Page 10 of Ties of Death

I shake my head of my burgeoning sympathy, instead reminding myself of all the ways this king betrayed everything he used to be to me and letting that fuel my anger. “So, this is just who you are now. You need something and instead of going about it like a sane person, you kill anyone in your way.” Daenn flinches, leaning away from me, and the weaker, softer part of me wins out, but only a little. “Maybe it started with your magic, Daenn, but you embraced it. You killed Tolomon to get to me. You claim me like a trophy. You’re nothing but a cold-blooded killer now.”

It hurts watching the brief moment of soft desperation erase from his face, leaving only the cold unfeeling king behind, but I won’t take back my words. Someone needed to say it. Someone needed to call him on this depravity, and it seems everyone else in the clan has either lost their fool minds along with him, or they’re too scared of him to do so.

So I only tilt my chin and stare him down as he leans back in. He’s angry now, eyes sparking as he closes the distance between us. “If that’s what you want to believe of me, so be it. It doesn’t change that you’re my wife now. You can hate me. I’m not doing this for me. You will stay with the clan—forthe clan.”

And then he leaves me standing in the ceremony hall. All alone for the time being, but bound as effectively as if my chains were real, because I’ve just married the infamous tyrant gryphon king.

7

Instant of Triumph

When I open the door to the ceremony hall, Eskil waits outside with Kettil. Daenn is nowhere to be found.

Good riddance.

“We’re to escort you back to your room,” Eskil says bluntly.

“I don’t want to go back to my room,” I snap back. “I want to leave.”

He arches a single eyebrow. “You’ve decided to lump the whole clan in with your irrational hatred of Daenn, then, I see.”

I want to hiss at him like a cat, maybe claw his eyes out for good measure.

“Irrational?Irrational!? Eskil Achton, you did not just refer to my feelings toward the monster my childhood friend has turned into as ‘irrational.’ He—” My voice breaks, but I’m not ready to admit to either of them what exactly has my heart so bruised, so I reach for the more obvious offense. “He killed my husband.” The word is bitter. I’m doomed for it to be nothing but a curse in my life—first with Tolomon, now with Daenn.

Eskil’s expression softens. “And you act like he took some sort of pleasure in that.”

I shake my head, too weary from the day’s events to have this argument. I can believe Daenn didn’t take a sadisticpleasure in what he did, but he still ran roughshod over me in his grim determination to fix his problem.

Kettil clears his throat and shifts with the awkwardness that has always been a second skin to him. “Are you ready to go back to your room, Emana?”

I grimace. I don’t want to be cooped up right now. “No. Can I visit the eyries?” Kettil and Eskil exchange a look, and I can already see the refusal mounting on their lips. “I’m not going to try to run. I meant the hatchlings’ eyries, not the riders’ gryphons’.”

They share another look. Eskil nods slowly. “There are a few gryphlings, yes. But we need to take you to your room after that.”

I bite back a retort. I don’t want to go back to my room like a prisoner, but I’m going to get to go to the eyries despite their reservations. I don’t want to annoy them into rescinding the agreement.

We make our way through the halls, heading from the more formal occasion caverns toward the common areas. The clan lives in a natural cave system that we adapted for our own uses generations ago. The lower parts of the walls are smoothed, but the ceilings are irregular, smooth only when our ancestors had to make a tunnel taller; the bigger tunnels have ceilings that dip and curve as only unhewn stone can.

The lights are a mixture of torches and, in the deeper areas with less ventilation, luminescent stones, mined from deep in the mountain and left in cycles to soak up sunlight.

People move to and fro with practiced efficiency: clansfolk hurrying through the market for food and supplies, craftsmen delivering their finished tools or artworks. Children skitter underfoot and dart between adults as they play. It’s the same bustle I saw in the lowland cities I visited; it’s just mostlyconducted in enormous caverns or open-air caves instead of under the open sky. People are people no matter their home.

But here it has the flavor of coziness and simplicity I lived and breathed most of my life. The clothes are familiar, and the way my clan carves every piece of wood they use, the way we favor a mixture of lighter and earthy colors with the splash of deep red or sapphire blue for accents.

The clan is home, and despite the circumstances that brought me here, I can’t help but savor it as we move through the market in the direction of eyries.

Idon’tsavor the eyes I draw, though. So many people stop and stare, muttering to each other as they take me in with my gryphon warrior guard detail. Many I recognize.

There’s Britta, the master weaver’s daughter—though I suppose now she mightbethe master weaver. The grizzled Ahlstrom twins, still working together to deliver wood throughout the caverns for the fires. So many faces, so many histories I haven’t thought about in years.

But none approach me, and really, I have no energy to make awkward I-haven’t-seen-you-in-nearly-a-decade chatter, so I avoid eye contact and keep my steps directed toward my goal.

I exhale in relief when we reach the eyries. Eskil steps around me to go first, and I let him without protest; it’s been a long time since I’ve visited the eyries—besides my first night back, but I was asleep for that, so it hardly counts—and it’s never wise to intrude on gryphons who don’t know and trust you. They’ll probably ignore us with him in the lead.

The eyries are an open-air cavern, one with an entrance that is a sheer drop-off the side of the mountain. The area closest to the entrance is where training and preparations for flights happen, and the rest is a series ofsmaller nests. The bonded gryphons—those who each have a specific warrior they fly with—have theirs first, then the unbonded adults, the adolescents, and at the very end, in the safest corners of the cavern where there are smaller caves to tuck them away from the noise and hum of the greater cavern, the gryphlings stay with their mothers.

This is where Eskil leads me, but my feet know the way, because this was always my favorite part of the eyries as a child. I’d visit all the time, often with Daenn, but many times alone—this is where I came when he had obligations I wasn’t a part of.

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