Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
“I should get down and walk alongside you.”
I reach a hand around and grab her knee, hooking my fingers behind it. “You stay right where you are.”
Her chest expands against my back as she inhales deeply. Then her legs erupt in chills from the touch of my hand behind her knee.
“It’s fine, Callistina. No one is going to touch you.” I say it, and I mean it. But she’s right. These people walking along the road with us look really put out that she’s riding the pegásius behind me.
I give Ire a little kick and send him into a trot. His stride is massive and covers a lot of ground, so we leave this group of people behind. But there are more small groups ahead. Everyone going in the same direction—no one coming back this way.
Which makes sense now that I understand when we are.
For this is the world I was born into.
This is the world of my beginning.
The woman I left Pie with back in the human realm—Lisa. Her name is always there in my head even though I want to forget it—she thinks I just abandoned her and Pie, but that’s only partly true.
Once I realized Pie’s magic wasn’t available—didn’t come with her, i.e. I wasn’t going to be able to steal it—I did leave. But I had intentions—maybe not every intention, but one or two intentions—of returning after gathering more knowledge of Pie’s curse.
Ironically, my plan was to locate Callistina. Since Callistina was her sister, and present at the ceremony when I took little Pie, I figured she’d have a perspective on that night that could enlighten me. Could help me break little Pie’s magic free.
Then… Pressia happened.
The child bride of my half-brother Pell. Would-have-been bride, at least. That wedding never happened. Why she was so upset with me I still don’t understand. I mean, she was practically a baby.
Who wants to get married when they haven’t even lived yet?
After I stole Pie and then disappeared through a door in the dingy hotel room where Lisa was keeping the little gryphon princess for me in the human realm, there was fog waiting for me. A nothingness. It felt right. Appropriate. Punishment, of course. But I had it coming. I knew that and so it felt right. And familiar.
But it wasn’t the gods getting even with me for ruining their little caretaking ceremony where Pianna—lioness from the House of Fire, First Daughter of all deities, Second Daughter of Saturn, gift-daughter of Ptah, holder of one magic bag of rings bound up in a spell straight out of the mouth of Ostanes herself and shoved into the beak of an invisible bird—was being sold to the King of Vinca and his chimera princeling, Tarq, to make a godling royal beast even more powerful than the old succession gods themselves.
It wasn’t them.
It was her. Pressia.
She was a shrieking little child. An angry little speller with a glowing ruby-red doorknob as big as her fist hanging around her neck. And she was gooooood at it.
She pointed a tiny finger at me and seethed, “I see you.”
I don’t remember what I said. Maybe nothing. I didn’t understand what was happening. I certainly didn’t perceive her as a threat. Annoying, cringe-y, for sure, but not a threat. Not in that tiny hysterical body.
But then, out of her mouth, came the spelling…
“Once you were great, once you were tall. But now you’re bait, and now you’re small.
You steal the love, not set it free. You take the joy, from them, from me.
I see you now, I see you then, I see you everywhere you’ve been.
And you will know my name forever, you will know my spell is clever.
Not just some words and pretty rhymes, my spells are deep and keep the time.
I curse you now, evermore. The magic ends with the last great war.
You cannot win, you will not prevail. You will be lost in time and tale.
For it is not gods who rule this place—they have no honor, truth, or grace.
It is the magic of the spells that keep us safe, and warm, and well.
We craft them careful, make the words, and wrap them up in beaks of birds.
So go, and live, and rejoice. But know, my enemy, this is not your choice.
Goodbye, lost god, be gone for good. Be the man you know you should.”
I mean, what was she? Seven? I was stunned at the complexity of her spelling. I couldn’t process things properly, I do remember that. Because I was really stuck on that line that said, I see you now, I see you then, I see you everywhere you’ve been. I didn’t know she was an oracle until she said that line. I don’t even know how she knew she was an oracle because oracles are old. All over the age of forty because it takes decades to figure out if they’re insane or truly seeing through time. There are hundreds of tests. Dozens of proofs. And only then, when they have predicted things with accuracy, are they led into the chamber of a god and blessed with the ability to spell through time.