Page 89 of Mother of Death and Dawn

“Go!” I choked out. We didn’t have time to waste on Caduan’s explanations. Already, I could feel the thread leading me to Tisaanah and Maxantarius beginning to wane, threatening to snap.

Caduan’s mouth closed. Without another word, he pulled me close, one arm locked tight around my waist, the other reaching around me to cradle my hand. “Let it pull you,” he murmured in my ear. “Just feel the direction we need to go, and I will do the rest.”

That wasn’t difficult. I was so focused on it that I barely felt the world dissolve around us.

* * *

Caduan’s bedchamber became a forest.We were waist-deep in water. Caduan’s body was still braced around mine.

The thread of connection felt tighter, stronger.

Closer.

A broken image flashed through my mind—fear, as a horrifying face leaned over me.

“Again!” I commanded, and Caduan obeyed.

With every landing, every clumsy arrival in another nowhere, the presence crept closer.

The familiarity was intoxicating. I had been dropped into an unfamiliar world and an unfamiliar body, but in this moment, in this single shred of connection, my fingertips brushed the soul-deep bond we had once shared.

I had not realized how much I craved it until now.

“Again!” I would gasp with every arrival, and Caduan would take us away again. I lost track of how many times we had leapt when my knees came crashing down on a riverbank.

Perhaps I should have been concerned that this time, Caduan had arrived several feet away from me, wrenched away in transit—but I was not.

“This is getting dangerous, Aefe,” he said, as he crawled back to me.

“Dangerous?” I laughed, a strange, high-pitched noise. How dangerous could it be to go home? Especially now, when I felt so connected to everything—myself, and them. Euphoria devoured any twinges of discomfort. I was Aefe, I was powerful, I had control of my own magic and breath and heartbeat, and I felt all their soulsright there, so close I could taste them.

“No. We are close.” I grabbed Caduan’s hand, forced his arm around me again.

Perhaps I should have been concerned by labor in his breath— but I was not.

“I can get her. I can bring her to you.” I had never been so certain of anything. This was what it was to havepurpose.

Perhaps I should have been concerned that Caduan hesitated—but I was not.

I clung to the thread of connection and let it catapult us through the earth.

We landed.

The world was cold and dark.

Everything that had not concerned me collided at once as I sank into the water, Caduan nowhere to be found.

CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHT

TISAANAH

This thing was a living nightmare, and it was going to kill me.

As its horrific half-rotted face loomed over me, I thought it might be fitting to go this way, because this was what the face of death must look like. Cold light leaked from beneath torn, paper-thin skin, blinding behind those gaping eyes.

The soldiers had tried and failed to control it. Now they just ran.

Those sightless eyes looked only at me, as if it could smell something in me that it desired. I could feel it, too—sour, curdled, tainting the rhythm of magic that ran beneath this world.

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