little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.
the Indian's axed your scalp.
She had left the palace feeling rage and worry and flung herself into the sky without pausing to think, racing for the Steppe with the wind urging her along. And she had left the Steppe in sorrow and in awe and will that same rage, now no longer a boil but a simmer, a black mark on her soul.
Their new king had been correct - there was no sign of Seraphina, no sign of a fresh grave, so sign of anything that had been the Steppe at all. There was only that wide spread of flowers gleamed like cut stained glass from the air and sang like sirens as she stood among them, so like and so unlike the strange golden pool. But this time there was no wonder in Elif, and no pride in the gods.
All of Solterra would have their revenge on Raum. Elif will see to it.
But of course the how of it eludes her, as she streaks through the darkening sky back for home, swift and red as a falling star. The hawk has never been a creature of plans, only of action and reaction and raw impulse, and how could she go against the cool, dead-eyed silver of Raum?
That is when she thinks of the man with eyes like molten gold and a laugh like soot. A man who looked black in the shadows until he revealed brown richer than the darkest earth, more gold gilding him like the city’s blackest wealth. A man and his griffin whose smile was a sword and whose mind was a snarled nest (she is sure) of scheming. He will help her - she will make him. Somehow.
It is a relief to have a plan, even if the plan is foolishness (but this she will not allow herself to think). Elif is above the sun-court again, the desert a silver sea in the last dying winter light, and she banks low toward a part of the city she knows better than to walk. But what part of Solterra is safe for any of them anymore, with curfews, with a dictator king? Her wings blend with the darkness as she glides down and down, and she touches to the sand without so much as a sound. Even such an angry cat can be quiet when she wants.
More difficult is to wind through the narrow corridors of the Black Market, towering like the canyon’s walls above her. Elif stays as quiet as she can be as each turn takes her deeper into dangerous territory, driven on despite the nerves singing her like fire and the way her skin wants to jump at every leaning shadow. She tells herself that everything is only made strange by the dark, that beneath the punishing sun she could give each thing a name and fear none of them.
Until a final turn reveals a shadow more solid than the rest.
Elif freezes when met with the pegasus, the shape of his wings indistinct against his sides, the arch of his neck and the height of him achingly familiar. But she does not yet recognize the man from the fighting-pit, who lounged like a lion with a griffin at his side; all she sees is a black pegasus. All she scents is the promise of blood and something pitch-dark and strange.
But she knows him. Oh, she knows him!
“You killed my brother,” Elif snarls, and lunges for him before she can even begin to unfurl the whip at her side.
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