understand it, couldn’t begin to fathom the how or the why of it, but he knew those words came from Veronyka. Was this some Ashfire trick? It didn’t matter.
He nodded. Yes, he would help her. That was why he was here.
Tell me how, he begged inside his mind, but there was no answer.
Something thunked loudly on the rickety table within the room, causing Veronyka’s gaze to wrench away with a start. The lawmaker Lord Rolan brought with him had finally entered, dropping his bag onto the wooden surface and unearthing a stack of papers.
Veronyka cast one last frantic look in Sev’s direction, and another image surfaced in his mind, clearer than the rush he’d seen before. A dark hole—a cave. And within… smoking, burning feathers. A phoenix.
No, Veronyka’s phoenix.
Sev had forgotten about her. When Veronyka had been taken away, her phoenix had been nowhere in sight.
Now Sev knew what had become of her. She was trapped in a cave with metal bars. There was something else, too, some other instruction or warning, but he was unable to grasp it.
Before he could formulate a question in his mind or figure out what to do next, the image vanished, and Veronyka’s attention returned with a snap to Lord Rolan and her sister. Sev watched her swallow, pulse jumping in her throat, while Val said her name impatiently—as if this weren’t the first time she’d tried.
A warning bell sounded in his mind a second before Val’s cloaked head began to turn. Sev darted back from the doorway and disappeared down the stairs, past the other soldiers.
He slowed his steps and schooled his features into an expression of boredom. When one of the soldiers looked his way, as if expecting news or orders, Sev shrugged and mimed a talking mouth with his hand, rolling his eyes.
The soldier snorted.
Sev wandered to the edge of their perimeter, but as a soldier himself, no one paid him any mind. Then, when the nearest guards bent their heads together in discussion, he ducked behind a corner of the crumbling wall and slipped away.
He came up on Kade from behind, finding him crouched in the same place they’d both been hiding the previous night.
Kade whipped around, the tense look on his features relaxing at once. “Sev. What’s happening? What—”
“Come on,” Sev said, nodding his head away from the tower. “We’ve got a phoenix to free.”
* * *
Sev caught Kade up on all he’d seen and heard as they picked their way over the rocky ground.
He tried to keep the vision Veronyka had shown him—and how, exactly, had she done that?—in his mind, but the details were hazy. One thing was for certain: her phoenix had been locked up somewhere near the place Veronyka had been captured, at the edge of the battleground. Sev wasn’t eager to go back, but if they hurried, they could make it there in under an hour.
At least he understood now why she wasn’t fighting her imprisonment, despite her obvious desire to. They had her bondmate.
When Sev saw how stiffly Kade was moving, he tried half-heartedly to convince Kade to remain behind—but he wouldn’t hear of it, especially when Sev relayed the fact of Veronyka’s identity. They were in the middle of something big here, and Kade insisted Sev needed someone to watch his back. Sev couldn’t deny that he was probably right. He was out of his element again, not quite a spy and not quite a hero, either. He felt a stab of guilt for not rescuing Riella but tried to focus on the task ahead. Freeing Veronyka’s phoenix was the first step—he’d worry about everything else afterward.
It wasn’t long before the rough earth beneath their feet gave way to slabs of stone and steep inclines, requiring more climbing than walking. Kade labored, sweat pouring down his face, while Sev kept his eyes cast wide, trying to find the easiest paths, as well as seeking shadowy entryways or clefts in stone. They were probably in Pyra now, the actual borderline happening somewhere within the rising, undulating Foothills that stretched for miles north, south, and west.
As Sev climbed, he tried to recall the last thing Veronyka had been trying to say to him. It had been some kind of warning that had been interrupted by her sister.
Sev soon got his answer.
They crested a rise and spotted a dark hole in the side of a series of low, rocky hills. A cave, striped with bars that gleamed golden in the early afternoon sun. Something was