That high up, the crack of thunder echoed off every rock and crevice, and as Nesryn and Sartaq sat pressed against the stone wall beneath the overhang, winds lashing them, she could have sworn even the mountain beneath shuddered. But Kadara held fast against the storm, settling herself in front of them, a veritable wall of white and golden feathers.
Still the icy rain managed to find them, freezing Nesryn down to her bones even with the thick ruk leathers and heavy wool blanket Sartaq insisted she wrap around herself. Her teeth chattered violently enough to make her jaw hurt, and her hands were so numb and raw that she kept them tucked beneath her armpits just to savor any scrap of warmth.
Even before magic had vanished, Nesryn had never longed for magical gifts. And after magic had disappeared, after the decrees banning it and the terrible hunts for those who had once wielded it, Nesryn hadn’t dared to even think about magic. She’d been content to practice her archery, to learn how to wield knives and swords, to master her body until it, too, was a weapon. Magic had failed, she’d told her father and sister whenever they asked. Good steel would not.
Yet sitting on that cliff, whipped by the wind and rain until she couldn’t remember what warmth felt like, Nesryn found herself wishing for a spark of flame in her veins. Or at least for a certain Fire-Bringer to come swaggering around the corner of the cliff to warm them.
But Aelin was far away—unaccounted for, if Hasar’s report was to be believed, which Nesryn did. The true question was whether Aelin and her court’s vanishing were due to some awful play by Morath, or some scheme of the queen herself.
Having seen what Aelin was capable of in Rifthold, the plans she’d laid out and enacted without any of them knowing … Nesryn’s money was on Aelin. The queen would show up when and where she wished—at precisely the moment she intended. Nesryn supposed that was why she liked the queen: there were plans so long in the making that for someone who let the world deem her unchecked and brash, Aelin showed a great deal of restraint in keeping it all hidden.
And as that storm raged around Nesryn and Sartaq, she wondered if Aelin Galathynius might yet have some card up her sleeve that even her court might not know about. She prayed Aelin did. For all their sakes.
But magic had failed before, Nesryn reminded herself as her teeth clacked against each other. And she’d do everything she could to find a way to fight Morath without it.
It was hours before the storm at last lumbered off to terrorize other parts of the world, Sartaq only easing to his feet when Kadara fanned her feathers, shaking off the rain. Spraying them in the process, but Nesryn was in no position to complain, when the ruk had taken the brunt of the storm’s wrath for them.
Of course, it also left the saddle damp, which in turn led to a fairly uncomfortable ride as they soared down the brisk, clean winds from the mountains and into the sprawling grasslands below.
With the delay, they were forced to camp for another night, this time in a copse of trees, again with not so much as an ember to warm them. Nesryn kept her mouth shut about it—the cold that lingered along her bones, the roots that dug into her back through the bedroll, the empty pit in her stomach that fruit and dried meat and day-old bread couldn’t fill.
Sartaq, to his credit, gave her his blankets and asked if she wanted a change of his clothes. But she barely knew him, she realized. This man she’d flown off with, this prince with his sulde and sharp-eyed ruk … He was little more than a stranger.
Such things didn’t usually bother her. Working for the city guard, she’d dealt with strangers every day, in various states of awfulness or panic. The pleasant encounters had been few and far between, particularly in the past six months, when darkness had crept over the city and hunted beneath it.
But with Sartaq … As Nesryn shivered all night long, she wondered if she’d perhaps been a tad hasty in coming here, possible alliance or no.
Her limbs ached and eyes burned when the gray light of dawn trickled through the slim pines. Kadara was already stirring, eager to be off, and Nesryn and Sartaq exchanged less than a half-dozen sentences before they were airborne for the last leg of their journey.
They’d been flying for two hours, the winds growing crisper the farther south they sailed, when Sartaq said in her ear, “That way.” He pointed due east. “Fly half a day in that direction, and you will reach the northern edges of the steppes. The heartland of the Darghan.”
“Do you visit often?”
A pause. He said over the wind, “Kashin holds their loyalty. And—Tumelun.” The way he spoke his sister’s name implied enough. “But the rukhin and the Darghan were once one and the same. We chased down the ruks atop our Muniqi horses, tracked them deep into the Tavan Mountains.” He pointed to the southeast as Kadara shifted, aiming for the towering, jagged mountains that clawed at the sky. They were peppered with forests, some peaks capped in snow. “And when we tamed the ruks, some of the horse-lords chose not to return down to the steppes.”
“Which is why so many of your traditions remain the same,” Nesryn observed, glancing down at the sulde strapped to the saddle. The drop far, far below loomed, dried grasses swaying like a golden sea, carved by thin, twining rivers.
She quickly looked ahead toward the mountains. Though she’d grown mostly accustomed to the idea of how very little stood between her and death atop this ruk, reminding herself of it did nothing to settle her stomach.
“Yes,” Sartaq said. “It is also why our riders often band with the Darghan in war. Our fighting techniques differ, but we mostly know how to work together.”
“A cavalry below and aerial coverage above,” Nesryn said, trying not to sound too interested. “Have you ever gone to war?”
The prince was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Not on the scale of what is being unleashed in your land. Our father ensures that the territories within our empire are well aware that loyalty is rewarded. And resistance is answered with death.”
Ice skittered down her spine.
Sartaq went on, “So I have been dispatched twice now to remind certain restless territories of that cold truth.” A hot breath at her ear. “Then there are the clans within the rukhin themselves. Ancient rivalries that I have learned to navigate, and conflicts I have had to smooth over.”
The hard way, he didn’t add. He instead said, “As a city guard, you must have dealt with such things.”
She snorted at the thought. “I was mostly on patrol—rarely promoted.”
“Considering your skill with a bow, I would have thought you ran the entire place.”
Nesryn smiled. Charmer. Beneath that unfailingly sure exterior, Sartaq was certainly a shameless flirt. But she considered his implied question, though she had known the answer for years. “Adarlan is not as … open as the khaganate when it comes to embracing the role of women in the ranks of its guards or armies,” she admitted. “While I might be skilled, men usually were promoted. So I was left to rot on patrol duty at the walls or busy streets. Handling the underworld or nobility was left for more important guards. And ones whose families hailed from Adarlan.”
Her sister had raged anytime it happened, but Nesryn had known that if she’d exploded to her superiors, if she’d challenged them … They were the sort of men who would tell her to be grateful to be admitted at all, then demand she turn in her sword and uniform. So she’d figured it was better to remain, to be passed over, not for mere pay, but for the fact that there were so few other guards like her, helping those who needed it most. It was for them she stayed on, kept her head down while lesser men were appointed.
“Ah.” Another beat of quiet from the prince. “I’ve heard they were not so welcoming toward people from other lands.”
“To say the least.” The words were colder than she’d meant. And yet that was where her father had insisted they live, thinking it offered some sort of better life. Even when Adarlan had launched its wars to conquer the northern continent, he’d stayed—though her mother had tried to convince him to return to Ant
ica, the city of her heart. Yet for whatever reason, perhaps stubbornness, perhaps defiance against the people who wanted to throw him out again, he’d stayed.
And Nesryn tried not to fault him for it, she really did. Her sister couldn’t understand it—Nesryn’s occasional, simmering anger on the topic. No, Delara had always loved Rifthold, loved the bustle of the city and thrived on winning over its hard-edged people. It had been no surprise that she’d married a man born and raised in the city itself. A true child of Adarlan—that’s what her sister was. At least, of what Adarlan had once been and might one day again become.
Kadara caught a swift wind and coasted along it, the world below passing in a blur as those towering mountains grew closer and closer. Sartaq asked quietly, “Were you ever—”
“It’s not worth talking about.” Not when she could sometimes still feel that rock as it collided with her head, hear the taunts of those children. She swallowed and added, “Your Highness.”
A low laugh. “So my title makes an appearance again.” But he didn’t press further. He only said, “I’m going to beg you not to call me Prince or Your Highness around the other riders.”
“You’re going to beg me, or you are?”
His arms tightened around her in mock warning. “It took me years to get them to stop asking if I needed my silk slippers or servants to brush my hair.” Nesryn chuckled. “Amongst them, I am simply Sartaq.” He added, “Or Captain.”
“Captain?”
“Another thing you and I have in common, it seems.”
Shameless flirt indeed. “But you rule all six ruk clans. They answer to you.”
“They do, and when we all gather, I am Prince. But amongst my family’s own clan, the Eridun, I captain their forces. And obey the word of my hearth-mother.” He squeezed her again for emphasis. “Which I’d advise you doing as well, if you don’t want to be stripped and tied to a cliff face in the middle of a storm.”
“Holy gods.”
“Indeed.”
“Did she—”
“Yes. And as you said, it’s not worth talking about.”
But Nesryn chuckled again, surprised to find her face aching from smiling so often these past few minutes. “I appreciate the warning, Captain.”
The Tavan Mountains turned mammoth, a wall of dark gray stone higher than any she’d ever beheld in her own lands. Not that she’d seen many mountains up close. Her family had rarely ventured inland into Adarlan or its surrounding kingdoms—mostly because her father had been busy, but partially because the rural people in those areas did not take so well to outsiders. Even when their children had been born on Adarlanian soil, with an Adarlanian mother. Sometimes that latter fact had been more enraging to them.
Nesryn only prayed that the rukhin would be more welcoming.
In all her father’s stories, the descriptions of the aeries of the rukhin somehow still did not convey the sheer impossibility of what had been built into the sides and atop three towering peaks clustered in the heart of the Tavan Mountains.
It was no assortment of gir—framed, wide tents—that the horse-clans moved about the steppes. No, the Eridun aerie had been hewn into the stone, houses and halls and chambers, many of them originally nests for the ruks themselves.
Some of those nests remained, usually near a ruk’s rider and their family, so the birds could be summoned at a moment’s notice. Either through a whistled command or by someone climbing the countless rope ladders anchored to the stone itself, allowing movement between various homes and caves—though internal stairwells had also been built within the peaks themselves, mostly for the elderly and children.
The homes themselves each came equipped with a broad cave mouth for the ruks to land, the living quarters hewn behind them. A few windows dotted the rock face here and there, markers of rooms hidden behind the stone, and drawing fresh air to the chambers within.
Not that they needed much more fresh air here. The wind was a river between the three close-knit peaks that housed Sartaq’s hearth-clan, full of ruks of various sizes soaring or flapping or diving. Nesryn tried and failed to count the dwellings carved into the mountains. There had to be hundreds here. And perhaps more lay within the mountains themselves.
“This—this is only one clan?” Her first words in hours.
Kadara soared up the face of the centermost peak. Nesryn slid back in the saddle, Sartaq’s body a warm wall behind her as he leaned forward, guiding her to do so as well. His thighs bracketed hers, the muscles shifting beneath as he kept their balance with the stirrups. “The Eridun is one of the largest—the oldest, if we’re to be believed.”
“You’re not?” The aerie around them had indeed seemed to have existed for untold ages.
“Every clan claims it is the oldest and first among riders.” A laugh that rumbled into her body. “When there is a Gathering, you should only hear the arguments about it. You’re better off to insult a man about his wife than to tell him to his face that your clan is the eldest.”
Nesryn smiled, even as she squeezed her eyes shut against the sheer drop behind her. Kadara aimed, swift and unfaltering, for the broadest of overhangs—a veranda, she realized as the ruk banked toward it. People were already standing just beneath the enormous arch of the cave mouth, arms raised in greeting.
She felt Sartaq’s smile at her ear. “There lies the Mountain-Hall of Altun, the home of my hearth-mother and my family.” Altun—Windhaven, was the rough translation. It was indeed larger than any other dwelling amid the three peaks: the Dorgos, or Three Singers, they were called—the cave itself at least forty feet tall and thrice as wide. Far within, she could just make out pillars and what indeed seemed to be a massive hall.
“The reception court—where we host our meetings and celebrations,” Sartaq explained, his arms tightening around her just as Kadara back-flapped. Squeezing her eyes shut again in front of the awaiting people would certainly not win her any admiration, but—
Nesryn gripped the saddle horn with one hand, the other clenching Sartaq’s knee, braced behind hers. Hard enough to bruise.
The prince only laughed quietly. “So the famed archer does have a weakness, then.”
“I’ll find out yours soon enough,” Nesryn countered, earning another soft laugh in reply.
The ruk mercifully made a smooth landing on the polished dark stone of the almost-balcony, those waiting at the entrance bracing themselves against the wind off her wings.
Then they were still, and Nesryn quickly straightened, releasing her death-grip on both saddle and prince to behold a hall full of pillars of carved, painted wood. The braziers burning throughout cast the gold paint glinting amongst the green and red, and thick carpets in bold, striking patterns covered much of the stone floor, interrupted only by a round table and what seemed to be a small dais against one of the far walls. And beyond it, the gloom brightened by bracketed torches, a hallway flowed into the mountain itself. Lined with doors.
But in the very center of the Mountain-Hall of Altun: a fire.
The pit had been carved into the floor, so deep and wide that layers of broad steps led down to it. Like a small amphitheater—the main entertainment not a stage but the flame itself. The hearth.
It was indeed a domain fit for the Winged Prince.
Nesryn squared her shoulders as people young and old pressed forward, smiling broadly. Some were clad in familiar riding leathers, some wore beautifully colored, heavy wool coats that flowed to their knees. Most possessed Sartaq’s silken onyx hair and wind-chapped, golden-brown skin.
“Well, well,” drawled a young woman in a cobalt-and-ruby coat, tapping her booted foot on the smooth rock floor as she peered up at them. Nesryn forced herself to keep still, to endure that sweeping stare. The young woman’s twin braids, tied with bands of red leather, fell well past her breasts, and she brushed one over a shoulder as she said, “Look who decided to give up his fur muff and oiled baths to join us once more.”
Nesryn schooled her face into carefu
l calm. But Sartaq just dropped Kadara’s reins, the prince giving Nesryn a distinct I told you so look before he said down to the girl, “Don’t pretend that you haven’t been praying I bring back more of those pretty silk slippers for you, Borte.”
Nesryn bit her lip to keep from smiling, though the others certainly showed no such restraint as their chuckles rumbled off the dark stones.
Borte crossed her arms. “I suppose you’d know where to buy them, since you’re so fond of wearing them yourself.”
Sartaq laughed, the sound rich and merry.
It was an effort not to gawk. He had not made such a laugh, not once, at the palace.
And when had she last made such a bright sound? Even with her aunt and uncle, her laughter had been restrained, as if some invisible damper lay over her. Perhaps long before that, stretching back to days when she was only a city guard with no idea what crawled through the sewers of Rifthold.
Sartaq smoothly dismounted Kadara and offered a hand to help Nesryn down.
It was the hand he lifted that made the dozen or so gathered notice her—study her. None more closely than Borte.
Another shrewd, weighing look. Seeing the leathers, but none of the features that marked her as one of them.
She’d dealt with the judgment of strangers long before now—this was nothing new. Even if she now stood in the gilded halls of Altun, amongst the rukhin.
Ignoring Sartaq’s offered hand, Nesryn forced her stiff body to smoothly slide one leg over the saddle and dismounted herself. Her knees popped at the impact, but she managed to land lightly, and didn’t let herself touch her hair—which she was certain was a rat’s nest despite her short braid.
A faint gleam of approval entered Borte’s dark eyes just before the girl jerked her chin toward Nesryn. “A Balruhni woman in the leathers of a rukhin. Now, there’s a sight.”
Sartaq didn’t answer. He only glanced in Nesryn’s direction. An invitation. And challenge.
So Nesryn slipped her hands into the pockets of her close-fitting pants and sauntered to the prince’s side. “Will it be improved if I tell you I caught Sartaq filing his nails this morning?”