Page 133 of By the Orchid and the Owl
But I could feel their terror, buzzing in front of me and behind me like swarms of hidden wasps. They’d all known this day would come, but they hadn’t expected it to happenbeforetheir Final Tests. Right now.
I thought I was going to faint from lack of breath; I couldn’t get in a good lungful. It was one huge, painful thing to have Coen torn from me, disentangled from my every attempt to hold him close… but it was another, smaller hurt to also have to say goodbye to his friends. Terrin. Garvis. Sasha. Sylvie.
Would I ever see any of them again?
Right as we got to the cave of gemstones, both Coen and Garvis stopped.
And clutched their own scalps.
“What is it?” I asked immediately, grabbing Coen’s wrists.
“She’s found out,” he rasped. “I don’t know how, but she knows we’ve escaped. And—”
He didn’t even have to finish the sentence. The next moment, something happened beneath our feet: a kind of swaying shudder that made the ground buck.
“Terrin?” Sasha asked sharply.
“Wasn’t me. That wasn’t even Element Wielder magic, from what I could tell.”
Terrin’s ball of light popped into ashes, and he slammed a hand downward, steadying the cave floor. But everything else outside the cave still seemed to shudder and shake, if the wavering motion of colors through the waterfall was any indication, and when Terrin swept away the cascade of raging water, we saw…
“By the lockpick and the lyre,” Sylvie whimpered.
The moon looked like a marble stuck haphazardly in the sky—a marble that was cracking down the middle as Dionysia’s shield began to… change.
Cracks lashed down its surface like lightning. The surface itself, usually nearly invisible, grew foggy and opaque, like the same milky residue of the Uninhabitable Zone had slithered over the entire world. And tendrils of that milkiness were lashing out, fingers of fog striking and curling and snatching in every direction, as if desperate to catch whoever went through.
The dome… it wasalive.
There was no other explanation. The dome was alive, and it answered to Dyonisia just like everything on this damned island answered to her, and I burrowed my fingernails deeper into Coen’s wrists as if I could get him to stay away from that toxic horror of misty fingers and claws just by holding on to him tighter.
“You can’t go through that.”
“We have to go through that,” Coen said, meeting my eyes. “And right now. Before it gets worse.” He flicked them toward the twins. “Sasha? Sylvie?”
They seemed to understand his plea, because within moments, my feet had lifted off the ground, and I felt their Summoning energy fling me off the edge of the cliff.
It was like falling with ropes tied to each of my limbs. Right before we hit the rocky ground so far beneath us, the descension slowed, and the twins yanked us all—as well as themselves—to a halt before we could crumple to our knees.
“Transport, Terrin,” Coen said, more panicked than before as the dome swirled and broke and lashed harder than ever. “Find us some transport.”
Terrin peered out at the brewing sea, then closed his eyes in concentration.
Within seconds, a ferocious current of water broke through the shield and shot toward us, hurling an oversized boat our way, swinging with ropes and sails.Terrin had it plunge past the breakers and come to a halt right within the shoreline of low-tide, where it bobbed in wait, looking so much like a larger version of that polished wooden boat in Coen’s room when we had both exploded with shards of the moon.
Except whereasthatboat had brought us together, this one would be pulling us apart.
And suddenly, I was angry at this vessel for even existing. Where had it come from? The faeries? Did they just have uninhabited boats bobbing around in case Coen and the others ever needed them?
There would be no time for those questions. There would be no time for anything anymore.
“I—”
I didn’t know how to possibly watch them leave. I didn’t know how to say goodbye. That ice hadn’t shattered or melted, but it was splintering off now, stabbing me from the inside-out.
“Rayna.” Coen gripped either side of my face, his thumbs stroking beneath my chin. “You know what I have to do.”
“No.” I backed away from him.Pushedaway from him. “No. Don’t. You said you were trying to keep people safe without having to steal their memories.”
