The aunt, nephew, and his friend sat on a quilted blanket that had been laid out on the short grass of the Carmelia, the massive stadium named in honor of the seventh Akaran king’s wife. Around them, the flat field stretched out in all directions, running right up to the walls that hemmed the exhibition grounds. Beyond that, terraced levels of bleachers rose up, enough contoured benches to hold thousands of spectators. They were empty at the moment, though, save a few cleaners working their slow way down the aisle. These Mena barely noticed. The four Numrek guards who stood on watch were more conspicuous, spaced throughout the bleachers in an approximate square around Aaden, their special charge.

Above them, Elya soared through the air. She, of course, was what so captured the boy’s attention. Seemingly in answer to Aaden’s request and Mena’s thought, she steadied her wings and tilted into a slow, circular flight, lifted higher on thermals of warm air.

“You’ll get a stitch in your neck if you keep looking up like that,” Mena said, winking at one of the three servants that stood attending them. The young woman smiled back.

Aaden showed no sign of having heard her.

Eventually, Elya was but a speck in the sky.

“She’s going to disappear,” Devlyn said. He was a handsome boy, slightly taller than Aaden, dark haired but with features that did not clearly mark his ethnicity.

“She won’t, will she?” Aaden asked, his enthusiasm exchanged for concern. And then, as if something had just occurred to him, “Tell her to come down now.”

“But you just told me to send her up! She’s barely gotten started.”

Mena joked with them for a time, playing with their growing anxiety. When both boys began to look truly troubled, she set an arm on Aaden’s shoulder and did as he requested. She was no surer now how the communication between her and the creature worked than she had been at first. There were no rules to it, no way to explain or quantify it. She simply thought to Elya, and Elya responded. It was not words Mena used but visual images. As now: she saw the world from high above and imagined plum meting down, the contours beneath her taking shape, the outline of Acacia amid the shimmering cobalt sea, the terraced palace and the lower town and the spit of land upon which the Carmelia lay, three people waiting on a square of woven fabric. She imagined all this and knew that Elya would both think it and understand what Mena meant by it.

That was just how it seemed to work, with images and also with emotions. Elya could pick up Mena’s frame of mind readily. Sometimes Mena realized what she was feeling only because of something Elya did in response to it. When Mena grew pensive, thinking about Corinn or concerned about Dariel on his mission far away, Elya might make faces at her, invite her to fly, or simply draw near and let joy radiate between, like heat from her body.