The Crow Rider by Kalyn Josephson

Author:Kalyn Josephson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-07-06T23:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

We’d failed, and I didn’t know what to do.

The throne room had emptied long ago, leaving me alone with Kiva, Caylus, Res, and the slow, creeping feeling descending about my shoulders.

We’d failed, and now Rhodaire would fall.

I stared at the empty thrones and heard Elkona’s damming words again and again. Useless useless useless.

We’d failed, and it was my fault.

“Thia—” Kiva began but stopped when I shook my head.

Res nudged me with his beak, but I couldn’t look at him. Caylus hovered nervously at my side. My eyes snagged on the empty cushion where Estrel should have been.

Suddenly, their presence was too much. All of it was too much. Before any of them could say anything more, I broke for the open doorway. The wide corridors spread before me in a welcome maze, allowing me to lose myself in them.

I remembered another time not so long ago when I ran. When everything inside me felt too sharp to touch. Too broken.

I’d rested all of Rhodaire’s hopes on this alliance, and in the end, it was my inability to lead, my failure as a rider, me, that brought it tumbling down.

I don’t know how I found her room. One moment, the hallways had swallowed me up, and the next, they’d spit me out in a familiar place.

My hand hovered over Estrel’s closed door. A wave of emotion rose inside me. Hurt, confusion, and a coiled fury I was afraid to touch, lest it spring to life and consume me. Fueled by more than just my anger at Estrel, it felt a drop away from roiling into an uncontrollable sea.

I slammed my fist into Estrel’s door twice. I half hoped she wouldn’t be there, that it’d turn out she’d been called away on some urgent business. But after a brief pause, a voice I would know anywhere called, “Who is it?”

“Me.”

Silence. Then, “Now isn’t a good time, Thia.”

I stilled as an unfamiliar coldness descended over me. Not a good time? Not a good time? I seized the handle and, finding it unlocked, flung open the door.

The room looked like a wind crow had gone berserk inside. The blankets were thrown to the foot of the bed, a toppled vase lying in pieces at the base of a cabinet. A nightstand beside her bed had been overturned, and pacing a worn path in the floor rug, there was Estrel.

What remained of her hair was a tangled mess, and she had deep purple shadows under her brown eyes. She must have covered them with powder earlier to hide her exhaustion.

Her eyes widened. “Thia.”

“It failed,” I snarled.

“What?”

“The alliance!” My voice rose. “It failed, I failed, and you weren’t there!”

She stared back at me, and the fear, the uncertainty that filled her dark gaze, nearly broke me. I couldn’t reconcile the woman before me with the one who’d been like a mother to me. The one who’d caught me saddling Iyla in the dead of night and, instead of reprimanding me, had climbed into the saddle at my back and taken me for my very first flight.

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