Page 29 of Madness of Her Mages

He flashed a wicked grin.I’ll rub them later.

I refrained from rolling my eyes. How could he flirt at a time like this?

“Tell me about your childhood,” Malvolia called to me, her voice dragging against the wind.

Ugh. How could she expect me to talk when I was too focused on not falling? I squeezed her sides tighter. “What about it?”

“Where did you grow up?” she called.

I tensed at that question, wondering what she would do with the information. My mother and father were probably disguised as other people and dwelling in Peloponese by now, so it wasn’t like Malvolia could send more mages to kill them.

I shot Blaze a questioning look as he soared beside us.

He answered with a nod.It’s okay, Shiri.

“In the Periculian Forest,” I finally answered.

“A dangerous place. I’m surprised you weren’t eaten by giants or worse.”

Mortimus’s wings had stopped flapping, quieting the space around us as he soared on a pocket of air. I savored the reprieve from an onslaught of wind that had numbed my nose and lips.“We were to the west of Three Rivers. Giants didn’t come to that part of the forest.”

“At the edge of Caldaria?”

“Yes.”

“Did your mother use her skin shifting magic to hide her features?”

I didn’t like the way she said ‘your mother’ as if the words left a sour taste on her tongue. Even though I sometimes felt like a wilting flower underneath my mother’s scrutinizing gaze, for all her flaws, my mother hadn’t been callous enough to order the death of her pregnant sister.

“Only when strangers approached, but most people knew better than to come into the forest.” For though there were no giants, there were bears and other predators, but what most deterred visitors were stories of ghosts and ghouls. Not that we’d ever seen any, but there were times at night that I thought I felt the presence of spirits.

“What was your home like?”

“It was no more than a shack.” I smiled to myself, remembering with fondness that my sister and I had made up for the lack of material things with our imaginations. How we loved picking berries with our mother or going on short flights from treetop to treetop in our father’s arms. If it hadn’t been for the eternal hunger pangs that plagued us, I’d have thought we had an idyllic childhood. “We spent many winters rationing food.”

“I’m sorry you suffered, but not sorry for my sister. She deserved worse than a life of poverty for her betrayal.”

Her words soured my stomach. Fighting back a verbal rebuke, I gritted my teeth. I wanted to tell my aunt that my mother and father had made many sacrifices to keep their innocent children safe after Malvolia had so cruelly put a priceon our heads. I wanted to call her a weak witch for being so easily fooled by Thorin’s mind-spinning magic.

How ironic that Malvolia had been revered as the queen who had saved her people from the Dark Tide only to fail them by letting an even worse threat sweep up Delfi in a Crimson Tide. How many others besides my father Marius and my mates’ parents had died because Malvolia had succumbed to paranoia? And how many more would die now that Delfi and Caldaria were headed toward war?

I COULDN’T DISMOUNTfrom that terrifying horse fast enough after riding on his back all day. Mortimus. Death bringer. What a fitting name indeed. I ducked under one of the horse’s massive wings, easily twice the size of my mates’ wings, and took Blaze’s outstretched hand. We quickly ran down the side of the hill toward my waiting mates and nieces. Despite my sore thighs and back, I flung myself into Nikkos’s and Drae’s arms, kissing the tops of the girls’ heads while they pressed into me.

Ember wrapped her arms around my neck, whining for me to carry her. Who was I to object to holding this cherub in my arms? How I’d missed my nieces. Malvolia had flown so far ahead of her army, that I’d many times lost sight of Nikkos, Drae, and the girls.

After I set down Ember, I held both of my nieces’ hands and spun a slow circle. We were high up in the mountains, for I had to work hard to draw in each breath in the thin, chilly air. We stood on the sloped side of a mountain, the clearing giving me a small glimpse of the snowy peak above that was mostly shrouded in clouds. I could see nothing below but pointy treetops shrouded by more thick, white clouds.

“What is this place?” I asked Drae, his dark, windswept hair having fallen out of its queue, his nose and cheeks slightly reddened from the cold.

He handed me a bladder of water. “The Sorel Mountains, smaller than the Periculian Mountains but still magnificent.”

“They are,” I said as I took several sips of refreshingly cool water and then handed the bladder to the girls.

The girls didn’t do such a great job sharing, arguing over who got to hold it and who took bigger sips, and Drae had to snatch the bladder back, scolding them when they pouted.

“Keep the girls close,” Malvolia said as she passed by us, one of her lovers from yesternight trailing at her heels like a puppy begging for scraps. “There are bears in these woods.”

I turned sharp eyes on the girls while squeezing them to my sides. “Did you hear that?”

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