Page 17 of The Legacy of Ophelia
My teeth ground. We’d hovered up there for hours, Jezebel on Zanox and me on Sapphire. The pegasus had been just as stubborn as us, sensing her rider beyond those bounds, but there hadn’t been a way to penetrate the defense.
“Explains why our letters aren’t getting in,” Rina said.
Fuming, I added, “Even the tunnels in the mountains are blocked.”
“You went into the—” Cypherion sighed. As Second, he was trying so hard to hold everything together, and I felt for him, but not enough tonottry to help Ophelia. “You’re going to drive me to the Spirit Realm early.” He scraped a hand down his face, and guilt flashed through me at the circles beneath his eyes. But he’dleftOphelia there. “Can we at least agree not to do that again now that we know we can’t get in?”
“Fine,” I conceded, keeping my face wiped of emotion. It wasn’t technically a lie. No way in the Spirit Realm would I stop trying to get Ophelia back—no way I’d be as powerless as I’d been in the mountains ever again—but I didn’t need to trythattactic.
CK squinted at me, likely sensing some sort of loophole, but he said, “We can reconvene tomorrow.”
Exhausted, I sank into my chair, glaring at the tray in the center of the table that held Mystique ink, parchment, and a mystlight that was fucking useless to me. The seat beside me scraped back, and Mila dropped into it.
“You didn’t see them?” she asked, eyes also on the mystlight.
I shook my head.
Sure, we may have learned something of Echnid’s external defenses, but really, we’d failed. I hadn’t so much as laid an eye on Ophelia or Malakai. That truth draped over me, thick as the dark clouds rolling through the desert skies beyond Xenovia. Unusual apparently, but then again, everything was nowadays.
Mila sighed, and the breath was as weighted as I felt. I looked at her—at the way her hair hung around her face, eyes dull and skin wan. Mila was the only person who’d lost as much as I did in that mountain theater. I thought she was the only one who felt Lyria’s death and Ophelia and Malakai’s abduction quite as poignantly as I did, like every breath was a knife driving through my ribs.
“I’m sorry, Mila,” I said.
She shrugged. “For what?”
“For not protecting them. For not saving Lyria.”
She looked at me, and dammit was that expression haunted by all the ghosts of memories with my sister. We may both have been grieving, but we were mourning different things. Mila had the past, the reminiscing. The solitude their friendship had provided following the first war and through the second.
I was mourning the future. The reparations Lyria and I were striding toward, the gaps we were making up for. All of the things we now would never have.
Both were tremendously fucking awful. Mila’s seemed to compress her as she worked through it, but I forced mine to the back of my mind.
“Erista told me what she said,” Mila whispered. “That she knew it was coming.” Some of Lyria’s last words had been just that. An explanation that it was okay because a Soulguider had hinted her end was near. “A piece of me is so mad she didn’t tell us.”
“Me, too,” I agreed. We were robbed of a proper goodbye, instead getting a bloodstained one at the end of the fae queen’s dagger. “But I think she was making her own peace with it.”
“I think so, too. And she deserved that.”
The confusion that accompanied grief clouded between us, and I hated that there was nothing I could say to make it better. Nothing to absolve either of our pain or speed it along. We’d feel this aching loss for years to come. And how was I supposed to move on when every time I closed my eyes, I saw all thewhat if’splaying out in a future we’d never have?
“I’m glad you killed Ritalia,” Mila said.
“Highlight of the night,” I huffed, happy for the change of conversation.
She laughed softly. “I wish I got to watch it happen.”
Mila didn’t though. And she didn’t get to say goodbye to Lyria. She’d been unconscious the entire time, waking in Meridat’s manor two days later to her life being entirely flipped on its head. She hadn’t left her room for three days, only Soulguiders going in to try to figure out what happened to her in the Spirit River when she was knocked out by a head wound and the magic entered her bloodstream.
“Did the Soulguiders find anything?” I asked.
“Not yet.” She sank into her seat, and every blink, every word, appeared as leaden as I felt. “They’re going to take me into the city with them this week. Try some other methods.”
“Maybe it really didn’t have any lasting effect.”
“Maybe.” Mila shrugged, her haunted stare drifting back to the useless mystlight flickering in the center of the table. “But when have we been that lucky lately?”
Chapter Seven
