that the word control seems a laughable stretch.
“I can change the weather,” she finally admits. “But...the power is...volatile.” She stops for a moment, her throat growing tight. “My weather power put me and my family in so much danger. So many times.” Memories of losing control scrape at the edges of her mind—storm clouds forming at wildly inopportune times, isolated rainstorms, small blizzards. And always, the Gardnerians lurking somewhere near, ready to swoop down.
She struggles to force the horrible memories back down.
Go ahead. Push it all down. Stifle your fear instead of facing it.
An unbidden image of Viger’s horned head enters her mind. His dark lips and black, unfathomable gaze.
Fyordin is watching her closely now, turned fully to face her as he leans against the railing, the hard arrogance from just a moment ago now gone. Tierney is struck anew by his unglamoured Asrai-ness. His pointed ears and rippling Fae hue. Out in the open. Unafraid. Rune blades strapped to his arms. It’s a heady rush just looking at his unhidden Asrai form.
“Were you raised in the West?” Tierney asks him, wondering how long it will take her to shake off the lingering spikes of terror that flash through her whenever she releases her magic. The panicked reflex to force down her power and run for cover.
Even her kelpies stay submerged most of the time, wary of coming to shore.
In hiding.
Still.
“I didn’t grow up over there,” Fyordin admits with a tight look toward the storm-limned Vo Mountain Range, lightning flashing above it. “My family managed to get out before the Realm War. They were the only ones in their band of Asrai to survive.” He meets Tierney’s gaze once more. “I grew up here with my parents and brother.”
Shock lights. “You have family here?” Tierney’s throat tightens at the memory of her mother screaming her Asrai name and being dragged away by several Asrai as Tierney was placed in the arms of her Gardnerian parents.
Gardnerian parents who risked their own lives to keep her safe from the Gardnerians’ Fae purge.
Her water power thrust into chaos, Tierney looks to the stone floor and furiously blinks back the wretched tears now brimming in her eyes. She can feel the storm cloud forming over her head, the crackle of lightning spitting in it as she struggles to pull it in, not wanting to bare herself to this arrogant Fae whose parents never died.
Who doesn’t understand the full horror of the West.
Who never can.
“Stay in our division, Asrai’il,” Fyordin says, and Tierney snaps her gaze to his, astonished by his newly compassionate tone. His deep-river eyes are searching and dark as the Vo’s depths in this dim light, the metallic blue hoops in his ears catching glints of the terrace’s runic light.
“So now I’m ‘Asrai’il’ again?” Tierney bites out, her voice fracturing as she roughly wipes away her tears.
“You always will be,” Fyordin says, and this time there’s unmistakable apology in his eyes.
She tightens every muscle and manages to pull the storm cloud in, wrestling control of her fitful power.
Barely.
Then she looks back at Fyordin.
“The Wyvernguard has my fealty,” she says to him in Asrai with a ferocious sincerity. “And the Asrai do, as well. No matter what. Even if you despise me for speaking my own mind.”
“I don’t despise you.” He takes a step toward her, a hard current of his water power breaking free to course around her. “Stay in our division, Tierney Asrai’ir. I want to help you gain full mastery over your Fae power. And train you to channel it through runic weaponry.”
A blaze of defiance courses through Tierney as she fixes him with a mutinous glare. “Trystan Gardner also has the full weight of my support.”
Fyordin’s water magic gives a hard, angry surge with an intensity to rival her own. “Gardnerians have no place here in the Eastern Realm,” he declares, impassioned and dauntingly entrenched.
Tierney’s face twists into a deeper scowl as the Vo’s cool breeze rustles her hair and caresses her neck.
An inexplicable longing to be back with her odd circle of friends from Verpax University washes over Tierney, rapidly gaining force as she stares in the eyes of this implacable Fae. But her friends are scattered, Trystan isolated on the North Twin Island with only Death Fae for companions, the Lupines brought to a Vu Trin military base somewhere in the northeast, Wynter sheltered by the Amaz.
And both Elloren and Yvan, trapped in Gardneria as Vogel’s darkness takes root there and grows.
Dread and frustration roll through Tierney