“Well, it seems like she’s got the gardens covered,” says Orion, who frankly looks a tad relieved, when up above us a pair of servants scream.
He sprints for the steps, and I turn toward my estranged sister.
A mere jumps out in front of me, but I slash through it with ease. Moments later, I find myself fighting alongside my sister in the garden.
“Evander?” Olwen asks, voice dripping with what sounds less like sibling rivalry and more like simple derision. “What are you doing here?”
She prances off the bench, looking a bit like a ballerina as she does. Behind her shoots a stream of wooden arrows that pierces the beasts in the sky.
What a showoff.
I instantly regret the decision to come out here.
“Helping,” I say, sending my own thorns twisting around the neck of a mere.
Olwen allows the edges of her lips to droop at the same time her eyebrows raise. It’s the kind of expression made when someone you previously considered an imbecile does something mirroring that of someone with average intelligence.
“You’ve been practicing your magic. I told you that you might need it someday.”
“Twelve seconds,” I say, to which she raises an eyebrow.
“Twelve seconds for you to say the words ‘I told you’ in succession.”
Her eyes don’t participate in her grin. “So what? Did Father send you to die in his stead? I hear he likes that wife of yours well enough to be content to name her heir over either of us.”
My throat tightens. She doesn’t know. “Father didn’t send me. I came of my own accord.”
Olwen peers out beyond a shattered portion of the garden wall and into the desert plains, where Dwellen’s army still marches on the city. “And you took his army with you? Well, I might become his favorite one of these days, after all.”
“Father’s dead, Olwen.”
If I wasn’t watching for it, I might have missed the shock that flickers across Olwen’s otherwise bored features. “How?”
“Wyvern,” I say, not really wishing to relive the moment.
“Hm,” she says, as if told her that lip rings were now in fashion and not that our father had been slaughtered.
Before I can say as much, a formation of a half dozen wyverns swoop from the sky, nosediving directly toward us.
Olwen, of course, sends trunks skewering five of them, sparing the one nose-diving for me.
Thankfully, magic really is easier here in the gardens, though the plants are already beginning to wilt now that the climate-controlled magic barrier has been broken.
Still, when I call, the plants answer, piercing the wyvern’s wings before dragging it to the ground. I spear it through its chest.
“You know,” I say to Olwen, wiping the blunt edge of my blade on my trousers, “some would consider refusing to protect your king treason.”
Olwen humphs. “Good thing I’ve already withdrawn my citizenship, then.”
I roll my eyes, but then someone else comes running around the corner of a hedge, a tall male with brown hair and tanned skin who’s vaguely familiar.
Olwen pierces an overhead wyvern with a jagged trunk before prancing over to the male, jumping into his arms, and planting a kiss on his cheek.
“Quill, Evander. Evander, Quill,” she says.
Ah. Desidarius Quill. Olwen’s old school rival.
I point the blade of my sword between the two of them. “Don’t the two of you hate each other or something?”
Before my little sister can explain how she’s gone from writing hate poems about this male over Solstice break to planting a kiss on his cheek, something shrieks overhead.
“Does that one seem bigger than the rest to you?” asks Quill, who sets Olwen down gently and stares at the massive wyvern above us.
The creature cranes its neck, sniffing at the wyvern carcasses Olwen and I slaughtered.
Then it bellows in rage. I have just enough time to throw my silver-coated shield over the three of us, as the wyvern sprays a pillar of flames into the sky and showers streams of acid down upon us.
The acid sizzles as it hits the shield.
But Ellie’s creation holds.
Olwen coughs through the smoke. “Is it just me, or do we think that’s the creatures’ mother?”
CHAPTER 104
BLAISE
When I wake, Nox is gone.
