Page 104 of Ashborne Phoenix

I wanted to scream. To weep. What had they done to Voski?

I began to tremble, but I couldn’t let these men see my fear. They hadn’t been malicious, but they had no care for me. I was being led like a horse by the halter. And they’d proven already that I would be ignored, as long as I behaved.

I had no desire for their attention to shift to me.

But my heart hammered in my chest and panic rose to tighten my throat.

‘What have they done to him?’

‘Kham sees no harm. But he… Voski bound.’

‘Bound? His hands and feet? They tied him up?’

She didn’t send words then, only images, and it was cloudy—something Kham had passed to her, I thought.

Seeing Voski, standing proud, his eyes narrowed at his mother was encouraging and let me breathe. But to Kham’s eyes, he’d been surrounded in shadow. As if the air around him were painted black. Not a shadow that fled light, but a shadow that consumed it.

And he couldn’t hear through it. Not the dragons, or me.

Which was when it occurred to me, that not only had I lost my ability to reach him, but I could no longer tell which direction would take me closer to him, either.

Then I truly shook. ‘Koa—’

‘I will not leave you. I help. I kill them—’

She cut off even before I told her to do so, and I gathered Kham had spoken to her, because a moment later she spoke to me again, but her tone was… a little sulky. In other circumstances I would have laughed.

‘Kham tells me… He helps Voski. I help you. We bring you together. No death except to save life.’

I nodded, sending thrusts of reassurance to her. Yet, I wavered. There was a blade strapped to my thigh under my robe. And I had at least some capacity to use it. Neither of these men seemed determined to harm me. But how could I know?

I’d been told I would be hidden from the men, and taken by whoever found me first.

Voski vowed it would be him, but we’d relied on the link and the dragons to give him a straight shot to finding me.

How would this happen now?

But as always, there were no answers. So I trotted along between the two men who seemed to know where they were going—were we setting a trail? Neither attempted to hide their passage, or mine.

I assumed they would take me to whatever spot they’d been told to release me, and once they did, I’d let Koa direct my steps. I would run toward Voski.

But as we passed into a deeper thicket of trees, both the men on either side of me lifted scarves that had hung around their necks, and tied them tightly across the lower halves of their faces.

I frowned. “What—”

“We’re nearly there,” one of them said, glancing at his companion on my other side, who nodded. They walked me directly toward a large tree that was—oddly, given how close together the trees grew here—surrounded by undergrowth that rose to my hips and was peppered with small, white flowers.

The plant was bushy, but soft, and the men plowed through it, moving quicker now, tugging me with them, the small branches snapping.

If they planned to hide me, why be so obvious with their passage? Had Breckon been warned to look for this plant? Was that it?

That had to be it. I determined as soon as the men left and I could be sure they were some distance away, I’d move and secret myself somewhere Voski would be skilled enough to identify, but Breckon wouldn’t.

Except that, as the men dragged me through the bushes, it became harder and harder to breathe. My heart raced, and anxiety rose in my veins.

I kept losing focus—trying to reach Voski, desperate for his reassurance, only to find that impossible, impassable wall between us. And in the despair of that, my body slumped. My head grew hazy. The men repositioned me, turning me so my back was to the tree and I looked back in the direction from which we’d come.

What was happening? What had happened? Why couldn’t I feel Voski?