steady mantra pounded through her mind: He’s alive. He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive.
The woman nodded, though she had flinched at the sound of Caius’s name so casually invoked. Once a Drakharin was elected to the throne of the Dragon Prince, their names were consigned to memory, and eventually forgotten. Their names were shed like the lives they’d lived before, so that all that remained was a person wholly devoted to a life in service of their people. When Echo had asked Caius how the Drakharin referred to Dragon Princes of eras past, he’d laughed and said, “With great difficulty.” They were given titles after their deaths based on significant events during their reigns, but there was little consensus on which events were deemed most worthy of remembrance.
“How is he? Is he okay? What’s Tanith doing to him?” The questions tumbled from Echo faster than the woman could answer them.
“Echo,” Rowan prodded. “What are we going to do about them?” The last word was punctuated with a dismissive tilt of his head toward the ragtag group.
“Right,” Echo said. They couldn’t just leave them there. The next Avicen scouts to find them might not be as cautious as the one who had reported to the Ala. And if humans stumbled upon them … Well, that sentence was best left unfinished. She turned back to the woman, who seemed significantly less cowed by their presence after Echo’s display of concern for the true Dragon Prince. That must have earned her some brownie points. “Does everyone here speak English?”
The woman shook her head.
“Can you translate?”
A nod.
Echo addressed the Drakharin, pausing every now and then to give the woman time to translate. “There’s a safe place we can bring you. There are wards – strong ones – that will protect you. Not even Tanith can get through them.” Echo recalled laying the ward with her strength and feeling her magic seep into the land. “Trust me. I built them myself.”
The Drakharin shared a dubious look, none of them appearing convinced that leaving the relative safety of their hideout with an Avicen and public enemy number one was a grand idea.
“It’s an island,” Echo continued. “With a castle. It’s very nice.”
“Avalon?” Rowan’s voice was flat and disbelieving. He spoke slowly, as if she had just said something very, very stupid. “You can’t seriously mean to suggest we bring them to Avalon. That’s insane. You’re insane.”
Echo grabbed hold of Rowan’s sleeve and dug her nails into his arm as sharply as she could. He scowled and tried to tug his arm free, but she held on.
“Rowan,” Echo said through gritted teeth. “Sidebar.”
She guided him to the far corner of the room. The Drakharin could still see them and they could see the Drakharin, but if she pitched her voice low enough, she might not be overheard.
“Look at them,” said Echo. The Drakharin were a sorry sight, but it was the children who tugged at her heartstrings the strongest. They were so young. Too young for the hardship they faced. And their parents didn’t deserve to see their children suffer while they tried to find a better life for them. “They obviously need help. And think about the little ones, Rowan. They’re just kids. We don’t hurt kids.”
“I’m not suggesting we hurt them,” Rowan said, seemingly horrified that Echo would dare to accuse him of such a thing.
“No, you’re just suggesting we don’t help them, which is pretty much the same thing as hurting them,” Echo said.
Rowan did not appear entirely convinced, but his shoulders had relaxed somewhat, and Echo could tell from the softening of his expression that he needed only the tiniest of nudges to come around. She laid a hand on his bicep. “You know this is the right thing to do.”
He sighed. “I know, I know. It’s just” – he looked back at the Drakharin – “it’s not going to be easy persuading the council to open their doors to the Drakharin. Even refugees.”
“And that’s why you’re going to win their hearts and minds,” Echo said. “People like you. They respect you. They saw how you stepped up after the attack on the Nest, and they trust you and your judgment.” She gave his arm a little squeeze. “They can’t keep carrying on the way they always have. Somebody has to bridge the divide between the Avicen and the Drakharin. They need you to help show them a better way. The best way to fight hatred is with kindness. Be their example.”
Rowan narrowed his eyes at her, but a soft smile played at the corners of his lips. “That’s a mighty fine pep talk.”
Echo gave his arm a little punch. “I learned from the best.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Rowan said, “but what about Caius? And Dorian and Jasper?”
Echo squared her shoulders. “I’ll go back to the cabin and wait for them. You lead these people to safety.” At Rowan’s dubious expression, she added, “Can’t you handle a pack of Drakharin refugees on your own?”
He sighed. She saw the scales tipping within him. He didn’t want to. He really didn’t want to. But he would. Because it was the right thing to do. Because he was good in a way so few people were. After an interminable moment of Echo projecting a psychic Say yes! at him, Rowan rolled his eyes and said, “Yes. Fine. Go enjoy my stir-fry without me. I’ll bring them to New York.”
“I can’t enjoy the stir-fry,” Echo said. “You burned it, remember?”
Rowan shrugged. “So pick up some shawarma on the way back.”
“I will.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” Rowan stuck his tongue out at her.
Echo rolled her eyes and turned back to the Drakharin, a warm smile on her face. “Pack your bags. This nice man here is taking you to Avalon.”