I wasn’t looking forward to tonight.
The sun was high above us when I realized the horizon I’d been staring at wasn’t where the clouds met the land. I sat straighter, gripping the saddle as patches of dark green started to appear in the gray ahead. This mist. It was the mist obscuring the mountains, so thick that for however many miles we’d traveled, I’d believed it to be the sky.
“You see it now?” Casteel asked. “The Skotos?”
Heart stammering, I nodded. “The mist is so thick. If it’s like this during the day, how much worse is it at night?”
“It’ll thin out a bit once we get into the foothills.” Casteel’s arm remained secure around me as I stretched forward. “But at night—well, the mist is all around you.”
I shivered as more of the mountains began to peek through the mist. A rocky cropping here, a cluster of trees there. “How did the armies get through the mist then?” I looked at Kieran. “How did you get here so quickly.”
“The gods allowed it,” he replied, and my brows rose. “The mist did not come for us. It thinned out at night, enough for us to continue forward.”
I sat back against Casteel, hoping the gods would allow us the same.
Casteel burst the bubble of hope the next second. “The mist is never as bad leaving Atlantia as it is entering.”
“Great,” I murmured.
“We’re lucky that the Skotos Mountains are nowhere near as large as the range beyond,” Naill said from where he rode on Jasper’s other side.
“There are larger ones?” The Skotos Mountains were the largest in Solis, that I knew of anyway.
The Atlantian nodded. “It takes less than a day to cross where we’re passing through. However, some peaks would take days.” He shifted on his saddle. “But there are mountains in Atlantia that stretch so high into the sky, you see nothing else. Peaks so high that it would take weeks just to reach the top. And once there, even an Atlantian would find it difficult to breathe.”
Tendrils of mist began to creep between the bushy reeds, forming little clouds above them.
Beckett dashed ahead, and within a heartbeat, was swallowed up by the mist. I sucked in a sharp breath, straining forward as I reached for my dagger—
“He’s okay.” Casteel’s hand closed over mine. He squeezed gently. “See? There he is.”
My heart didn’t slow as the dark, furry head appeared above the mist, tongue lolling as he panted with excitement. “Are you sure there’re no Craven here?”
Riding slightly ahead, Emil said, “There hasn’t been a Craven this far east since the war.”
I still remained alert as we neared a blanket of mist where only shadows of shapes existed behind it. Muscles tensed as every instinct in me wanted to grab the reins and pull Setti to a stop. We couldn’t possibly pass through this. Who knew what waited on the other side? And what if they were wrong about the Craven? Goosebumps broke out across my skin as Jasper and Emil disappeared through the wall of mist. A shout built in my throat, lodging there when Delano vanished into the thick, grayish-white haze. I started to press back against Casteel—
He slowed Setti. “The first time I saw the wall of mist from the other side, I refused to pass through. It wasn’t because of the Craven. I hadn’t learned yet that they travel in the mist. It was that I feared we’d reached the very end of the kingdom, and that there was nothing beyond it,” Casteel told me, his arm a band of steel around me. “I know that sounds silly, but I was young, less than a year from the Culling, and Kieran also feared passing through it.”
I looked to our right, where Kieran kept pace with us. After everything I’d learned, I still found it hard to picture either of them afraid of anything.
“It was Malik who went through first,” Casteel continued, dragging his hand around my waist in a slow, comforting circle. I looked down, my gaze snagging on the golden band he wore. “For a moment, I thought that was the last I saw of my brother, but then he came back. Told us there was nothing but weeds and sky on the other side.”
“That wasn’t what he told us at first,” Kieran chimed in. “Malik claimed there were giants with three heads on the other side.”
“He said what?”
Casteel laughed. “Yeah, he did. We believed him until he started laughing. Bastard doubled over with it.” There was a fondness in his tone, and it was so rare to hear him speak of his brother without sadness and anger. “It will only take a few seconds to pass through. I promise.”