Children Of The Sky (The Scripts Of Neptune, Book 2)

Chapter 40

The grasslands were lonely without Chad.

Dria found her steps heavy and almost burdened without him to talk to, every footfall dragging back on her muscles. She didn't know how long she'd been walking, not wanting to fly on such a day, but it wasn't yet far enough that she'd reached the trees they'd so often held lessons in. The grasses and weeds and stone no longer looked inviting; they were still beautiful, but no longer magic. Something in the world dulled when that boy wasn't around.

She missed him, she realized as she walked, finally spotting the trees. The realization seemed to make her more tired. She'd promised herself she wouldn't get attached to anyone--and here she was, moaning and groaning about a boy, of all people. But it wasn't like that, not really, it wasn't anything romantic. It made her sick to remember she'd kissed him all that time ago. This was something of a different flavor, a different tone. A break in the usual lonesomeness that liked to keep her company so often. She'd seen the world, but had she ever met anyone she could call a friend?

The thought ate at her well into the night and on into the next day, and the only way she was able to chase it away was to read. It was hard without Chad there to tell her what words meant, or to remind her of things she forgot, but she managed. The book was about the specifics of the Order of Avani--the goddess of the earth, in Cassarian mythology--and the sheer act of holding it still made her feel like a traitor and a rebel. A book like this would've been torn to pieces and burned if it was found in her homelands. To think of serving anything other than the great Changer, or learning about anything with a purpose in mind besides knowing one's enemy, was the highest heresy. It was why magic was shunned. It was why her family had banished her to the Ashlands without a second thought.

The days passed slowly, but it didn't rain. Dria flew when she wanted, sang to keep herself from going mad, and climbed so many trees she convinced herself it was what she'd been born to do. It was a boredom like no other until the fifth morning, when she woke in the bone-deep cold of a mountain summer dawn and stared at the pale sky, remembering what she was to do today. Hauling herself up, she ate a dry breakfast of jerky and fruit and took to the sky.

Today, she was going hunting.

Her flight took her so high she could see the fringes of the ocean past the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the mountains, a line of blue in the distance that made her breath catch. She hovered there at the top of the world, watching the greens and browns blend together beneath her. The distance was nauseating. The air was cold and thin. With a shiver, she dropped into a dive.

Sparrows danced in the wind lower down, and Dria pulled herself into a steady spiral and circled above them, picking out the slower ones, the weaker ones. Then, when she'd singled out her target, she struck.

The bird must've been sickly; the others were long out of her reach by the time she reached them. Her claws closed halfway around its little body, and it let out a shrill cry as it was plucked out of the sky, wings askew. Dria dove again, pulling up just before she hit the ground, and caught herself as best she could on one leg in the middle of the weeds.

The bird almost got away when she shifted, but she pounced and trapped it in her hands before it could. Crooning to it and smoothing its feathers down, she knelt and sat back on her heels. "It's all right, little one," she soothed as it trembled in her hands, frightened into stillness. The sunlight turned its brown feathers to gold.

Chad had told her how to pull a soul out of a body, and Craventi had made her practice the night before she left until she felt like she could do it in her sleep. She tried now, her eyes falling shut, the sparrow's swift heartbeat on her fingertips. She tried to feel its being, its very life, and untie those subtle strings that held it in its body so securely.