Page 49 of Bane of the Wild Hunt

Sage’s chin bumped against my head, catching wisps of my hair on his unshaven stubble, and I could tell he had tilted his head to look at me when he laughed.

“It’s not so bad anymore,” I defended myself.

“I am glad you feel that way. We do a lot of flying.”

I grunted in agreement and rested my hand over his forearm when it banded a little tighter around me.

“You said that your family never actually wanted you to become a rider. I assumed that they must have been so proud of you for joining the Wild Hunt.”

Sage breathed in deep and slow, his chest expanding against my back before I felt him nodding as he exhaled.

“Challenging a rider for their place in the Wild Hunt is a dangerous gamble. It is not only a matter of cultivating the necessary skill to kill the other rider, which took me almost four hundred years, but one must also be accepted. You must be chosen.”

“Chosen,” I repeated, recalling an earlier conversation with him in which he had refused to explain how the rider chose a new body to inhabit. “How?”

“The armour makes us all nearly invulnerable until it chooses another rider to defeat us. That is why Aodhan was so cocky attempting to apprehend you. He believed himself to be infallible, but his armour betrayed him.”

I suddenly recalled my own incredulity after seeing the armour of the riders that looked like a freakish replica of a mortal’s rib cage with too many ribs. I had not understood how I managed to stab my knife so perfectly between all the bands of bone.

“I didn’t get lucky with my aim,” I realized aloud.

“No,” Sage confirmed. “I told you that only the worthy can become riders.”

“Where does it go when you’re not using it? The suit that Aodhan was wearing disappeared after he dispersed.”

“We believe it exists in a sort of in between place from which it is readily accessible at will. It is a similar place in which riders communicate with one another.”

“And you just call it to you mentally?” I verified.

“I do. You probably could too, if you tried. The armour is as bound to you now as Pyrope is,” Sage assured me.

I glanced at the vargr flying along beside us, and she glanced back as if sensing my attention had shifted to her. Rather sheknewit since there was some kind of mind link between us that I didn’t know how to mute yet.

“But how does the armourknow? What makes it want to choose a new rider?”

“That I cannot answer. I don’t know,” Sage admitted with a casual shrug. Evidently unbothered by the fact that his armour was sentient and could, on a complete whim, betray him and get him fucking killed!

“Can anyone challenge me at any time?”

“They certainly could, but they will not have a chance to do so before I cut them down.”

“But would that not be an interference—” I began.

“I don’t care, Summer, you are myanam. If anyone is foolish enough to challenge you, then they challenge me as well. And I will respond as such,” Sage insisted.

I breathed out a quiet sigh of relief and squeezed his forearm in appreciation. I was not ignorant of the fact that I was the newest rider and therefore likely to be perceived as the most vulnerable. Nor was I naive about the reality of being the only female in the group which would also undoubtedly single me out to be challenged.

“The same goes for me,” I assured him with certainty. “Challenging you means challenging me too.”

Because the thought of someone trying to hurt him, trying toreplacehim, made me want to rage. It made my claws itch to extend and my magic roiled dangerously. Which in itself was terrifying to me, caring so much about someone again, but we were far beyond the point at which I could turn back now.

“I am glad we understand one another,” Sage said with a hint of amusement in his voice.

“Why did you defy your parents?” I asked, steering the conversation back to him. It had occurred to me earlier that I didn’t actually know much about his personal life and hisrelationships. He was very set on uncovering my secrets, and I wanted to know more about him too.

“I knew very early in my life that I did not want to be stuck in Aes Suri. I never wanted to be forced to settle down and lead an ordinary, uneventful life. And when Rian came to visit, he would tell such incredible stories about his adventures in other worlds,” Sage told me.

We could not be more different as people. He had been raised in a safe place by a warm, loving family that he’d only ever wanted to escape. While I had been born into a virtual war zone with a father who saw me as a means to further his own power. All I ever craved was everything that Sage had been freely given.

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