creeping in early on the Kichonan autumn’s reign.
Daemon gasped as he looked up at the delicate, feathery pink clouds above.
Sora glanced up and smiled. It was as if the gods had cast an ethereal lace in the sky. “Welcome home,” she said.
He simply sighed. She heard the actual sigh as well as felt the echo of it in their gemina bond, the wisp of contentment like a shadow trailing behind the original.
Daemon closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath. Sora followed suit. The air here smelled evergreen, as though it had been kissing the dew on the trees for millennia. Breathing it in was Daemon and Sora’s ritual each autumn when they returned, a marker to the start of another school year together. And this breath felt more significant, because it was their final year before graduating.
They sat still on their horses for a few minutes, simply breathing.
When Daemon cleared his throat, Sora opened her eyes. He smiled at her, recharged, and it seemed almost as if the air around him buzzed with his renewed energy.
“Let’s climb some trees,” he said.
She laughed. “You know, sometimes I think you belong in the sky, not on the ground with the rest of us.”
Every night at the Citadel, Daemon climbed out his window and onto the boys’ dormitory rooftop to lie under the stars. He said there was something about the sky’s vastness—its possibility and infinity—that comforted him. There were too many limits imposed down on the earth.
Sora dismounted and tied her horse to a tree. “Shall we climb?”
“Yes, please. I’m itching for height.”
They hiked into the woodland. After a few minutes, he picked a tree, cast a squirrel spell, and quickly scaled the trunk, into the branches. Sora followed, and the crisp smell of the evergreens greeted her again. She watched as Daemon inhaled deeply before he pushed off and jumped into the next tree. He bounded from bough to bough, working his way farther down the canyon but higher into the treetops. Sora leaped from tree to tree in a path parallel to his.
Eventually, she landed on the tallest cypress in the area and climbed up until she was on the highest, thickest branch that would support her weight. She wrapped her legs firmly around the trunk and stood up, opening her arms and tossing her head back toward the sky. The wind blew her back and forth, as if she were a mere dandelion swaying in the breeze. Contentment washed through her.
“You see?” Daemon shouted from where he had also found himself a cypress towering into the sky. “This is why I love being up high.”
A raptor soared above her and let out a shrill whistle. Sora whistled back.
The bird jerked in flight and steered away from her, as if offended by Sora’s birdcall.
Daemon laughed.
“Oh, shut up,” Sora said.
She looked over in his direction. A waterfall came into view, crashing hundreds of feet to the whitewater pools below. And then, beyond that, the trees cleared, and she could see straight down into the bottom of the gorge.
What in Luna’s name—?
She leaped through the trees until she was beside Daemon. “I think there’s an Autumn Festival celebration going on down there.”
He squinted. “Really?”
Sora formed her hands into tapered oval shapes and chanted, “Eyes like a hawk. Eyes like a hawk.”
The skin around her eyes tightened, and her long-distance vision sharpened. She homed in on the canyon floor.
“Whoa,” Sora said. “There’s an entire encampment of red tents, with long yellow-and-green banners whipping in the wind. Thirty or forty people are dancing around a fire.”
Daemon tried to cast a hawkeye spell too, but a few seconds later, he muttered a string of half-intelligible curses under his breath. “Stupid mrphrk bumbling grffff magic never works . . .”
“I think we should sneak in and join the party,” Sora said.
“I don’t know. . . . It’s weird that there’s a celebration in Takish Gorge. No one ever comes out here. This is wolf and bear territory.”
He was right about that. Takish Gorge was far from civilization; Paro Village was the closest town, and because it was already one of the remotest parts of Kichona, its residents wanted to go into the heart of the kingdom when they traveled, not farther away. The canyon was also known for its unfettered wildness, home to a dense population of wolves, bears, cougars, and poisonous, camouflaged snakes. Takish Gorge was not the kind of place most people wanted to go, especially for a celebration known for its