CHAPTER FIFTEEN

FARON

THE IRYAN TOWN OF SEAVIEW GLITTERED BEFORE THEM AS FARON and Reeve walked out of Nobility.

Renard Hall was at the top of a cliff cradled by the town. This estate had been in the Renard family for generations, and it boasted the oldest and most varied collection of books on the island. Faron and Reeve could have gone back to Deadegg with her parents, but, as Aveline had pointed out, Seaview provided them with the privacy and the resources they needed to make sure that, when they did go home, it was with Elara safely in tow. How the queen had managed to convince Faron’s parents of that, Faron would never know, but they’d only hugged Faron slightly harder than usual when they’d separated. At least this time they knew Faron would be safe.

Though the capital of San Irie was officially Port Sol, it was Seaview that was their true treasure. The ancestral seat had once housed one of Aveline’s mothers, Nerissa Renard, before she and her wife had been killed by dragonfire during the war, and Seaview Temple was one of the first ones ever built on the island.

She should have known the latter would be a problem.

Santi were the first people whom Faron saw as she stepped off the exit ramp, and that was mostly because they were crowded in front of the manor house in their white robes and gold belts. An ocean of bent brown heads lifted almost at once as everyone fought to catch a glimpse of the Childe Empyrean. Behind them, Renard Hall stood as tall and proud as an oak tree, so close and yet so worryingly far from where she was standing.

Faron took a step back and collided with Reeve. She’d forgotten he was here.

His hands curled loosely around her shoulders. “Was the temple supposed to know you were coming?”

“No. I mean. I don’t know?” Faron caught sight of children in the crowd, children who weren’t wearing robes or golden waistbands. It wasn’t just santi before her. Townspeople were threaded through the gathered group, adding to the noise that hammered at her skull. Some of them held signs that begged her to intercede with the queen, to stop the Summit, to be the people’s champion again. “Maybe we should wait a bit before we—”

Reeve led her back up the exit ramp, where, in the absence of drake mechanics, the pilots were running their own logistics on the drake to prepare for the flight back to Port Sol. A few quick orders later, three no-nonsense Queenshield soldiers escorted them through the mob. Reeve stayed close by her side, carrying both their bags with a commanding expression on his face, but he didn’t need to. People cleared a path for the Queenshield, maintaining a respectful distance that Faron had never gotten before.

But to compensate for that distance, the clamor grew louder as people shouted over one another to catch her attention.

“Please—we came all this way just to see the Empyrean!”

“Stop the Summit! The Empyrean has the power!”

“At least take our offerings,” said a woman with a wicker basket in her arms. Fat mangoes in vivid shades of green, crimson, and gold nestled together inside. “I’ve been growing these for months. They’re the sweetest on the island!”

“Coconut water?” shouted another person near the back. “Would the Empyrean take some coconut water?”

“Irie curse your coconut water! The Empyrean needs to stop the Summit—”

By the time they broke through the other side of the swarm, she’d almost forgotten how Seaview had gotten its name. That changed when she saw the stunning expanse of ocean beyond Renard Hall, so bright that she had to cup a hand over her eyes like a visor to block most of the glare. Instead of taking the cleared path toward the front door, Faron walked around the house until she was a few feet away from the steep drop at the cliff’s edge. Far below, a narrow line of white sand was littered with rocks, sharp and dangerous. The waves crashed against them violently, even on such a crisp, warm day.

“This way, Empyrean!”

Faron turned from the water to see one of the hall servants waving her back toward the house. Reluctantly, she moved away from the overlook, making a mental note to come back here later and just… be. Once she brought Elara back to Deadegg, she had no idea when she’d next have the chance to see the ocean, let alone sit by it.

The inside of Renard Hall was just as lavish as the outside. White marble floors were covered with soft aqua carpets, scented with some sort of floral powder. Tasteful seaside paintings decorated the walls, threaded in between wall etchings of suns in Irie’s honor. By the time Faron made it to the second floor, where the bedrooms were located, she’d lost track of the details about her surroundings. It all blurred together into one message: This is what money and royalty can get you.

For a girl raised in a small village, it was as intimidating as the palace. And yet it would be her home until she figured out how to save Elara.

She felt woefully out of her depth.

Reeve had dropped her bags in front of a door that she assumed led to her room. Faron stood there staring at them until she got her heart rate to slow down and her skin to stop itching from the memory of the hundreds of stares. After five years, she should have been used to being stared at, but it still unnerved her when she wasn’t expecting it.

“You threw Papa’s dominoes in the gully on a dare,” Elara had said once when Faron had complained about a group of worshippers that had passed through Deadegg just to see her at home. “How can you possibly hate attention?”

Faron hadn’t known how to explain that negative attention was something she could deal with. She encouraged it, in fact. But these people looked at her as if they expected her to do something wonderful, and she didn’t know how to navigate that.

“Do you need help unpacking, Empyrean?”

She jolted. A servant girl stood there in an ivory day dress, her hands folded behind her back.

“Sure,” Faron said. “Where’s Reeve’s room?”

“Mister Warwick’s room is around the corner, but he’s in the library right now.”

“Already?”

She found Reeve sitting in a high-backed chair in Renard Hall’s library, a book open in his lap. The frescoed ceiling bore a fading map of San Irie, the main island, and the southern islets of San Mala and San Obie—all Aveline’s queendom, surrounded by the Ember Sea. White-painted oak bookshelves flowed through the room in wavelike curves, designed to evoke the ocean. Each shelf was bursting with books, but Faron was more interested in the fireplace in front of Reeve’s chair. It would be perfect for calling Elara after she’d spoken to the gods about her predicament.

And the new voice she still hadn’t found an explanation for.

“Getting started already?” she asked as she approached Reeve. He tucked his finger into the book to hold his place, allowing her to see the title: A Concentrated History of the Novan Empires. “I don’t think Elara will mind if we unpack first.”

“Lenox said that he’d do it for me,” said Reeve. “He also said that dinner is in an hour.”

Assuming Lenox was a servant, Faron nodded and drifted over to one of the shelves. It was unlikely to her that the answer to breaking a bond between a dragon and a Rider could be found in any of these books, but Aveline had been right that some of these books were very old, maybe even older than the island itself. One was so ancient that its spine seemed to cave when Faron ran a finger over it. Maybe within these pages there was another person, lost to history, who had once spoken to the gods. Who had once heard voices without origin and had the answers she sought.

Elara and Reeve were the ones who reached for information when faced with a problem they couldn’t solve. Faron liked to blunder around, making it worse until she made it better. But even if there was no simple, straightforward answer, maybe she might read something that would shake an idea loose.

She grabbed a book about the first two drakes at random and curled up with it on the carpet in front of the fireplace.

Three sentences in, her attention began to wander.

Faron rubbed her eyes, frustrated. She’d never been the best student, and, unlike Elara and Reeve, she didn’t have the patience for books. She liked hearing about them, if she had to, but reading was not particularly her thing.

“Are you actually going to read that?” Reeve asked.

She made a face. “Apparently not. Thanks for having faith in me, though.”

“We all have our strengths. Yours are elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Faron searched his expression for any sign that he was mocking her and found none. Uncomfortable, she closed the book and pushed herself onto her feet.

“I’ll try the temple,” she said without looking at him. “I didn’t get to go before we left Port Sol, anyway.”

“Good idea.” Reeve disappeared behind his book again. “Make sure you’re back for dinner. I got the impression from Lenox that the servants are so excited you’re here that they’ve put a lot of effort into the meal.”

“I’ll come back when I feel like it,” she snapped. A guilty groan escaped seconds later. “Sorry. Force of habit.”

“Right.”

“So, I’ll just… go then.”

“Okay.”

Faron didn’t run for the door, but it was a near thing.

To her relief, it was easier to get inside a sunroom at the Seaview Temple than it had been at the Port Sol Temple. Like all these hallowed buildings, the Seaview Temple was a palatial single-story structure with glass-covered sunrooms to the east and west. The outer walls were the bright yellow of an egg yolk, with a white wraparound veranda enclosed with ventilated windows. But, regardless of their architectural beauty, Faron generally didn’t like temples.

Like the palace, they required her to stand on ceremony.

Everyone in this building was a pious worshipper of the gods. She used them to cheat in races. She talked back to them when they tried to chastise her. If she weren’t the Childe Empyrean, she could never be a santi. There was a purity to their devotion that she lacked.

The High Santi met her at the top of the flared staircase, dressed in white robes cinched at the waist by a broad golden belt. His salt-and-pepper locs fell past his shoulders, the back half wrapped in a white crochet cap. Luckily, he seemed embarrassed by the display his novitiates had put on when she’d arrived. Instead of the usual fawning, he personally escorted her to the sunroom at her request, and she didn’t see another person on the way.

The sunroom door was open and waiting for her, heat already leaking into the otherwise cool hallway. There were sunrooms in every temple, one where the sun rose and one where the sun set. People prayed in them, and santi grew plants like mint and thyme in them, but they were mostly meant to be living examples of Irie’s power. The glass panes that made up the walls and ceiling amplified her sunrays, bringing life-giving heat to the herbs and drawing beads of sweat to the surface of her people’s skin like a biological sacrifice in her honor.

The High Santi ducked his head respectfully and then left Faron there alone. But, within seconds, she wasn’t anymore.

Obie appeared in his pure white suit, his hood drawn, as always. Next came Mala, her curls hovering like a cloud around her narrow face. And, finally, Irie shimmered into view, braids decorated by a golden crown.

“Hello, Empyrean,” Mala said brightly, floating forward to pull Faron into her arms. Affectionate and bubbly, Mala was always the first to take advantage of the fact that the pious power of temple grounds allowed the gods a rare measure of corporeality. Faron only came up to her knees, but she never cared. “How may we help you?”

Irie stared icily through the glass walls of the sunroom. “I can feel them.”

Even if Faron hadn’t seen her expression, she would still know that Irie was talking about the Langlish miles away at Pearl Bay Palace. Irie had once explained that the gods had neither the interest nor the ability to intervene in every war of man, but Langley oppressed the island with tools that had escaped from the divine plane where all the gods of every religion resided. It was no longer one country’s magic against another.

It was a problem that deities had created, and thus a problem the Iryan deities had to help solve.

“I need your help,” Faron said. “And my sister needs your help. There was this voice… This dragon… And then—”

“Oh, Empyrean, hold your tears.” Mala gave her one last squeeze before she rejoined the line of gods. “Tell us what happened.”

The story spilled from Faron like water through the cracks in a dam, trickling at first and then pouring out in an unstoppable deluge. The Summit. The screams. The dragon attack. She shook as she described almost drowning her sister, how she would have drowned her sister and never noticed until it was too late. And then the voice, that stupid voice, talking her through taking command of the dragon’s soul. Helping her end the attack without bloodshed.

In contrast, it took only a few seconds to summarize everything that Commander Warwick had said about the Fury and Elara’s fate. By the time she finished speaking, Faron was ready to collapse from emotional exhaustion.

And none of the gods looked happy.

“The problem is that you are trying to break a bond without killing anyone involved,” said Irie. “It is an impossible task, Empyrean. Dragons choose Riders whose souls are made of the same celestial material as their own, and the bond fuses that ethereal matter together to create a channel between them to share power, emotions, and thoughts. Your sister’s soul is inextricable from that of her dragon and her co-Rider, because their souls are the same. That is the very basis of the dragon bond.”

It took everything Faron had to keep from screaming. “My sister does not have the same soul as a dragon. That’s impossible. She’s Iryan. Why would you—How could you have allowed this?”

“We cannot affect the mortal realm except through proxies like you. Yes, we created your world, but we did not create the dragons, and they are now on a different plane than—”

“There has to be something. Please, give me something. That voice—” Three sets of faces closed off in an instant. Faron’s heart stuttered. “You know who that voice belongs to.”

Irie sighed. “Empyrean, you need to understand. If this voice belongs to the being we suspect it does, you and your world are in grave danger—”

“Who is he?” Faron demanded. “He’s reached out to me twice now, and all he’s done is help me.” And, she thought but didn’t say, he made me feel powerful.

“He was the one who taught the founders of the Langlish Empire how to bond with dragons and how to ride them,” said Mala. “They may have forgotten his name, but they still worship him as a god, even though his regard for them is nonexistent.”

Faron’s eyes widened, though she couldn’t truly say she was surprised. How else could that voice know so much about dragons? How else could he have helped her soothe one? Iryans knew as much about dragons as they knew about the clouds; there were scientific theories, but no one had ever gotten close enough outside of a drake to really know anything for sure.

“We have no proof of it,” Mala continued, “but I suspect that his reappearance might be a symptom of the Fury that you speak of. He is the one who opened the door that brought dragons into your world, and it would be just like him to originate a problem with them and then put a hefty price on returning to fix it.”

Which meant that it could be fixed. If this man had taught the Langlish how to bond with dragons, then surely he knew how to break that same bond. If this man had created the Fury, then surely he knew how to cure it. Her sister’s life hung in the balance, and all Mala was doing was confirming that the answers Faron sought were in the hands of the same voice the gods were trying to warn her away from.

“Is he a god?” she asked. “Can I summon him the way I summon you? What’s his name?”

“He would call himself a god, and in many ways his powers are equal to our own,” Irie said. “But his name is irrelevant. He was born a man, and a duplicitous one at that. If he is talking to you, whatever he tells you will be a lie to get what he wants.”

“But, unlike you, he can affect the mortal world? So doesn’t that make him the more powerful god?”

Obie was a silent ghost behind Irie, but Mala looked stricken by Faron’s words.

“Faron, dragons are creatures with cosmic power. They were never meant to be in this realm. The Fury is beyond anyone’s ability to create or control at this point. We think, in fact, that this is a sign the creatures have overstayed their welcome.” Mala said this as if she were trying to calm a toddler. “The way forward is clear. Once, we came to you to be the Childe Empyrean and save San Irie from the dragons. Now we must call on you to save the world from them.”

It was a moment that Faron had always known, at the back of her mind, would come. The war was over, but the gods had never left. For all their complaints that she used their powers for trivial things, the gods were seemingly content to be at the beck and call of a teenager who had done her duty.

Why else would they have done that if there wasn’t a larger duty waiting?

“How do I save everyone?” she asked. “Is there a way to break all the bonds at once?”

Obie reached up to lower his hood. His bushy eyebrows drew together over his pale eyes, lending him a more severe appearance than usual. “You have misunderstood us, child,” he said. It was always a shock when he finally spoke, his rich timbre a rare gift. “There is no way to break the bonds before you rid the world of dragons.”

“But then… what about Elara?”

The gods exchanged glances. Finally, it was Mala who continued. “Eradicating the dragons will destroy the threat of the Fury, but it will also destroy their Riders along with them. Including your sister.”

“I—What?” Faron stumbled back, nearly hitting the glass wall. “No. No! You’re supposed to help me save her. You’re—”

“This will save her, Empyrean,” said Irie. “Her soul is tainted by her connection to that creature. Death is the only mercy that we can offer. There is no other way.”

“There has to be. You’re wrong! I’ll find another way. Without you.”

Faron shoved out of the sunroom before they could say anything else, their words echoing unpleasantly in her head. Death is the only mercy that we can offer. It will also destroy their Riders… Including your sister. You have misunderstood us. As if it were a simple thing for her to accept, being responsible for the death of the sister she’d promised to save. She imagined telling Elara that the gods she and the rest of the island worshipped had casually suggested she must pay for her unwanted bond with her life, and had to choke back tears. Knowing Elara, she would obey the gods’ will if she thought it would make the world safer. Her sister had always been the nobler of the two of them.

How could they sentence someone like that to death? What kind of world would she be creating, if good people like her sister had to be sacrificed to build it?

No. No.

Faron stumbled sightlessly through the hallways of the temple, rage curling in her chest. They had tried to keep secrets from her. They were using her to solve problems they had caused. Again and again, they used her, and when she was in need, they turned their backs on her. If she couldn’t trust them with this, then how could she trust them at all?

And if she couldn’t turn to the gods, who could she trust?