She was likely barren to boot, being her parents’ only child, even after hundreds of years of trying—one way to make sure that my line died out, I thought viciously. Only I had already found fertile fields here. My hand rested for a moment on Ronog’s belly, swollen with the proof of that. I looked into her freckled face and felt my heart clench. Marred, they called it, and alien and mixed blood and common, and a thousand more insults besides.

Beautiful, I thought, and broke away.

I pulled back, desperately trying to separate my consciousness from the fey’s before I lost myself in it, but it only brought me back to that half immersion I’d started out with. It left me feeling less like the person in question and more like his backpack, one he was carrying along whether I liked it or not. It was maddening!

There was no way to know who he was, but the shadow on the ground in front of me looked like someone dressed in armor, and his hand had been gauntleted. He also had a helmet on, topped by a feathered plume. Its shadow bounced as he jogged away from the girl’s small house.

I hadn’t known that people could jog in full armor, but he barely felt the weight of it, although whether that was because fey armor was lighter than the human variety, or because he was stronger, I didn’t know.

He headed up a hill overtopping the village, where a huge, feathered creature was tethered to a pole. The beast was in the middle of eating a mole that had gotten too close, its great beak ripping into the red flesh held between its mighty talons, its eagle-like eyes watching us warily, as if it thought we might be after its snack. I saw the fey’s hand reach out and grab its bridle, and heard his voice tell it to hurry up, that they had work to do.

The beast did not hurry up and tossed its eagle-like head with what looked like disdain at the suggestion. But it did allow us to mount the saddle affixed to its back. It felt completely unlike a horse under our body, being lithe and low to the ground and heavily muscled, and it moved with a fluid grace that a horse could never match.

Caedmon, Aeslinn’s old enemy and the fey king currently occupying his capitol, had told me once that Svarestri warriors sometimes came into his lands, trying to steal gryphon eggs. Caedmon’s fey used the creatures, which had an eagle’s head and wings and a lion-like body, as sky mounts, as the adult ones were powerful enough to carry a fully grown fey. I’d gotten the impression that very few Svarestri had succeeded in doing likewise, but it looked like at least one had.