Page 65 of A Court of Bones & Sorrow

Some strikers didn’t belong to one person in particular, those ones were trained to simply travel to one particular location and back again, but most of us had at least a few strikers that we trained ourselves. It took more work, but we could teach them to deliver messages to specific people and not just locations.

I thought about lying about who this one belonged to, but the red tips on this striker’s tail were easily recognizable, and if Draven asked around, someone would tell him.

“Ary’s,” I said and gave the creature a scratch under her chin. She nipped at me with her blunt beak but didn’t break the skin, just a warning. Ary’s favorite striker was such an ornery thing.

I plucked the message from the pocket on the back of her harness, and she immediately took off to fly back home. My eyes skimmed Ary’s neat handwriting, and I worked hard to keep my expression blank.

“Problems?” Draven asked. I was holding the letter at an angle so he couldn’t read it.

“No.” I folded up the paper and slipped it into my pocket. “He was just thanking me for hosting him here earlier this week and inviting me to visit him at House Tepes,” I lied through my teeth.

“Interesting,” he drawled. “Ary doesn’t usually bother with such polite words and invitations.”

“Perhaps he just finds me a delight to be around.” I rose tomy feet and brushed some dried grass and dirt from my deep purple dress, the letter burning a hole in my pocket. I needed to find Vail. Immediately.

“No doubt,” Draven murmured as he plucked a pink wildflower and rolled to his feet until he was standing right in front of me. My breath hitched as he pulled my long braid over my shoulder and wound the stem of the wildflower into it. “Everything about you is delightful. That’s why I’m going to marry you.” He winked before tugging on the end of my braid and leaning in to kiss me on the cheek.

“Still not marrying you,” I said a little too breathlessly to be convincing. Damn it. Damn him. I cleared my throat. “I have some meetings to attend to. See you for dinner tonight, Prince?”

“Of course.” He smiled. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

It tookme a while to find Vail because he wasn’t in any of the training yards. Emil had been the one to tell me Vail was inspecting some tracks that had been found in the woods nearby. Less than five minutes later, I had Zosa saddled up and was racing out of House Harker to find him, Emil’s bay gelding hot on my heels.

Zosa nimbly leapt over fallen trees as we turned down one of the lesser-used trails that had never been cleared away after some of the winter storms. It didn’t take long for me to spot the bright chestnut mare tied to a tree.

I jumped off Zosa and looped her reins around the saddle, loose enough that she could nibble on grass but wouldn’t get tangled up in them, trusting her not to go far, then set off to where Vail was.

Emil was at my side a second later, sending me a curious look. When he kept staring, I glanced at him. “What?”

“I didn’t tell you where Vail was,” he said slowly. “Only that he was in the forests outside the House, but you seemed to know exactly where to go . . .”

I stopped dead in my tracks. He was right. I’d been so caught up on getting to Vail that I hadn’t thought about it, but I’d been growing more and more desperate as I’d searched the House for him. Then Emil had told me he was in the woods and . . . I rested a hand against my chest.

A pull. I’d felt a pull and had just naturally followed it. This had happened before when we’d found the body outside one of the outposts that had been attacked, but I’d assumed that had been because of the blood magic involved and I was just more sensitive to that kind of thing because I’d experimented with it so much over the years.

I rubbed my chest as the pull intensified the more I focused on it. This . . . wasn’t normal. I’d never read about anything like this in all my time at Drudonia.

“Okaaay.” I drew out the word and dropped my hand from my chest. “We’re going to add this to the ‘Weird Shit We Need to Figure Out Once We’re Not in Danger of Dying’ list.”

It probably said a lot about my life that strange, unexplainable magic happening in my own freaking body was far down on the list of mysteries I needed to solve. But here we were.

Emil grunted, and we started walking again. He let me take the lead since, apparently, I could magically find Vail now. “Kind of a long name, but I suppose it’s accurate.” His gaze cut my way again before focusing on the woods around us. “You gonna tell Vail?”

“Depends,” I said lightly. “You gonna rat me out if I don’t?”

Emil sighed. “I’m getting too old for this. Maybe I should listen to Adrienne and retire.”

“Probably.” I snorted.

“I’ll leave it up to you to tell him,” he said. “Unlesssomething changes and I think it becomes important for him to know.”

“Fair enough.”

“So . . . are you going to tell him?”

“Tell me what?”

I jumped two feet into the air when Vail slid out from between two trees. His dark brown hair was pulled back into a bun, but pieces of it had slipped free and were plastered to his sweat-slicked skin. The light beige shirt he wore clung to his body, and for a second, my eyes snagged where he’d unlaced the top, giving me a good view of his chest.

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