Page 126 of Flame and Sparrow

HopedI had.

But Dravyn’s gaze tracked upward, and his hands stopped their teasing and roaming and came to rest in a strong grip on my hips.

“What was that?” I asked.

He was too focused to answer right away.

A foreboding wind swirled. The trees rattled around us, and Dravyn finally, reluctantly took a step away from me and answered my question. “Foreign company.”

“Marr from other courts, you mean?”

He nodded.

“Should we go back to the palace?”

He considered the question for a long moment, his eyes still watching the little glimmers of sky visible through the thick trees. “Maybe.”

He called Farak over to us, helped me into the saddle as before, and we set off without another word.

We galloped in silence for several minutes. His body wrapped around me in a way that now felt more protective than teasing, pressing close enough that the tension in his muscles seeped into my own.

It scared me.

I was so busy trying to watch the sky and our other surroundings for threats that I didn’t realize, at first, that we seemed to be taking a completely different route than earlier.

“This isn’t the way back to the palace, is it?”

“There’s one more place I wanted to go before we went back.”

He seemed like he was trying to find excuses not to return, which made me even more nervous.

“Should I be concerned?” I asked, jokingly, in an attempt to lighten the mood. “You reallydidintend to smite me, didn’t you? But you’re stealing me away to some even more remote corner of your territory to do it.”

I felt his chest vibrate with a suppressed laugh. “You’ve caught on to me. Nothing gets by you, does it?” He pressed a kiss to my ear with the words, and I shivered.

We raced onward, climbing a steep hill and reaching a relatively flat meadow at the top. Far on the other side of it, across a swaying expanse of flower-dotted grass, I spotted two jagged, crystalline structures rising like miniature mountains toward the sky.

We rode toward them, our pace gradually slowing as we approached.

As we eased into a trot, I tried to think of another joking comment, but my mind was racing with too many questions, wondering about the other courts and all the other trouble that seemed to be building around us.

“You know, most of my kind believe you did steal me away,” I said, wincing as I remembered the uncomfortable conversation I’d shared with Cillian.

“It did look that way, I suppose.”

“And many of them think I’m a fool for willingly offering myself up as a slave to the Marr.”

He stiffened a bit. “The Miratar spirits are not slaves. They have free will, same as you and me.”

“But it’s a hierarchy, correct? The Marr are always more powerful than the lesser divine spirits who serve them.”

I don’t know why I found myself curious about how it all truly worked—though gathering information was never a bad idea, in my opinion.

He shrugged. “The Marr has most of the say in how much power the ascendant in question receives—partly because it requires giving up some of their own power to make the ascension happen. So it’s a much deeper bond than master and slave…more like, the Miratar becomes an extension of them. It’s kind of hard to explain, and it’s not an exact magic.”

I pondered this as we came to a stop. “Does it ever…fail? The intended ascension, I mean.”

He slid off Farak’s back and offered me a hand. “Are you worried something might go wrong because of your elvish blood?”

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