She focused on generating a steady, concentrated stream of flame around her sides, so searingly hot that the air around her blurred, and the grass at her feet wilted and shriveled into gray ash.
Slowly she rose up toward the Wind God.
Up close, Feylen looked miserable. His skin was pallid, pockmarked, overgrown with sores. They hadn’t given him new clothes—his black Cike uniform was ripped and dirty. Face-to-face he was no fearsome deity. Just a man with tattered garb and broken eyes.
Her fear faded away, replaced by pity. Feylen should have died a long time ago. Now he was a prisoner in his own body, sentenced to watch and suffer while the god he detested manipulated him as a gateway to the material world.
Without the Seal, without Kitay, Rin might have turned into something just like him.
The man is gone, she reminded herself. Defeat the god.
“Hey, asshole!” she shouted. “Over here!”
Feylen turned. The winds calmed.
She tensed, anticipating a sudden blast. She had only Kitay’s guarantee that she could correct course with her wings if Feylen sent her spinning, but that was a better chance than anyone else had.
But Feylen only hung still in the air, head cocked to the side, watching her rise to meet him like a child curiously observing the antics of a little bug.
“Cute trick,” he said.
A piece of driftwood shot past her left arm. She wobbled and righted herself.
Feylen’s cerulean eyes met hers. She shuddered. She was acutely aware of how fragile she was. She was fighting the Wind God in his own domain, and she was a little thing held in the air by nothing more than two sheets of leather and a cage of metal. He could tear her apart and dash her against those cliffs so easily.
But she didn’t just have her wings. She had a javelin. And she had the fire.
She opened her mouth and palms and shot every bit of flame she had at him—three lines of fire roaring from her body all at once. Feylen disappeared behind a wall of red and orange. The winds around him stilled. Debris began dropping out of the air, a rain of wreckage that dotted the waters below.
His retaliatory blow caught her off guard. A gust of force hit her so hard and fast that she hadn’t braced herself, hadn’t even tensed. She hurtled backward, tumbling through the air in circles until the cliff wall appeared perilously close before her eyes. Her nose scraped the rock before she managed to redirect her momentum and pull herself right-side up.
She drifted back toward Feylen, heart hammering.
She hadn’t burned him to death, but she’d come close. Feylen’s face and hair had turned black. Smoke wafted out from his scorched robes.
He looked shocked.
“Try again,” she called.
His next attack was a series of unrelenting winds blasting her from different, unpredictable directions so she couldn’t just ride out the current. One moment he forced her toward the ground, and the next he buoyed her upward, just to let her drop again.
She maneuvered the winds as well as she could, but it was like swimming against a waterfall. She was a little bird caught in a storm. Her wings were nothing against his overwhelming force. All she could do was keep from plummeting to the ground.
She suspected the only reason Feylen hadn’t yet flung her against the rocks was because he was toying with her.
But he hadn’t finished her off at Boyang, either. We’re not going to kill you, he’d said. She told us not to do that. We’re just supposed to hurt you.
The Empress had commanded him to bring her in alive. That gave her an advantage.
“Careful,” she shouted. “Daji won’t be happy with broken goods.”
Feylen’s entire demeanor changed when she spoke Daji’s name. His shoulders hunched; he seemed to shrink into himself. His eyes darted around, as if petrified that Daji could see him even so high in the air.
Rin stared at him, amazed. What had Daji done to him?
How was Daji so powerful that she could terrify a god?
Rin took the chance to fly in closer. She didn’t know how Daji had subdued Feylen, but she was now sure that Feylen couldn’t kill her.
Daji still wanted her alive, and that gave her her only advantage.
How did one kill a god? She and Kitay had puzzled over the dilemma for hours. She’d wished they could bring him into the Chuluu Korikh. Kitay had wished they could just bring the Chuluu Korikh to him.