Page 114 of Kissed By the Gods
With a flourish, she extends her wing again, and light catches on her feathers, scattering brilliant colors across the snow and ice. Her emotions pulse into me—eager, insistent.Let’s go.
“Alright,” I mutter.
I cinch my scythe tightly to my back and secure my pack. My hands won’t stop trembling. I pretend it’s from the cold.
I take a breath and step toward her, slower this time. Stalling.
She’s smaller than Einarr, but she’s still huge. She’s more than twice my height from her hooves to head. I try to spread my hands out on her back, bracing against her as I pull myself up, but I can’t quite get the leverage to jump. Instead, I wrap a hand in her mane and give a testing little tug, making sure I’m not hurting her.
She blows air through her nostrils, and I swear she rolls her eyes at me. I fist my hand in her mane and use it to swing myself up, landing on her back with far less grace than I wouldlike, pitching forward so hard I slam my head into her neck and knock the wind from my lungs.
But she doesn’t notice, because she’s already sprinting through the little canyon, rushing into the wind. I wrap my arms around her neck with a little shriek and dig my knees into her body to stay upright, and then we’re gliding up and over Elandors Veil. The temple at the base of the mountain looks puny and insignificant from here. Just yesterday, I’d never seen anything more impressive. But this … Nothing is more perfect than this.
Her powerful body is rippling beneath mine. Her feathers rustle with the sound of a thousand winds, and each beat of her wings sends a vibration through my body. I’m sitting on top of a living storm. As we glide through the air, my fear turns to awe and then settles into something like coming home.
This must be how it feels to be a god.
I let her set our course, trusting her instincts far more than my own. The horizon stretches out endlessly. We bank hard. The horizon spins. My arms are shaking, fingers dug deep into her mane as she carves through the air like a blade. I can feel her reading the currents, adjusting pitch and angle with fluid, instinctive grace.
We’re flying higher and higher still, but we’re not headed in the direction of the Synod. I lean closer to her ears, shouting to be heard over the wind and the furious beat of her wings.
“We need to go that way,” I say, pointing my finger toward the northwest. She ignores me, and continues along her distinctly northeast heading.
I think about pushing, about nudging her in the right direction.
But today is for her. Tomorrow, we’ll fly back to the Synod. To politics and subterfuge; to training and war; to expectations and others.
But not today.
She swoops down, and with a shriek I latch my arms around her neck and squeeze my thighs into her belly, before she lowers into a full dive toward the earth, powerful wings beating into the air and driving us down, down, down. The ground rushes up at us, and I scream again, but it’s not one filled with fear.
This isfun. She pumps her wings and we climb again, so high I think I could reach the sun.
She folds her wings in suddenly, and we drop. The wind shreds past me. I open my mouth to scream again—but no sound comes out. I have no breath; I can’t even move my lips. I cling to her as we dive. We’re falling so fast the pressure makes my ears pop and my bones vibrate.
Then she spins.
The world corkscrews around us. My lungs flatten until I think they might break from the pressure. Her wings angle, and she levels out above the tree line, skimming the tops of pine trees so fast the wind from our wake snaps trunks and sends younger trees rebounding in our aftermath, snow from the branches flinging up into the air.
With my breath back, I throw my head back and laugh.
She whinnies, a wild sound full of delight, and rockets back upward—an explosion of force that sends the earth dropping away until it is nothing but a patchwork quilt of greens and whites and browns, with rivers sparkling like they’re blue threads. The air thins. The cold sharpens. I can taste the sky, clean and vast and terrifying.
She sends me a flash—an intention, maybe—and I squeeze my legs tighter against her belly as she dips into a full body roll that continues in a circle, creating a corkscrew-like path. She rolls again, a perfect loop that drags every organ in my body sideways. I squeeze my thighs tighter, my entire body screaming under the force of the pressure trying to crush me.
My vision tunnels. My head throbs. But I don’t close my eyes—even with the wind trying to rip me off her back.
We level out.
I suck in breath like I’m breaking the surface of deep water.
“We’re gonna need to practice that again!” I yell into the wind, half laughing, half wheezing.
She answers with a hard bank and does it again.
And again.
Each time my body feels like it is shutting down under the pressure. By the end, exhaustion is tugging at my eyes and the muscles in my neck are aching, but I’ve at least gained the ability to turn my head left and right. I’m able to keep my eyes open.
