Page 110 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

Ryder said nothing, glaring out at the dark landscape.

“I know you want to,” I told him. “You’re worried about Alastrina. If she did help Talan escape, she could be punished for it. Don’t you want to do whatever you can to help her?”

It was a cruel thing to say, but at that moment I would have said anything to make him agree with me. I wasn’t tired anymore; I felt no despair or anger. Instead I feltready, like a hook in my heart was tugging me out of a mire toward fresh air.

I saw the moment the feeling took hold of him too—his angry brow smoothed out and his tense posture relaxed. A twinge of warning tickled the back of my throat, but I had no Ianto to try and stop me, no Osmund or Una or Freyda with their clear animal minds, so I ignored it.

“All right,” Ryder said, giving me a hard little smile. “Let’s try it.”

I grinned up at him and took his hand, tugging him out of the thicket and into the open air. The wind hit us like a wall, knockingthe breath out of me; cold, hard sheets of rain pelted us, soaking us through in seconds. But I hardly noticed any of that as we trudged across the sodden fields of Derryndell, keeping the line of storms in our sights. We were on a path I had never traveled before, and instead of feeling frightened, I felt giddy, triumphant. At the other end we would find Gareth, and Alastrina, and all the others who’d been taken. They’d been waiting for us; they would be overjoyed. I could see Gareth’s smiling face, Alastrina’s exasperated smirk.Took you long enough.

My teeth started chattering, my body responding to the storm even though my mind couldn’t be bothered to. Soon I lost sight of Derryndell, the trees and the fields and the sky and its clouds all melding into one massive dark shape. I laughed through the awful cold, spun around to smile up at Ryder—and then I saw it, a glimmer in the corner of my eye.

I froze, afraid to blink, afraid to move. If I so much as breathed, I might lose it.

But Ryder had seen it too, and after a moment he seized my hand and ran toward it, laughing, as carefree and silly as a boy. My whole heart ached with love for him; was this what he could have been, had he grown up in a different house with a different father? Was this whatIcould have been? An untroubled girl so happy she could skip through even the fiercest storms and not be afraid?

The glimmer grew brighter and became a shimmering swath of moonlight rippling across the ground. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen; tears pricked my eyes as I took my first steps along it. A soft warmth bloomed through my body. I was skipping across a sparkling lake; I was lighter even than the birds. The whole world was silver and soft, and Ryder’s strong, steady hand was around mine. I’d never been happier.

Then came another flicker of movement at the corner of myeye—this one darker, the dart of a shadow. It pricked the bubble of my happiness, and in that brief instant of clarity, I dug in my heels and pulled Ryder to a stop.

At once the world shifted, as if it had been tilted on its side and was now righting itself. The path of light under our feet faded, leaving us standing in an ordinary field under an extraordinary sky, with a huge, brilliant moon and more stars than I’d ever seen. Underneath it all stood a small but grand city, and gardens, and a palace, all twinkling with as many lights as the sky above held. The air was full of music—pipes and drums and fiddles—and distant singing, distant screams. Some of delight, some of pain.

It was like being dashed with ice-cold water.Gareth. Alastrina.I froze, Ryder’s hand gripped in mine, both our palms clammy with sweat. Only then did we understand what we had done, what had been donetous.

Like Talan, we had taken the moonlight road—or it had takenus. We had found the city of Moonhollow.

The voice of Nerys the harpy hissed through my mind, correcting me.

Mhorghast.

Chapter 23

Terror stole my breath. If I hadn’t stopped us, we might have skipped right on into the city, ripe for the taking.

Immediately I looked behind us for the moonlight road but saw only a quiet forest where there had clearly been some kind of revel. Plates and cups lay scattered across the ground amid discarded clothes and empty shoes. Strings of lights were draped between the branches overhead, magicked to glow pink and violet in their paper cups. The road was gone, and the sky was clear, each twinkling star crystalline. My stomach sank. How were we supposed to find the road home if there were no storms here to guide us toward it? Talan had found it, but he might not have without the help of those beasts and birds, wilded by his mysterious benefactor.

No, by Alastrina. I told myself that three times, saying her name clearly in my mind. Alastrina had helped him. Even if it wasn’t true, the thought was a comfort.

“Farrin…” Ryder’s voice was low and awed, tense with warning. “It’s happened again. You look…”

When I met his gaze, I could see that he wanted to avert his eyes, to shield them as if from a bright light. But he made himself look atme, even gave me a small smile.It’s all right, his expression seemed to say. His gaze was soft.We’ll figure this out.

A laughable sentiment—there was no guarantee of anything here except danger—but I clung to it nevertheless and looked down at myself, holding my breath. Ryder was right. I had changed. My skin glowed from within as if I’d swallowed a star. I touched my hair, which I’d tied back in a hasty braid, eager to get the greasy strands out of my face; I sorely needed a bath. But here, my hair was clean and thick, still bound in its braid but now soft and silken. I pulled the braid around to look at it, and my breath caught to see its lustrous sheen. Kerrish, Gemma’s stylist, would have demanded to know whom I’d hired to achieve such an impressive effect. It was as though candlelight had been combed through the strands, leaving each tress shimmering and golden.

In Edyn, I’d felt tired, worn out, full of heartache and uncertainty. But here—in the city of Mhorghast, hidden somewhere in the Old Country—I felt reborn. All the pain in my heart remained, but my body felt renewed and rested. I could have run ten miles. I could have outrun Ryder.

I smiled a little to think of it, but then a jubilant whoop from somewhere not too distant sent me crashing back to myself. Ryder grabbed his crossbow, nocked an arrow. I whirled, a song in my throat. But we were safe. Whoever or whatever had yelled was elsewhere. We hadn’t yet been spotted.

“What do we do?” Ryder muttered, his crossbow still held at the ready. “The road is gone. Are we stuck here?”

I shook my head, refusing to entertain such a terrible thought. “Talan wasn’t. He found the road back. We can too.”

“Preferably without being spotted by demons and chimaera first,” he said drily. “But we don’t have Talan’s power of disguise.”

“No,” I agreed, “but we have mine.”

The thought had dropped into my mind with perfect clarity. I could sing a firebird quiet, sing a demon down from his pain, sing an audience into a lustful frenzy. So I could do this; I could weave a disguise around us using only the power of my voice.Farrin of the gods.

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