6. BOND SICKNESS
Chapter six
BOND SICKNESS
PORTIA
The fire is already on my hand before I have decided to use it, and that is the most frightening thing that has happened all night.
He comes off the moonstone toward me, enormous and moon-silver and certain, the wolf with the bond behind it and one word in its whole body, and every instinct I own says do not run, running is what the animal wants, running is the last mistake.
So I do the only other thing I have. I have spent my whole life as a closed door.
Control is not a skill I have, it is the architecture I am built from, the load-bearing wall.
And here, in a roofless hall under an open moon, with the man I was made for pouring across the floor toward me in a body the size of a horse, that wall develops a crack I can put my fist through.
The flame curls off my fingers, pale and cold-blue, the wrong color for comfort, and I throw my hand up between us.
Not to burn him, God, never that, but to make him stop, to put one bright line of warning in the air that even a newborn wolf has to respect.
He stops.
He stops so fast and so completely that it undoes me worse than the lunge did.
The enormous head drops. The gold eyes, my eyes now, the bond insists, fix on the fire and then on my face, and the whole vast animal lowers itself by degrees to the cold stone.
Not in submission exactly. In offering, the way you set down something you are carrying because the person you are carrying it to has asked.
Mine, the bond says again, but quieter, asking permission now where a moment ago it only knew how to take.
And that is so much worse, because I can refuse a thing that grabs.
I do not know how to refuse a thing that lays itself down.
"Don't," I say, to him, to myself, to the fire, and the word comes out wrecked. "Don't, don't."
The mate-mark begins to form while half the room watches.
I feel it before I see it, a heat blooming at the curve where my neck meets my shoulder, a brand laid by no hand, the bond writing its claim into my skin because the wolf has shifted and the law's one condition has been met and there is nothing now, nothing, between the thing I am and the thing I was forbidden to become.
In the cold moonstone light I see the courtiers' eyes drop to my throat and go wide.
I did not even hear them arrive, drawn down by the alarm and the rumor of the heir, gathering at the mouth of the hall.
I see the exact second the smartest of them understands what the mark means, and what its appearing on a dragon's neck means, and begins, behind that careful face, to compose the message they will send the moment they reach a door.
Ferb sees it too. The old king's gaze moves from the mark to my face with an expression I cannot read and do not have the time to try, because the bond-heat arrives, and it arrives all at once.
This is the part the stories never warn you about properly.
They tell you the pull. They tell you the heat.
No one tells you that a new bond is a wound before it is a comfort, that the body, flooded suddenly with a connection it has wanted its whole life, does not celebrate, it panics, the way a starved person's body rebels at the first real meal.
My vision tilts. Heat and cold chase each other under my skin in waves that have no rhythm.
The fire on my hand gutters and I have to clamp it out against my own palm, and the small clean pain of the burn is almost a relief, a thing I chose, in a body that has stopped consulting me.
I cannot stay. If I stay another minute the scales come fully, in front of every witness in this hall, and a dragon hybrid revealed in the heart of the Polish court on the night of the queen's burial is not a scandal, it is a war, with my name on the first page of it.
I gather what is left of the wall. I find Ferb's eyes one last time, and the old man, who knows more than he has said, who said both crowns like a man laying down a card he has held for twenty years, gives me the smallest nod. Go, it says. I will hold this.
I go.
I do not remember the corridors. I remember the bond stretching as the distance opens, thinning, screaming, a rope paying out behind me with a hook still set in my sternum, and I remember biting down on my own tongue until I taste copper just to give the pain somewhere to live that is not the place where he used to be.
By the time I reach my own suite I am shaking so hard I cannot work the latch on the first try, and when the door finally gives I fall through it and put my back against it and slide to the floor and let the scales come, because here, alone, behind oak and iron, they are allowed.
They surface across my arms, my collarbone, the backs of my hands, iridescent and catching the lamplight, beautiful and damning and, for once, unwitnessed.
I let myself be the thing I am for one ragged minute.
Then I begin the long climb back to human, scale by scale, breath by counted breath, the way my tutors drilled into a child too young to ask why she needed to.
When I can stand, I try the suppression spell.
It is old dragon work, a thing my mother's line carried, meant to muffle a bond gone too loud, to put a layer of felt between the body and the pull so a diplomat can function, can sit in a room, can think.
I draw the sigil on the air with a fingertip dipped in my own banked fire and I speak the words and I press the working flat against my breastbone where the hook is set.
It backfires.
I should have known. A suppression spell is built to quiet a normal bond, a steady thing, a banked coal.
What is in me is not banked. It is a bond locked tonight, raw as a fresh weld, still glowing, and the spell meant to dampen it instead lands on it like cold water on hot glass and the whole thing cracks open wider.
The heat I was trying to muffle floods up through the broken working and takes me at the knees again.
I catch the edge of the dressing table. The mirror in front of me fogs with the heat coming off my own skin.
I am, I understand with a kind of distant horror, going to be no good to anyone tonight, not as a diplomat, not as a strategist, barely as a woman who can stand, because my body has discovered the one thing it was built to want and been told it cannot go to it.
And that is when the sigil appears on the mirror.
Not mine. I did not draw it. It blooms across the fogged glass from the inside, lines of ember-red light burning up through the condensation my own heat laid there, a shape I have known since the nursery, the coiled mark of the house of Dragonia.
My house. My father's seal. The summons-sigil, which is sent only when the throne itself calls a child home, and which has not been sent to me in nine years.
For a moment I simply stare at it, the way you stare at a familiar face in the wrong city.
Then the lines shift, the way summons-sigils do, rearranging from the seal into the brief brutal grammar of a message, and I read it twice because the first time my mind refuses it.
It is not my father's hand. The seal is his. The hand is not. The hand is my brothers'.
Come home, sister, it says, the ember letters steady and patient and somehow worse for their patience. Father needs you. Dragonia needs you. Do not make us send again.
The heat in my body goes, all at once, to ice.
I know my brothers. I know what it means that they hold my father's seal and write in their own hand.
I know what do not make us send again means in the mouths of Kael and Rhun, because I grew up downwind of their ambition the way you grow up downwind of a fire that has not started yet but intends to.
Bond-sick, half-shifted, marked on the throat by a wolf I cannot reach without breaking a court, and now summoned home to a kingdom by men who would not write in their own hand if my father were still the one giving orders.
I press my burned palm flat against the cold glass, over the ember letters, as if I could push the message back where it came from.
It does not go. Of course it does not go. Some doors, once a thing comes through them, do not close again. I am learning that twice tonight.
"All right," I say to the empty room, to the mark on my neck, to the sigil on the mirror, to the two enormous old creatures, mine and his, now chained together across a distance I am about to make so much worse.
My voice is steadier than I am. It is the one thing I have left that obeys me. "All right. One fire at a time."
I do not sleep. I sit with my back to the door and the bond aching in my chest like a struck bell that will not stop ringing, and I watch the ember letters slowly fade from the glass, and I plan, because planning is the only prayer I know.
By morning I will have to choose which fire to walk into first. The one with his name on it, or the one with my father's.
I already know it will be the wrong one. They both are.
Dearest Readers,
She could have burned him. Do you understand that? The fire in her hand could have stopped his heart, and instead she used it to stop his feet, and half the court watched her do it and saw a brand bloom on her throat that will start a war.
But that is not the part that frightens me, loves. This is:
Come home, sister. Do not make us send again.
The seal is her father's. The hand is not.
Now, my clever darlings, tell me what it means when a king's seal is in a son's hand. Tell me what it means that they wrote at all, when they could simply have come.
And tell me why they waited until tonight.
Turn the page.
Your author.