Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
We stumble back together, Reave's arms still locked around me, both of us struggling to stand as the wind from beating wings whooshes over us.
His heart thunders against my back as we watch Sesca soar higher and higher.
My own is pounding even harder. I vaguely realize we're too close to one another again, but I can't get myself to move. My legs are still shaking from the climb, and from the sheer force of the creature ascending before us, this divine dragon that has chosen me for reasons I still can’t fathom.
She’s…incredible.
And my fears were unfounded, it turns out; she flies effortlessly, as if she’s been doing it for an eternity. Which I suppose she has, even if it was in different shapes, across different lifetimes.
She eventually glides out of sight, her silhouette swallowed up by the darkness beyond the palace walls. I finally exhale the breath I've been holding. Little by little, I become less aware of her and more aware of myself. Of Reave. Of how I could move—my legs feel more solid now.
I should move.
But I’m too focused on the way his hand is lazily trailing along one of the sheer panels of my dress, only the barest of fabric separating his touch from my skin.
We both continue watching the sky, catching the occasional glimpse of Sesca spinning, diving, twirling among the moonlit clouds, and the moment feels surreal and sacred and set apart from everything, everything I’ve ever known and believed.
Eventually, Reave’s hand moves higher, sliding the waves of my hair to my opposite shoulder before he angles his mouth toward my ear and says, “I think she’s managing the flying part well enough.”
I nod—the only reply I can manage with the tingling heat spreading through me—and I slowly turn to face him.
A mistake.
The dizzying questions that have been threatening my balance go up in smoke, leaving me with only a singular, dangerous query.
What happens if I lean toward him now?
We’re alone up here. Sesca is nowhere in sight.
The guards that often station themselves along this rooftop are nowhere to be seen.
The servants who dealt with the chains have moved on from down below.
Clouds are shifting over the moon, blocking its light, and the darkness seems to wrap around us like a shared cloak, pulling us together until there is no space left between us—only tense silence and a smoldering, dangerous heat.
“I’ve wanted to kiss you all night,” he murmurs, a ragged, barely-there restraint to the words, and a dark desire in his gaze that tells me he doesn’t want to stop at just a kiss.
My hand reaches for his face before I can stop it, knuckles grazing the strong line of his jaw, mind wondering what it would be like to trace every angle of him this way.
My breathing turns shallow at the thought.
I lower my hand to his chest. He places his own over top of it, holding it to his fiercely beating heart.
“There’s no one around here that we need to trick,” I point out in a whisper.
“I know.”
“So who are we trying to fool?”
His forehead leans into mine. He cups my face, his thumb tracing my lower lip with careful, considerate precision, like he’s trying to decide what part he wants to taste first. “Ourselves, maybe.”
I exhale a bitter little laugh.
He’s nearly fooled me, at least.
Again.
I take a step back. His hand holds on to mine as I go, and I can’t bring myself to pull it free. I just shake my head and say, “This is a bad idea.”
His grip tightens for a moment before he seems to realize what he’s doing. “Yes. It is.”
He releases me.
I wander away from him, hugging myself and searching the skies for Sesca.
I don’t see her. I don’t feel any trace of the warmth she was lending me earlier, and though I try not to let it, the dread finds its way in.
It’s a well-worn path at this point, after all, as often as I’ve let the fear of loss and abandonment flow through me.
“What if she doesn’t come back?” I whisper, more to myself than Reave.
“She’s bonded to you,” he says, stepping closer. “She’ll come back.”
I don’t answer, keeping my gaze on the sky.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” he asks.
“I swear she can read my mind at times, and she…” Wrapping my arms more tightly around myself, I move to a portion of the roof that hangs out farther than the rest, with an intricate railing and occasional notched grooves likely meant for resting weapons upon—one of the vantage points the guards are often stationed in.
Reave follows, watching me expectantly.
“She knows me,” I finally manage to say. “Maybe better than anyone, at this point, and so maybe…maybe she’s seen something about me that’s going to make her keep flying as far away as she can possibly get.”
He gives me a bemused look. “What are you talking about?”
I loose a shuddering breath. This…this is one of the chains I’ve yet to break—this secret that I’ve kept buried so deeply inside of me for so long that it feels like I couldn’t possibly dig it up and release it.
Then I picture Sesca’s body shooting upwards toward the moon, and I wonder what it would be like to drop the weight of my own chains, to fly so effortlessly, so freely.
I decide to try.
Bracing my hands against the railing, I say, “I think I resisted my bond with her when I first arrived here because I didn’t want to be…
known. It terrifies me, letting anyone or anything in like that.
Part of the reason I was so committed to my role as an Ashwalker was because it gave me an excuse to not get close to people.
You can’t, when you’re in that line of work.
It’s too dangerous. People don’t expect you to open up to them about the things you’ve done, and so nobody knew the real me.
And I liked it that way—the way it was respect for my profession, not fear, that kept others at a distance.
Briar is the only one I’m truly close with, and there are things that even she doesn’t know.
Things that would likely scare her away if I told them to her. ”
His gaze flicks toward the sky. “Things that would scare off a dragon, though?”
It’s a long time before I find the courage to keep speaking. Even then, the words are strangled because I’m still clinging so tightly to them.
“The other day, you asked where my older scars came from.” I place a hand over the patch his sister made, my thumb tracing the ruined skin peeking out from underneath. “This one…this one happened on a night we refer to as Emberfall.”
He leans back against the railing, watching me with undivided attention, now.
“It started out…beautiful, almost. Bits of fire falling from the clouds like a soft rain. We didn’t realize what was happening; that it was actually a precursor to much more violent magic.
There were no dragons to be seen—there hadn’t been any sightings for weeks—and most went to bed thinking it was nothing but another strange, natural phenomenon we couldn’t explain.
Most of us had seen stranger things.” I take a deep breath, exhaling it slowly.
“Then I woke up to my city in flames.” Another deep breath.
“But what I’ve never told anyone is that I saw…
signs, in the days before it happened. Dreams. Visions.
Warnings. Like someone, something was trying to protect me.
I ignored them, though. I didn’t tell anyone. ”
“Understandable enough…people likely wouldn’t have believed you. If that’s your only crime—”
“It’s not.”
His brow furrows.
“Most of the city burned to the ground that night. I lost my parents. My fiancé. The people of Halvgate blamed your kingdom for the attack. They thought it was because of the Ashwalker guild headquartered there—that you wanted to eliminate us because of the role our kind played in keeping the kingdoms connected and united in some small way. And I encouraged that rumor.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his eyes slightly wide, as if he’s searching his memories for some order he might have given, some brutal choice he might have forgotten about. “I don’t think I…I didn’t command any such attack.”
I fix my gaze straight ahead. “I know you didn’t.”
I sense his eyes narrowing on me. He doesn’t speak, but there’s expectation in the silence. Patient, deliberate expectation while his words from days ago dance in my head—
Show me the worst of it.
I don’t know what it is about this man that makes me want to reveal the worst of myself.
Maybe I’m just tired of keeping it to myself. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t hate dragons the way everyone back home does, and so it feels safer, admitting this next part to him.
I take the covering from my eye, winding the band of it around my wrist as I say, “Now that I can’t deny the bond Sesca and I share, it’s confirmed something horribly wrong about me. Something that I’ve always feared.”
“Which is…?”
“That Emberfall was my fault.” The words shake as they finally claw their way out, dragging five years’ worth of pain with them. “It was my fault the dragons came to Halvgate that night. They were looking for me.”
“For you?”
“Commander Gareth and I have talked about the way lesser dragons and divine dragons interact,” I continue, voice trembling.
“How the lessers can’t resist yielding to a divine once it’s come into its full, bonded power, and so they’ve been known to attack them when they’re still young.
I think that’s why Sesca was injured when they found her.
And that’s why the more beastly, lesser ones tried to kill me, years before that.
They were trying to prevent the bond from having a chance to manifest, to become strong enough to control them. ”
He looks as though he wants to refute this, but he can’t seem to find the words.
“They should have killed me.” I close my eyes for a moment, trying to prevent tears from welling up in them. “I wish they had.”
“Arowyn—”