Page 29 of Wilds of Wonder
Maybe with one of them gone, I’d get some peace and quiet. Driscoll was the main talker, Leoni only responding out of annoyance or exasperation or sometimes amusement. I could see that they were close, had formed a bond over the events they’d been through. Not that I knew much about those events. By the end of every day we’d all been too hungry, too tired, too cold to do much talking. Well, they’d been too cold. I’d withstood the elements with much more ease than either of them.
Leoni came to an abrupt stop. The wind gusted past us and lifted the hood off her head, snowflakes catching in her hair. “You want to leave?” she asked Driscoll. “After everything we’ve been through, how far we’ve come? You just want to give up?”
“Of course I do! I told you back in the sky court: I’m not a hero, and I don’t want to be.”
Leoni opened her mouth to respond when I caught sight of a familiar black cloak far above and gasped.
Leoni and Driscoll looked at me.
“What?” Driscoll braced his legs, looking around. “Is it a bear? Or a wolf? Because I’m not into furry creatures that want to eat me.”
Leoni raised a brow. “I don’t think anyone is.”
“No.” I pointed at Maverick's form as he scaled the side of the mountain.
“The bone collector,” Driscoll said. “We actually found him.”
Maverick stopped and slowly turned, but surely he couldn’t have heard us from so far above.
“Or he found us,” Leoni murmured.
“Can we use our magic to get his satchel?” Driscoll whispered.
I lifted a hand over my eyes, arching my neck to look up. “He’s too far. But we know we’re on the right path at least.”
Leoni cocked her head. “What is he doing?”
He pulled himself up onto the edge of a plateau.
Before, in his office, he’d stared at me with curiosity, with a kind of awe and wonder. Now, all of that was gone, his gaze hard and cold as he glared down at us.
I wondered what had changed. Maybe me stalking him. Trying to best him. But that was nothing new. This was what we did. I wanted to say something, but without that hood over his head, it was like I no longer knew him. Like he was a completely different person. The truth was I didn’t know what to say.
I snapped my mouth shut as he slowly raised out his hand, and my stomach twisted into a tight knot.
“Is he about to use his magic?” Driscoll asked.
Fire appeared in his hand, and I squinted. “I think so, but we’re so far away, what could he hope to achieve? He can’t hit us from this far out.”
He knelt down and threw the fireball toward the area underneath the plateau. It blazed, melting the snow.
“Is he thirsty or something?” Driscoll asked. “Kind of a weird time to take a drink. But okay, Hot Professor. You do you.”
“He’s up to something.” I tilted my head. “But I don’t know what.”
All we could do was stand there like idiots and wait to see what in the bloody frost he was doing. He threw another fireball at the snow, and once again, it began to melt, softening.
“Tell me, white rabbit.” His voice boomed. “Have you ever heard of the Battle of Sofor?”
I stiffened. So he’d figured out my identity, and by using my nickname, he’d as good as revealed his. Obviously, I’d already suspected all of this, but now that I knew it was 100 percent true, I wasn’t sure how to feel. Relieved that I was on the right track. Confused that this great scholar was the bone collector. For the first time since we started our little game so many years ago, we were laid bare before each other. Officially on an even playing field. It was so odd hearing Maverick's voice, knowing that I could put a face to this mysterious nemesis I’d competed against for so many years.
“The fact that you even asked that is an insult to my intelligence,” I said. “It was a battle that happened in the Old World between frost elementals and fire elementals, right here in the Glacier Mountains.”
Though they’d been called something different thousands of years ago. Maverick probably knew the official name of those who wielded fire and frost magic, but I didn’t.
He threw another fireball at the snow below him. “Look at you. Almost like a real historian.”
We’d always made jabs at each other, but this one hit different. It felt like an actual insult.
