I swung around to face her. “You should never have come with me! You should have stayed back at Arbassa, where at least you’d be safe.”
Her gray-blue eyes examined me. “I don’t want to be safe. I want to be with you.”
I squashed a vine under my heel. “Why bother?”
“Because . . . I want to.” She glanced sadly at the dark water. “Despite what the lake told me.”
“What did it tell you?” She sighed heavily.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Remembering my own vision of Balor’s eye, I nodded. “All right. But I still don’t know why you want to stay.”
Something in the sky caught her attention, and Rhia looked up. Following her gaze, I found two distant shapes, weaving their way across the horizon. Although I could barely see them, I knew at once what they were. A pair of hawks, riding the breeze together. They flew almost as one, bobbing and turning in unison, in the way Rhia and I had moved as fishes.
“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked, her eyes following the birds. “If they are like the hawks in the Druma, they not only fly together, they build a nest together, a nest they share for their whole lives.”
All at once I understood. What tied the hawks to each other, what tied Rhia to me, had nothing to do with vines. Or ropes. Or chains of any kind.
I turned back to her. “I guess, Rhia, the strongest bonds are invisible. Maybe . . . the strongest bonds are of the heart.”
***
