They headed up the steps of the plane on the heels of his words.
Aodhan was the last one to board, and he kept his eyes turned toward the window as the plane began to roll down the runway. He didn’t look away even after they were in the clouds . . . not until they’d gone too far for even Illium to catch up to them.
9
This part of Morocco was an arid brown and gold landscape broken up only by hardy mountain wildflowers, waving grasses, and occasional groves of deep-rooted trees that provided an unexpected kiss of green to the landscape, but it was spectacular in its starkness.
Elena had been looking forward to the feast to the senses that was Marrakech, noisy and crowded and her kind of place, but they landed even deeper inland, at a private airstrip a considerable distance from the city with which she was most familiar. From there, they flew on the wing over and into the Atlas Mountains and to a sloping peak on which sat a stronghold that was all graceful curves and arches.
Lumia was formed of thousands of small sand-colored bricks that blended into the landscape, and rather than being one big block, it was a sprawling stronghold with myriad pathways and sections that flowed into one another, giving the place a delicate and almost ethereal air. She also glimpsed two domes far apart, one of which looked like glass, the other opaque.
“It’s like the Taj Mahal,” she said to Raphael when he flew close enough. “This huge thing that somehow has an air of beautiful fragility.” The Taj, too, appeared to float against the sky.
“Lumia was designed on the principles of perfect serenity, as understood by the Luminata. Each brick, each pathway in the garden, all of it.”
While the courtyard gardens she could see from the air appeared to be manicured and green with precise placement of foliage, mountain flowers covered the hillsides that swept down to gorgeous golden meadows on which it appeared no development had ever taken place.
But for the Luminata complex, there were no other buildings or roads within sight. No vehicles. Not even people on less modern means of transport. She couldn’t even glimpse the walled border that Raphael had told her protected Lumia on three sides. There had been no wall on the side over which they’d flown, the mountains providing a natural bulwark. “When you said the Luminata like their privacy, you meant it. Are the borders patrolled?”
Raphael maintained his position at her side with a minute change in his wing balance. “The sect has a small complement of guards who ensure no one breaches Lumia’s peace, but for the most part, the people here—mortal and immortal—know that these lands are forbidden to all except by invitation.”
“They have a lot of land if we can’t see the walls.”
“Not so much in the scheme of things. Perhaps an hour’s flight from the mountains to the far border at most.” Eyes of unfathomable blue met her own. “Is it all you imagined?”
Elena took another look at the compound getting closer with every wingbeat. “I’m not sure. I think I was expecting something more like the Refuge Library.” Stately and with a heavy sense of age about it. “Or maybe an austere monastery. This is more grand in a way. Peaceful and quietly lovely, but with an awareness of its own beauty.”
She deliberately “nudged” at him with a wing, their primaries barely brushing. “What about you? Is it as you remember?”
Raphael hadn’t flown wingtip to wingtip with anyone for a long time before Elena. Smiling deep within at the playful contact, the youth he’d once been rising to the fore, he nudged her carefully back. He was far stronger than Elena, and while she had incredible grace in the air, she’d only been in flight for a mere flicker of time.
Laughing as his nudge spun her to the left, she said, “Whoop!” and flipped over onto her back for a moment that had his heart crashing against his ribs as he prepared to catch her fragile not-yet-fully-immortal body.
If she hit the earth from this altitude, she’d break. She’d die.
But she angled her head down in a gentle curve, her body following, and was right-side-up again in a matter of seconds.
“I am going to kill your Bluebell,” he said, dropping two feet so they were wingtip to wingtip again.
A grin. “How did you know he taught me that?”
Raphael just raised an eyebrow.
Laughing again, his unrepentant consort blew him a kiss. “Don’t kill Bluebell. He’s teaching me to do a downward spiral roll right now.”
“Clearly, Aodhan is not the only one suffering pangs of boredom.” Raphael felt his lips kick up, the stab of fear retreating under a wave of memory featuring an intrepid little boy with wings of extraordinary blue. “Did he tell you who taught him the spiral roll?”