The magic had done her bidding. She’d asked it to free her from the mat. It just hadn’t done it in the way she’d imagined.
She gasped and looked at Hana. There really was something about sharing the same blood.
Sora rose and began to walk toward her sister, but not two steps later, she tripped on something and fell. She swore, as she stumbled and tumbled to the shrine floor for the third time.
Yet she was an inch off the actual floor, even though she wasn’t asking the ryuu particles to help her levitate. What was going on?
She ran her fingers over the air beneath her. It wasn’t air. It was a reed mat. Invisible, but there.
“Gods,” Sora said, as she ran her fingers over it again.
Like how Hana hadn’t truly vanished, she realized. During the scrimmage, the visible part of her sister had just been camouflaged, but her physical body still existed in the ordinary world. The same had happened with the reed mat—it was both here and not.
Hana had told her to focus on basic firsts. But Sora never had been one to follow the rules.
“I’m going to make myself invisible too,” she declared.
Her sister’s veil of disdain lifted, as if Hana had forgotten she wanted to dislike Sora. It was replaced by a cautious curiosity. “Try,” Hana said, her mouth parting into a small O as she watched.
Sora located the emerald dust. Make me invisible, she willed it.
Her hand trembled, but nothing happened.
Try again. Make me invisible.
Again, nothing.
She thought about what had happened with the reed mat. The magic had swirled around and then the reeds had soaked them in.
Sora smiled. She rose to her feet. Instead of asking the ryuu particles to come to her, she would go to them.
The emerald particles flurried before her. She hurled herself into them, as if diving into a pool.
Stars! They absorbed her, or she absorbed them, and they were cool and hot at the same time, on her skin, in every blood cell, penetrating all the way to her core. She inhaled sharply. This wasn’t just the sauna-like feel of the magic before. Sora lit up from within. The ability to make herself invisible was a thousand Autumn Festival sparklers inside of her, and she laughed, spinning in a circle with arms out, intoxicated by the power.
Hana made herself invisible too, but she appeared to Sora as if shimmering, like the form of her sister but composed entirely of green jewels. Sora looked down at her hand. It was delightfully the same.
“We’re made of emeralds,” she said.
“I can’t believe you figured out how to do this so quickly.” There was nothing but wonder in Hana’s voice.
“I’m learning as fast as I can for you,” Sora said, her belly filling with warmth, as if she’d just eaten the most delicious, hearty stew. Being a part of Prince Gin’s ryuu made her feel as if nothing could go wrong. Fate had put her here, in this time and place, to be a ryuu. With Hana. “I want us to be able to do things together. I want to share your ambitions. I want to be your sister again.”
Hana frowned, her defenses going back up a little. “You’re doing this for Prince Gin. It’s because of his vision for Kichona that we’re all here.”
Sora shrugged. “Yes, for Prince Gin. But also for us. We’d get to fight together, Hana. We can forge a new path for Kichona, make history and be part of building a kingdom together. I know it’s hard to have me here all of a sudden, but you have to believe when I say I love you and always have, and I would have come after you a decade ago if I could. But I was eight.”
Hana tensed.
That was the wrong thing for me to say, Sora realized. Because no excuse was good enough, not when you were as scared and lost and hurt as tenderfoot Hana must have been. All she’d wanted was her sister, and Sora hadn’t been there.
“For what it’s worth,” Sora said, “if anything happened to you now, I would fight to the ends of the earth to save you.”
Hana blinked as if surprised. She opened her mouth to say something.
But then a horn sounded. The ryuu had rounded up all the taigas from the vast countryside in Tiger’s Belly. It was time to assemble them in the Society outpost building so that Prince Gin could speak with them.
Giddiness burst inside Sora like a geyser in Rae Springs, and the conversation with Hana was immediately forgotten. Sora jumped up. “Come on! Let’s go see the new recruits get initiated.” Prince Gin’s charisma was addicting, and she craved being in his presence some more.
She hurried toward the stairs that led down from the shrine’s tower. “I can’t wait to see His Highness honoring some of the citizens as Hearts too!”
Hana rolled her eyes. It was a typical little sister thing to do, though, and Sora shrugged it off. Also, Hana had probably seen enough of the Dragon Prince’s speeches that she wasn’t awed by them anymore. But that wouldn’t stop Sora from enjoying this. Or dragging her sister along.
“Please, Hana? I don’t want to miss any of it.”
Her sister rolled her eyes again—it was a wonder they were still inside her head—but then she said, “All right, all right.”
Sora grinned, and they ran down the stairs together.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The ryuu were gone by the time Daemon and the fishermen rowed into Tiger’s Belly. Daemon had known this would likely be the case. And yet the emptiness on the pier—the quiet berths and complete lack of sailors and merchants and the other men who usually populated the harbor—nearly brought Daemon to his knees. Prince Gin had come and gone through another outpost, stealing its taigas for his army, hypnotizing all the citizens, and likely selecting more Hearts for sacrifice. He was one step closer to the Ceremony, and Daemon was one step farther from stopping him.
And then there was the deafening silence in Daemon’s head. Nothing was coming through his gemina bond, and what he tried to send to Sora just bounced back. Was she safe? Had Prince Gin brainwashed her? Would Daemon ever get her back?
He hadn’t realized how much she completed him, until she was gone.
But Daemon couldn’t feel sorry for himself. Because if Sora was alive, she needed him. They were in this situation because she’d decided she wanted to do all that she could for Kichona, to be the best that she could be.
He had to follow suit.
“Thank you for your assistance,” Daemon said to the fishermen. “I’ll see to it that the Society knows of your good deeds.”
“It was our honor to help,” the eldest man said. They all bowed, then pushed off to return to their atoll.
Daemon hurried down the silent pier to the harbormaster’s office and pushed his way through the door.
“Agh!” a man shrieked from beneath the desk. “Please don’t kill me.”
Daemon jumped. He already had blades in his hands before he realized that the man had screamed in defense, not attack. He put away his knives. “Why do you think I want to kill you?”
The man wouldn’t come out from his hiding place. Daemon walked around the desk instead. “I promise you, sir, I don’t want to hurt you.”
A bespectacled fellow was sitting in a puddle of his own piss, and from the smell of it, it was likely he’d soiled himself in another way too. As soon as he saw Daemon, he started sobbing. “Please! I’m just the assistant to the harbormaster! I had nothing against your ship docking on the pier! Please don’t decapitate me.”