Orthos lifted his wounded leg. “I’m not running anywhere.”
Yerin lifted her hand from him and vanished in an implosion of light. She reappeared at the same instant next to Lindon, panting.
He turned immediately, focusing on her instead of Heaven’s Glory, reaching out to steady her. She didn’t need his help, but rested a hand on his left arm anyway.
Interesting.
They exchanged words, Lindon gesturing angrily to Heaven’s Glory, but Yerin pointed back toward where Orthos stood.
The turtle inclined his head once.
Again, Lindon moved with speed Kelsa couldn’t track, but this time she could at least see a blur like a flying arrow as he ran up the hill and came to a stop next to the turtle.
“Forgiveness,” Lindon said. “I lost my focus.”
When the dark fire and red circles bled from his eyes, leaving them human black, he looked to Kelsa with apology in his eyes.
That was the first time she really recognized her brother.
He gave her a gesture of acknowledgement, but first he turned to Orthos and threw his arms around the turtle’s neck.
The sacred beast closed his good eye and rumbled deep in his chest.
They didn’t say anything, but when Lindon separated, his eyes were wet. Only then did he return to Kelsa.
When he did, he bowed deeply over fists pressed together. “Forgiveness. I left without telling you. I…I had no idea you were…I didn’t know things were this bad. My deepest apologies.”
At the moment, Kelsa didn’t understand her own feelings.
She was glad her brother wasn’t the type of person to completely butcher a retreating enemy…but she had wanted him to do it.
He could never have known what Heaven’s Glory had done in his absence…but part of her still blamed him for it.
For years, she had believed that he was dead, and was glad to see him alive…but he frightened her.
Orthos had told her stories about sacred artists outside, and about Lindon in particular, but her imagination had not been enough. She felt like she was within arm’s reach of a wild tiger.
He was still bowing to her, and he would stay that way until she responded.
He had always been like that.
Kelsa’s eyes filled, and she took in a rough breath. “You took too long,” she said in a broken voice.
Lindon straightened, now even taller than she was, and she wrapped him up in a hug before she wept. From the shaking of his chest, she knew he was crying too.
7
Lindon watched Eithan spread his arms wide as if to embrace the crowd before him, his smile gentle. “Brothers and sisters of the Fallen Leaf School, I am humbled and grateful by this overwhelming show of hospitality.”
All thirty-two Jades of the Fallen Leaf School knelt on the ground in front of him, their foreheads pressed to the dirt.
They had seen Lindon face Heaven’s Glory, and that had been enough to stop them from pushing the exiles back. It hadn’t made them open their doors.
That had taken the arrival of the Akura Golds.
If Eithan’s power and skill hadn’t intimidated them, the arrival of over two hundred and fifty new Jades—as the Sacred Valley inhabitants would see them—had certainly done the trick.
Lindon had seen only glimpses of the process. He’d been catching up with Orthos and waiting for Kelsa to find their parents; it was only at his sister’s insistence that he hadn’t gone to find them immediately.
In the few fragments he’d seen of Eithan’s negotiation, the Fallen Leaf School representatives had gone from wary to goggle-eyed to tripping all over themselves to agree as more and more Golds in black and purple descended from the skies.
Lindon was fairly certain that they would have promised anything to get these outsiders to leave. They would marry off their children to the exiles if it would get these powerful outsiders to leave them alone.
He guessed it would only be a matter of minutes before the first members of the School approached them privately, trying to get a hint about how to grow stronger.
But that had little to do with Lindon.
The Fallen Leaf School looked more like a farming community than an organization dedicated to the sacred arts, with barns and tilled fields separated by grassy plains. He and Orthos stood in the shade of a tall, purple-leafed orus tree as Little Blue sat on the turtle’s head, recounting their adventures to him in a series of chirps and ringing tones that sounded something like a bell tumbling down a flight of stairs.