Page 8 of The Mercy of Dawn

Their first day of riding came and went with remarkable ease.

A tepid breeze and overcast sky guided Cyril and her uncles up through the narrow, overgrown trail that wove its way through the forested lands north of the estate. The same trail that would apparently deposit them right at the base of the Stygian Mountains in a few days.

All around them, the noises of a living, thriving ecosystem filled the relative quiet the group traveled in. The soft, persistent burble of the creek running parallel to their path. Leaves and branches and shrubbery, all rustling in the wind. Squawks and squeaks of curious creatures investigating what in the hells was disrupting their peaceful realm.

Cyril enjoyed the midday chorus of birds perched high in the canopy most of all, though she earned pitiful glances from Dion when she attempted her own whistled rendition of their songs.

And when Bron finally said, “Any chance you brought a book to read aloud instead, dove?” Tyr filled in where she lacked the ability to carry a tune.

Truthfully, the quiet that started their day wasn’t an unpleasant thing, but the longer the silence persisted, the more uneasy Cyril felt. For as cantankerous of a bunch as they were, to not have spent any of the day bickering with each other was unsettling.

There was some sort of displeasure simmering beneath the surface with every one of them, and that meant Cyril was stuck with a group of stubborn, brooding men for the rest of the trip. Or until one of them inevitably took a shot at the other.

Gods help her.

Even then, as they puttered about and settled into the glen that would serve as their camp for the evening, the only words spoken were ones of absolute necessity.

Bron and Tyr took off immediately to find some poor, unsuspecting creature to kill for their dinner—their dried rations, Cyril was told, were to be saved for the alpine leg of their trip—and they left Cyril to struggle with tethering three gods damned horses on her own.

Ren didn’t speak as much as he just huffed and cursed as he hauled around a few half-rotted logs for them to sit on around the firepit, set up by none other than the bearer of the Rhodea Flames himself. He filled a log nearly entirely on his own, with Cyril and Dion taking another, and Bron and Tyr sharing the third when they returned from their hunt.

“What...is it?”

Cyril wrinkled her nose as she inspected the creature as it made slow rotations on a spit over the fire, manned by Tyr’s watchful eye. It was already skinned and cleaned by the time they hauled it back to camp, and Cyril was wary of anything that large with fangs and hooves.

“Do you really want to know what we found lurking in the bushes, dove?” Tyr raised a single, wiry brow at her.

She blinked at him, and back at the roasting…thing. “Maybe not.”

Tyr chuckled—the first bit of normalcy since they left the estate ten fucking hours ago—and turned his attention back to the spit.

It was going to be up to Cyril to get these stubborn arses to do anything other than bore holes into the trees with their eyes. Usually she could rely on Bron to drive a bit of conversation when the others would brood, but considering he was actively taking part in the brooding today, she wasn’t going to hold her breath.

“Have any of you ever been to Reykr before?” she asked, glancing at the three men sitting opposite her and Dion.

“Nope.”

“Never.”

And a fucking snort from Ren.

Cyril took a slow breath. These men were intolerable, and she wasn’t sure how any of them lived this long without strangling each other.

Dion, at least, wore an empathetic smile when she looked at him.

“Many times,” he said, and Cyril was sure she caught Tyr’s hazel eyes rolling in the firelight. A bold statement from the quietest Rogue of Helia. “Not since you were quite young, though. Impossible to leave for a month or two when you’ve got a tiny creature clinging to you, screeching for every strand of your attention.”

Bron stifled a noise that sounded somewhere between a cough and a laugh while Cyril gaped at her uncle. The nerve of this fucking man—

Dion threw his arm around her shoulders and tugged Cyril so tightly to his side that she had to fight to get away from him as he added, “A tiny, screeching creature that I love dearly to this day.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Cyril grumbled.

She slid down to the other end of the log, glowering.

“But that is why”—Dion tossed a pointed glance back across the fire—“I can say with confidence the bullshit they spread about the moon-fae and Reykr isn’t true. None of this…what did you say again, Cyr? Bloodsucking and virgin sacrificing?”

His less-than-impressed gaze slid over to Cyril as she found a splinter in her hand to pick at.