“It totally is. I have a piece of paper and everything.”
“Oh my gods.”
“My malt brings all the boys to the vestibule.”
“What does that even mean? What the hell is you—you know what? I don’t even care.”
Kevin spread his wings and laughed as we left the island and the snake dragon known as Zero Ravyn Moonfire behind.
Chapter 21: The True Cornerstone
RETURNING TO Mashallaha went quicker than I expected it to. Maybe it was the fact that we’d succeeded in what we’d set out to do, that something had actually worked the first time we’d attempted it, even if it’d been a bit of a bumpy road to get there. I didn’t know what it was I’d expected, but I didn’t think it mattered. We’d gotten the desert dragon on our side. I had Kevin already. That was two out of the five. The Great White had said I wasn’t ready. The star dragon had said there would be a sacrifice. But we’d come out ahead so far. And Zero was right: stone crumbled. We would prove everyone wrong, like we always did. I didn’t care if the gods themselves decried us. We would show them. I had faith in those around me. I had faith in myself. I wasn’t going to be controlled by Vadoma. I wasn’t doing this for Morgan or Randall. I was doing this because it was the right thing to do. And I would do this.
Stone crumbled.
Ruv went ahead as soon as we’d gotten into view of Mashallaha, saying he wanted to report to Vadoma as quickly as possible. He snapped open his sailboard and took off down the dunes, the wind at his back. Before he got too far, he turned and winked at me.
“Reporting to Vadoma?” Gary asked. “That didn’t sound ominous at all.”
“He’s probably a spy,” Ryan grumbled. “Gathering intel to give to Vadoma.”
“You just don’t like him because Vadoma wanted him to be my cornerstone,” I told him. “If he was anyone else, you’d think he was great.”
“No,” Ryan said, lying through his teeth. “He rubs me the wrong way.”
“I could teach him how to rub if he’s doing it wrong,” Kevin said.
I ignored him and focused on Ryan. “You know it’s nothing, right? There’s nothing there.”
“Tell your magic that.”
I rolled my eyes. “You knew there was more than one. That there could be multiple cornerstones.”
“Yeah, but I never expected to meet one,” he said. “And am I the only one thinking about how Vadoma knew that? She didn’t know you. She knew of you. How could she know who your magic would react to?”
That… was a fair point. “Huh. I never thought about that.”
“Knight Delicious Face has brains and brawns,” Tiggy said.
Ryan preened a little at that. Like a show dog.
“Maybe it was her visions,” I said, though I was loath to give any credence to that. I still thought her more of a fortune-teller than an actual seer. Maybe the star dragon had been a fluke, and everything else she’d done was smoke and mirrors. The Great White had said I wasn’t ready, but how did I know that had even happened? And the warnings about Ryan’s death. For all I knew she’d been manipulating me from the beginning, showing me only what she wanted me to see.
Stone crumbles, Zero had said.
And it did. But not if it was an illusion. Not if it was sleight-of-hand street magic.
“We shouldn’t trust her, kitten,” Gary said, pulling me from my thoughts. “Nor him, though he seems… enthusiastic. I think he’s harmless, but you can’t be too careful. We don’t know what Vadoma’s been feeding him all these years.”
Gary was right. Throwing caution to the wind would only end up getting us in trouble.
The problem?
That’s pretty much how we operated.
WHEN WE walked into Mashallaha a few hours later, we were greeted quite differently than we’d been the first time. Where we’d initially been met with distrust and derision, the gypsies now welcomed us as if we were the long-lost brothers of the clan. It was rather alarming, this change, because I couldn’t prove its veracity. These were the same people who had looked upon me with disdain because my skin wasn’t as dark as theirs. These were the people who had shunned my mother because she chose to love outside the clan. These were the people who didn’t seem to want to lift a finger to help us in any way.
I didn’t know if it had to do with Vadoma announcing that Ruv was my cornerstone before we left, but I thought it was a possibility. My suspicions seemed confirmed when Kevin and Gary and Tiggy had brightly colored scarves draped around their necks, similar to the one around mine, but Ryan was all but ignored. We’d been gone for just over a week. Which meant Vadoma had had eight days to fill her peoples’ heads with more of her rhetoric.