Page 50 of The Shadow Wand

Who doesn’t understand the full horror of the West.

Who never can.

“Stay in our division, Asrai’il,” Fyordin says, and Tierney snaps her gaze to his, astonished by his newly compassionate tone. His deep-river eyes are searching and dark as the Vo’s depths in this dim light, the metallic blue hoops in his ears catching glints of the terrace’s runic light.

“So now I’m‘Asrai’il’ again?” Tierney bites out, her voice fracturing as she roughly wipes away her tears.

“You always will be,” Fyordin says, and this time there’s unmistakable apology in his eyes.

She tightens every muscle and manages to pull the storm cloud in, wrestling control of her fitful power.

Barely.

Then she looks back at Fyordin.

“The Wyvernguard has my fealty,” she says to him in Asrai with a ferocious sincerity. “And the Asrai do, as well. No matter what. Even if you despise me for speaking my own mind.”

“I don’t despise you.” He takes a step toward her, a hard current of his water power breaking free to course around her. “Stay in our division,Tierney Asrai’ir. I want to help you gain full mastery over your Fae power. And train you to channel it through runic weaponry.”

A blaze of defiance courses through Tierney as she fixes him with a mutinous glare. “Trystan Gardner also has the full weight of my support.”

Fyordin’s water magic gives a hard, angry surge with an intensity to rival her own. “Gardnerians have no place here in the Eastern Realm,” he declares, impassioned and dauntingly entrenched.

Tierney’s face twists into a deeper scowl as the Vo’s cool breeze rustles her hair and caresses her neck.

An inexplicable longing to be back with her odd circle of friends from Verpax University washes over Tierney, rapidly gaining force as she stares in the eyes of this implacable Fae. But her friends are scattered, Trystan isolated on the North Twin Island with only Death Fae for companions, the Lupines brought to a Vu Trin military base somewhere in the northeast, Wynter sheltered by the Amaz.

And both Elloren and Yvan, trapped in Gardneria as Vogel’s darkness takes root there and grows.

Dread and frustration roll through Tierney as she shoots Fyordin a hard, exasperated glare.

Stubborn, intractable fool.

But then, she’s struck by a new remembrance, of how she and her friends were able to fight Vogel effectively only when they worked together.

Despite serious differences.

Maybe, Tierney begrudgingly considers as she looks toward the Vo,working together means trying to work with an arrogant, rigid Asrai who is dead wrong about what it’s going to take to go head-to-head with Vogel.

She turns back to Fyordin to find him considering her with equal frustration, both of their water powers contained but storming.

“Fyordin,” she says in the Water Fae tongue, leveling with this stranger-Fae, Asrai to Asrai, “in the west, I was part of a Resistance group that included Trystan Gardner and his brother and sister too. It included hidden Fae. And Amaz. And Lupines. And Icarals. We destroyed a Gardnerian military base. Rescued an unbroken dragon. And got the remaining Lupines out of the Western Realm. But we neededall of usto do these things.”

Fyordin shakes his head and gives her a stubborn look of refute.

“Hear me out,” Tierney presses. “I do not have the luxury of uncomplicated hatred. And you need to let go of it, as well. The Gardnerians separate the world into the Blessed Ones and the Evil Ones. We can’t win this fight if we think that way.”

“We will never see eye to eye about the Gardnerians,” Fyordin insists, and Tierney can feel his internal storm raging. His words cut to the quick, ramping up her worry for her Gardnerian family here. Her worry for Trystan.

A brushstroke of attention shivers through her roiling magic, directional and light as the brush of a dragonfly’s wing. She looks past Fyordin and up.

Viger Maul is sitting on an outcropping of the island’s onyx stone, his gaze set on her, and Tierney is too stirred up to be intimidated by the Death Fae’s sustained attention.

Go ahead, Tierney thinks at him as she holds Viger’s stare.Read my fear. Read all of it.

She turns back to implacable Fyordin, fully aware of Viger’s sustained focus on her as she and Fyordin consider each other, Fae to Fae, neither side ceding any ground.

What would it be like, Tierney wonders as her frustration mounts,to spend time with Viger Maul? To face every last fear, no longer hiding from any of it?

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