“It makes you skitty?” For a lethal creature, sometimes he used words that struck her as utterly childish.
“Shaky? Like you can’t be still?”
She smiled. “Can I wait with you up here?”
“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “I was hoping for that.” He threaded his legs beneath the wooden rail, letting them hang over the edge. Aria sat cross-legged beside him.
“This is my favorite place in Delphi. It’s the best spot to read the wind.”
She closed her eyes as a breeze swept past, searching for what he meant. She smelled smoke and pine on the cool wind. The skin along her arms tightened.
“How are your feet?” he asked.
“They’re still a little sore, but much better,” she said, moved by the simple question. With him, it wasn’t small talk. He was always looking after people. “Talon’s lucky to have an uncle like you,” she said.
He shook his head. “No. It’s my fault he was taken. I’m just trying to fix it. I’ve got no choice.”
“Why?”
“We’re rendered. There’s a bond between us through our tempers. I feel what he feels. I don’t just scent it. Same for him.”
She couldn’t imagine being linked with a person that way. She thought of what both Roar and Rose had said about Scires keeping to their kind.
Perry leaned forward, crossing his arms over the rail. “Being away from him, it’s like part of me is gone.”
“We’ll find him, Perry.”
He rested his chin on the rail. “Thanks,” he said, his eyes fixed on the courtyard below.
Aria’s gaze moved to his arm. He’d pushed his sleeves up above his elbows because of the cast. A strong vein laced the swell of his bicep. One of his Markings was a band of angled slashes. The other was made of flowing lines like waves. She had the urge to touch them. Her eyes trailed up to his profile, following the small rise at the top of his nose, finding the thin scar at the edge of his lip. Maybe she wanted to touch more than his arm.
Perry’s head snapped over to her and she realized he knew. Heat bloomed across her cheeks. He’d scent her embarrassment, too.
She scooted to the edge and swung her legs over the side of the roof like him and tried to look interested in the goings-on below. The courtyard showed more signs of life. People were moving here and there. A man split firewood with practiced thwacks of an ax. A dog barked at a young girl who held something high, out of its reach. As much as she concentrated on what she saw, she still felt Perry’s attention on her.
“What are you going to do after you find Talon?” she asked, switching tactics.
He relaxed over the rail again. “I’ll get him home, then form my own tribe.”
“How?”
“It’s a matter of winning men. You get one who’s either willing or forced to follow your lead. Then another and so on. Until you have a group big enough to stake out some land. Fight for it, if need be.”
“How are they forced?”
“In a challenge. Winner either spares the loser’s life and earns fealty that way, or . . . what you’d imagine.”
“I see,” Aria said. Fealty. Allies. Oaths taken at the point of death. They were ordinary concepts in his life.
“Maybe I’ll head north,” he continued. “See if I can find my sister and get her to the Horns. Maybe I can fix that ruffle before it’s too late. And I want to see what I can find about the Still Blue.”
Aria wondered where that would leave him and Roar. It didn’t seem fair to keep two people who loved each other apart.
“What about you?” he asked. “When we find your mother, will you go back to those virtual places? The Realms?”
She liked the way he’d said Realms. Slow and resonant. She liked even better the way he’d said when we find your mother. Like it would happen. Like it was inevitable.
“I think I’ll get back to singing. It was always something my mother made me do. I never . . . I never really wanted to sing. Now I have the urge to do it. Songs are stories.” She smiled. “Maybe I’ve got my own stories to tell now.”
“I’ve been thinking about it.”
“You’ve been thinking about my voice?”
“Yeah.” He gave a shrug that managed to seem both shy and offhand. “Since that first night.”
Aria had to rein in a ridiculously proud smile. “That was from Tosca. An ancient Italian opera.” The song was for a male tenor. When Aria sang it, she brought it up just enough to get it into her range, but still kept its lost, mournful quality. “It’s about a man, an artist who’s been sentenced to die, and he’s singing about the woman he loves. He doesn’t think he’ll ever see her again. It’s my mother’s favorite aria.” She smiled. “Besides me.”
Perry pulled his legs around and sat against the rail, an expectant smile on his face.
Aria laughed. “Seriously? Here?”
“Seriously.”
“All right. . . . I have to stand. It’s better if I stand.”
“Then stand.”
Perry rose to his feet with her, leaning his hip against the rail. His smile was distracting, so she gazed up at the Aether for a few moments, breathing the cool air into her lungs as anticipation stirred inside of her. She’d missed this.
The lyrics flowed out of her, springing straight from her heart. Words full of drama and wild abandon that had always embarrassed her before, because who flung themselves at raw emotion like that?