as she shoots Fyordin a hard, exasperated glare.
Stubborn, intractable fool.
But then, she’s struck by a new remembrance, of how she and her friends were able to fight Vogel effectively only when they worked together.
Despite serious differences.
Maybe, Tierney begrudgingly considers as she looks toward the Vo, working together means trying to work with an arrogant, rigid Asrai who is dead wrong about what it’s going to take to go head-to-head with Vogel.
She turns back to Fyordin to find him considering her with equal frustration, both of their water powers contained but storming.
“Fyordin,” she says in the Water Fae tongue, leveling with this stranger-Fae, Asrai to Asrai, “in the west, I was part of a Resistance group that included Trystan Gardner and his brother and sister too. It included hidden Fae. And Amaz. And Lupines. And Icarals. We destroyed a Gardnerian military base. Rescued an unbroken dragon. And got the remaining Lupines out of the Western Realm. But we needed all of us to do these things.”
Fyordin shakes his head and gives her a stubborn look of refute.
“Hear me out,” Tierney presses. “I do not have the luxury of uncomplicated hatred. And you need to let go of it, as well. The Gardnerians separate the world into the Blessed Ones and the Evil Ones. We can’t win this fight if we think that way.”
“We will never see eye to eye about the Gardnerians,” Fyordin insists, and Tierney can feel his internal storm raging. His words cut to the quick, ramping up her worry for her Gardnerian family here. Her worry for Trystan.
A brushstroke of attention shivers through her roiling magic, directional and light as the brush of a dragonfly’s wing. She looks past Fyordin and up.
Viger Maul is sitting on an outcropping of the island’s onyx stone, his gaze set on her, and Tierney is too stirred up to be intimidated by the Death Fae’s sustained attention.
Go ahead, Tierney thinks at him as she holds Viger’s stare. Read my fear. Read all of it.
She turns back to implacable Fyordin, fully aware of Viger’s sustained focus on her as she and Fyordin consider each other, Fae to Fae, neither side ceding any ground.
What would it be like, Tierney wonders as her frustration mounts, to spend time with Viger Maul? To face every last fear, no longer hiding from any of it?
Every dark thing exposed.
Like a relief, Tierney can’t help but consider. A cursed relief.
And, possibly, an essential preparation for Vogel’s advance on the Eastern Realm.
“You don’t fully understand what’s coming,” Tierney says to Fyordin, dread rising. “If you did, you wouldn’t be wasting your time fighting our allies, imperfect though they may be.” She moves closer to him, adamant, holding his equally fierce stare. “We need to fight this thing together. Every last one of us. Or Vogel’s nightmare is going to devour us all.”
Their mutual storms of emotion rise, their power lashing against each other’s with unbridled force.
Tierney wrenches her gaze from Fyordin’s, suddenly needing to be away from him. Needing to be away from Viger Maul. Needing to be away from everything but the river.
Fyordin remains silent as she grabs hold of the terrace’s railing, hoists her body up until she’s balanced on top of it, then raises her arms and dives straight into the Vo.
As her body hits the cool water, she doesn’t angle up to skim along the underside of its surface like she did last night as the waves of the river frolicked over her, welcoming her home.
No.
She swims straight down like an arrow, into the deepest black. Until she touches down on the river’s great bed, the weight of the Vo a soothing pressure as her Asrai body strengthens against it.
She lies back and splays her arms on the riverbed’s soft ground.
Erthia.
Tierney breathes in the clean river water, pulling it deep into her lungs as she’s filled with the glorious sense of all the life thriving there—life independent of the Wyvernguard, the Noi lands. The river flows into her with every breath, connected to her now like some mammoth network of veins feeding into her own. And for the brief sliver of a moment, as her body morphs into water and unravels into beautiful chaos, Tierney considers staying there for good.
But then she feels it.
A disturbance at the outer reaches of the water that feeds into the Vo. One small point of contact reverberating out, almost imperceptible.
A faraway tendril of shadow, seeping into the water.
Slow and curling.
Life draws away from that point of contagion, plants flexing back,