Page 90 of Trial of Thorns
Caelynn
Iwake to find Revstaring out over the skyline.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I ask, as I sit up.
“Slept fine. Just doing some homework.”
I nod. “Find anything useful?”
“The desert should be there,” he points behind him. “It’s not.”
I nod. We’d said as much last night.
“There’s very little to tell from here. Other than the fact that where we came from appears to be gone, there is nothing else out of place. No signs of shadow creatures in the southwest. No changes in foliage to be noticed. It looks... normal.”
“You’ve kept an eye out for evidence of portals?”
“Yes,” he says. “Nothing that I could make out from here.”
“They won’t want to make it easy on us, I suppose. We’ll have to see what we find as we head south. I’ll wake Tyadin, and we’ll get moving right away. The mountain alone will take two hours to descend, and who knows what kind of distance we’ll need to travel.”
I nod. “Two hours on the mountain. Then a few hours of running should get us twenty to thirty miles of distance easily—assuming a direct and obstacle-free route. Can the dwarf run for hours straight?”
“We managed the first trial fine.”
“Riding a wyvern half the way.” His voice remains low and sharp. Anger rises in my chest, even though it’s not me he’s criticizing. I thought he was getting along with Tyadin.
“It was a tenth of the way. And that tenth, if you recall was entirely underground. In a tunnel that did not exist before Tyadin plowed his way through. And that’s assuming riding a Shadow-vyrn is easy.”
“I have the two weakest allies left in the trials,” he says.
Several defenses and comebacks fly through my mind, foremost that I was strong enough to save his ass, but I bite them back and instead stare at him with disgust.
“With an attitude like that, you will never win the trials,” I say with no acid at all. It’s the simple truth.
If he can’t see beyond his preconceived perceptions of his own allies to understand what’s right in front of his face, he’ll lose every time.
He curls his lips, his eyes dark and full of rage. “Neither will you,” he seethes, hatred clear in his expression. He’s imaging all the ways he’d like to kill me. I can almost see them. His fingers gripping my neck, me gasping for breath. The words he’d like to hear from me—begging for my life.
I swallow back the pain those images cause.
“Watch me.”
