the scars.
He was too far away for her to hear his voice above the wind and the waves. She watched him reach out a hand. A smaller wyvern landed on his forearm like a hawk, its bat-like wings slapping the air as it found its balance. Silveri gently tickled its chin and stroked a nilarium-crusted finger down its throat.
Nelle took a seat behind a boulder where she could remain mostly hidden while she observed, then wrapped herself in the folds of her cloak and simply watched Silveri. Her hands were cramping and her brain was sore, and she couldn’t bring herself to think about Papa or Gaspard or Cloven or Sam or any part of a life that felt literally worlds away.
She simply sat and watched the mage as he petted his wyverns, inspecting their wings and claws and crests and scales. She watched for more of those brief sunburst-like smiles, and each time found herself shocked into a secret smile of her own in response.
He knelt in front of one particularly large wyvern—a tall red fellow with a crest that trailed in ridiculous furls all the way down his spine, and a wingspan that had to be close to eight feet. It bobbed its head the same way the blue wyvern did, yet somehow managed to make the awkward stance seem dignified and noble.
Silveri reached into the front of his robes and withdrew a scroll tied with black string. He slipped the string and unrolled the single sheet of parchment. Even from a distance, Nelle could see how frail and old it was, delicate as an autumn leaf. She watched Silveri present the parchment to the wyvern, which nosed it, crest rising and falling three times in some sort of wordless communication.
Then she gasped as the wyvern suddenly snatched the parchment into its mouth and swallowed it. Gone in a single second.
The wyvern threw back its head and bugled a cry. The other wyverns chortled and sang, flocking around it in a funnel that whirled up to the clouds above. The great wyvern spread its massive wings and, with a powerful gathering of its haunch muscles, sprang into the air, pulsing upward through the center of the flock, still bugling.
Nelle craned her neck to watch that brilliant red crest and trailing tail until it vanished into the clouds overhead. Only its voice still drifted down.
Then it was gone.
The other wyverns dispersed out across the waves and up into the cliffs, their chortles no longer a harmonious song.
Silveri remained kneeling on the beach, his shoulders back, his chin up, watching the clouds where the wyvern had gone. He looked paler than before, and his scars seemed deeper, darker. Harsher. His hair blew about his face, a partial veil, but Nelle could still read his expression. The sorrow. The remorse. The resignation.
At last Silveri shook himself and stood. He looked up and down the beach again, his gaze briefly scanning the wyverns in their cliff nests above. Then he turned and started back the way he had come. Toward Nelle.
With a little gasp, Nelle tucked away behind the boulder, her heart thudding. Why she didn’t want him to see her there, she couldn’t say. It wasn’t that she feared him. Not anymore. Perhaps eleven days was too short a time to form a just opinion of character, yet she could not make herself feel afraid. She trusted Soran Silveri. She knew the worst of his sins, knew the evil he had wrought upon the worlds. And she trusted him anyway. More than any other man she’d ever met.
Which doesn’t say much for the quality of men in your life.
A rueful grimace pulled at her mouth as she crouched in hiding, listening to the crunch of the mage’s footsteps as he passed. If he was aware of her presence, he gave no indication but marched on by without pause. She peered out from behind the rock and watched him climb the cliff path to the lighthouse again. Only when he was out of sight did she finally rise and sit on top of the stone, her arms tucked close inside the cloak.
“What’s wrong with you, girl?” she whispered.
She shook her head and gazed out across the white-topped waves rolling toward the beach. Out across the hazy horizon line to where Wimborne ought to be. She searched for the tip of the Evenspire but could not see it. Her old world—her real world—might almost never have existed at all.
If only she had time.