Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
It feels different every time I approach Blight here lately. This time, I’m greeted with the tiniest bit of warmth, though it pulls back almost immediately after it hits—as if she’s happy to see me, but she doesn’t want to show it.
Maybe she missed the routine of our usual training.
Maybe I did, too.
I don’t think either of us is ready to admit this, but it’s a positive start to our visit, nonetheless. I try to appease her further by immediately offering up the gift I’ve brought for her: a basket of marrow bones.
“The servants told me that this seems to be your favorite treat.”
She slips down from the platform she was lounging on, moving with surprisingly silent grace, her frill raised and her golden gaze narrowing on the bundle in my hand until I drop it at her feet.
While she crunches through the bones with obvious satisfaction, I take in the arena and all the evidence of my fiery loss of control.
It’s dark—because I put this visit off for longer than I should have, probably—but I can still make out the scorch marks climbing the walls like black vines, the sand fused to glass in places, the charred training equipment.
My appraisal is soon interrupted by a dragon snout shoving into my hands, then sniffing at all of my pockets. When it’s obvious I have no more treats on me, she instead points her nose at my face and inhales deeply.
You smell like the king.
I sigh, pushing her away. “I thought that would have worn off by now.”
It hasn’t. She tilts her head, studying my face. You come with questions.
“Or maybe I just came to enjoy your company?”
She snorts.
I give her a crooked grin. “No fooling you, is there?”
Turning her back to me, she slinks back toward her platform. It groans a bit as she leaps onto it. After circling a few times, and carefully stepping over and through the chains that bind her, she flops down and fixes her eyes on mine.
Ask.
I slowly step toward her. “…I was wondering about an ability you might have. Is it true that a divine dragon can see what drives a person—the flame that most fuels their soul?”
Karath-ven, in my tongue. Her nostrils flare. Fire-reading, in yours.
“That’s right.” I chance another step closer.
“I’m trying to make sense of it. Of what you see.
Because you didn’t get upset when the king got close to me yesterday, and you didn’t act as though he was a threat to me—even though I’ve spent most of my life believing there is no greater threat to me than King Reave and all that he represents. ”
She regards me silently. Patiently.
“But you seemed so certain of Gareth and the danger he might pose.”
Anger always burns brightest, even when it’s buried deep.
I think of the moment Reave and I first met. The way he seemed on the verge of losing control that night, and several times since. “You don’t see anger when you look at the king?”
No.
“What do you see, then?”
She considers for a long moment.
Sorrow.
I don’t know what I expected her to say, but it wasn’t this.
My knees feel a bit weak, suddenly. I want to sit, so I start to climb up on the platform she’s reclining on.
In the dark, my single eye misjudges the distance when I try to reach for one of the chains that helps support that platform; I slip, but Blight’s tail curves under me, catching me and lifting me the rest of the way up.
The feathered fronds along the end tickle my skin as she rolls me onto the cool metal.
I crawl over and settle on the edge of the platform, staring at a charred target on the ground below, considering her words.
“Sorrow can make men as dangerous as anger,” I think aloud.
Yes. And the entire palace echoes with this same sorrow. It rises up through the sand in this very arena. The air is thick with it.
“But why? What is causing that sorrow?”
I don’t know. She shuffles in her chains, restlessly fluttering her wings for a moment before settling closer to me. Her head lifts skyward, and I remember the way she stared up at that circling dragon. The sense of longing she felt.
Quietly, I ask, “Is it hard for you, being surrounded by these feelings of sorrow? Being chained up here—especially now that your wings have healed?”
I could break these chains, if I wanted to.
“Then why don’t you?”
She slowly lowers her face to mine. Because you have yet to break yours.
“I’m not chained as you are. I agreed to come to this palace, and our agreement has—”
I’m not talking about your agreement with the king.
Her cryptic words are annoying. I stretch out my legs, only to tuck one back underneath me, trying and failing to get comfortable under the weight of her penetrating stare. “You know, you’re a bit of a know-it-all for a dragon who was born just a short time ago.”
She gives another indignant snort. I have breathed before, in different skin. And I will breathe again when this skin turns to dust. And wisdom does not die; it burns eternal, so long as it has willing bearers.
“In different skin…your kind are capable of reincarnation, you mean?”
She hums out a low, echoing sound. Something ethereal and ancient, like wind sighing through a forest that’s older than civilization itself.
I take it as a yes.
“Do you remember the former dragons you were? The humans you bonded with before?”
This is the only bond that matters now. And I am the only one there is.
The words feel impossibly heavy, even in her soft voice. I blow out an exasperated breath. “What sort of games are the gods playing, thrusting us into this messy, impossible place? What could they possibly want from a nameless dragon and a nobody from the edge of the Ashlands?”
I am not nameless, and neither are you.
A bitter laugh rises automatically in my throat.
But as I look at her—at the moonlight striking her scales, the powerful grace of her pose, the impossible depth in her gaze—the laughter fades. The bitterness recedes, just for a moment. Just long enough to let a quiet question escape me.
“What is your name, dragon?”
No answer, as expected.
Not at first.
Then a breeze begins to stir, subtle and warm, enveloping me in a scent of smoke and jasmine.
The tips of my fingers and toes tingle. The sensation sweeps in toward my heart, a wave that soon pulses through my entire body. It carries with it a single word, presses it into my mind like a promise, deeper than either of the ones I marked on my arms.
Sesca.
The voice that speaks the name doesn’t sound like her—and yet I know, beyond any doubt, that this is her. Everything she is, or was, or ever will be.
I want to speak it out loud. But my lips won’t move. I feel even more like a nobody as I hold it in my mouth. Like I’m not meant to have it, I haven’t earned it, I can’t possibly carry the weight of it without stumbling and falling.
Yours, now, she insists.
I close my eyes, resisting the familiar urge to deny her. To run. When I open them again, she’s watching me like I’m the only thing in the world that she’s aware of just then.
Another question trembles out of me. “And what sort of flame do you see when you look into my soul?”
She glances once more toward the sky, blinking as she takes in the bright moonlight, exhaling another of those soft, ethereal sounds.
There are no clear flames, she says. Only embers.