Page 103 of Raven's Dawn

“No. It will not,” Iliantha’s voice came from behind me. I spun that way, just in time to see her strip off her drenched blue gown. “Someone, somewhere, will be under attack very soon. The air an tagadh will retaliate with far more brutality than we bestowed on them today.”

“They will,” Rania said. “It won’t be long. But it won’t be tonight. Tonight, we return to our queendoms, and we celebrate.”

Over the next few hours, a search was done on the island. Five air an tagadh remained. Caeda and Rania took them as captives. I didn’t know what they planned to do with them, and I didn’t care to ask.

The remnants were exactly as we expected. Many, many bodies. Mostly air an tagadh, along with some mangled, half-cannibalized corpses.

We still didn’t know what that meant. Hopefully, the captives would fill us in eventually.

But we were all exhausted beyond belief.

Bringing Jake back had been the hardest, most power-draining thing I’d ever done, but it didn’t hold a candle to today. I couldn’t explain it; all I had done was hold up a shield. But my gods, my body seemed to believe that we had lifted an eighteen-wheeler off the ground.

The others said that was normal. No matter how often I used large sums of power, I would be exhausted afterward. Apparently, it was a problem we all faced.

That said, Luci brought us all back to the cabin at the capital. He promised he would bring Jake home once we were settled. It was almost nightfall—not that it mattered—and we fell asleep immediately.

And no, we didn’t stay in the beds we had claimed when we arrived. Even though the mission had gone exactly as planned, we hadn’t lost a single life on our side, I guessed we all needed the embrace of our soul mates.

As Iliantha had predicted, we made it back just in time for the solstice festival. It started tomorrow and would span through the following day. As we retreated to our rooms, I asked Ramona if she’d join us.

She said, “I think I’ll rest for a while. But I hope you all have fun,” and carried on to her room in silence. As she’d been for most of this trip. I wanted to talk to her more, to get a feel for how she was doing, but I wasn’t sure how.

We were all treating this differently. Ezra and I saw it as a learning experience. Graham, a bitter memory he wanted to escape from. Warren, an internal quest to understand his identity without the Chambers. And Ramona…

I didn’t know. All I knew was that back home, on Earth, she was fun and silly. Here, she was hardly more than a wallflower.

Maybe before our next mission, I’d try to speak with her some more. If I couldn’t, maybe Warren could. He was her brother, after all. They had to have some common ground in all of this.

Although I wanted to ponder more, to process the last week, to prepare myself for the solstice festival, to hear Graham ramble about it for hours, all I could manage was a smile when his tangent began, and a, “That’s nice,” before drifting to sleep.

It was a dreamless one, and I was grateful for that.

The next morning, I awoke to bright sun shining in the windows. The guys weren’t far behind. It had been a few nights since we’d taken a shower, though. Well rested or not, I couldn’t wait to get out of that stinky bed and into a nice hot bath.

Like the bath I had taken at Cadea’s castle, I basked in it for far longer than necessary. When I came out of the room, a note was on my bed.

You were taking forever. We’re going to Iliantha’s. She has more tubs than this place. Come to the dining hall when you’re ready.

Love you,

— Graham, Ezra, and Warren

Graham had been the one to write it. I knew his chicken scratch.

Honestly, though, I had been around all of them nonstop for days. I was not at all opposed to a few minutes alone.

But I didn’t get that.

Because just after I finished applying some lotion to my incredibly dry skin from all the wind over the last week, a knock sounded at my bedroom door. I thought it would be one of the guys, so I said, “Come in.”

“Checking that ye’re decent first,” Amara said.

I grabbed my robe off the back of the door, tossed it on, and tied it at my waist. Opening the door, I propped my hand on my hip. “Well, this is a surprise.”

Rather than her typical armor, she wore a blue cloak that brought out the vibrancy of her eyes. Her wavy hair was spun into an elegant updo. She even wore a bit of red lipstick and shimmery gold atop her eyelids.

“Come on now,” she said. “We don’t hate each other that much.”