The Raven and the Dove (The Raven and the Dove #1) - Kaitlyn Davis Page 0,100

she made her way closer, stretching out with her spirit, pressing her invisible hand against the smooth surface of the stone and letting the energy sizzle where it touched her soul. If they only knew the truth.

The avians worshipped these floating orbs, associating each with a different deity, believing they thrummed with divine power. According to their legends, the gods had sacrificed their immortal bodies to lift the isles into the air, caging themselves within these stones to give their faithful servants a free, peaceful life high in the sky where no enemies could ever find them. And they believed these myths so strongly, they were willing to kill for them, to murder anyone who showed any hint of magic for fear it was an affront to their almighty gods.

That irony hit Cassi particularly hard.

She would be dead if her dormi’kine magic, her dreamwalking, was ever discovered.

Lyana too—their own beloved princess.

Cassi’s mother had been a victim of the persecution. At the age of five, her power had been discovered. They had stabbed her in the chest and sawed off one of her wings before hurling her over the edge to fall to her death. But she was an aero’kine. Wind was her power, and while her family abandoned her, the magic never did. It cradled her, held her, softened the fall, and a captain from the world below had seen her through the fog as she gently splashed into the ocean. He pulled her from the water and tended to her wounds, saving her life, giving her a better one where her magic was appreciated, even exalted, the way it deserved to be.

Because the truth was there were no gods.

The energy pulsing through the stone beneath her fingers wasn’t Taetanos, god of death—it was shadow magic. Pure and simple. There was no Aethios, only spirit magic like Cassi’s, like Lyana’s, the strongest kind of all. And Erhea, the god of love, revered by the songbirds? That beating red stone wasn’t a heart. It was the thing those of the world above feared most—fire magic.

There were seven elements, not seven gods, and each stone was one of those elements bottled up and sealed in an elaborate web that had been woven a thousand years ago through the sort of power that no longer existed. No one, not even her king, truly understood how the isles had come to rise into the air or why. The truth had faded into myth and legend in both the world above and the one below, but the past mattered very little.

The future, however, was still in flux.

The future was what Cassi fought to preserve.

Reluctantly, she pulled her spirit hands from the stone and blinked away the thrall of so much magic as she tried to focus on her surroundings. The sacred nest of the House of Whispers was, she quickly realized, a collapsed cavern. Impenetrable stone walls towered at least fifty feet high, curving in toward an open spot where the ground must have long ago given way. The stars glittered overhead, and the moon was bright as it filled the room, shining through the bars across the opening, keeping the squawking ravens inside. The area was thick with trees, as dense as the forest they’d flown across, though there were a few open passages leading from the orb toward the exterior sides of the nest—one led to the gate where Cassi had entered, and the others had to lead somewhere, too.

She had a hard time believing that any time the royal family wanted to visit the nest, they were first soaked by splashing water. There had to be another entrance, an easier one, even if only to deliver food and supplies to the priests and priestesses who were most likely asleep in their beds. The sacred nest at the House of Peace had an elaborate scheme of rooms and secret hallways used for the same purpose. This place would be no different.

Cassi just needed time—time and daylight, neither of which she’d find tonight. She put her hand to the orb one more time and breathed in the powerful aura, pausing for a beat to let it fill her, before reluctantly letting go.

Soon, she thought. Her new mantra.

Soon. Soon. Soon.

42

Lyana

He was so kind—so kind and caring and chivalrous—and he deserved more.

That was all Lyana thought as the rest of the week passed, and her feeling of suffocation grew, while his affectionate smile never wavered.

He deserves more than me, she thought, in his library for the