9. OPPOSITES
Chapter nine
OPPOSITES
LEON
Iwant to burn Dragonia to the waterline, and I have known this woman for two days.
That is the first thing I learn about a locked bond, that it does not care how long you have been a person of reason.
The letter is still smoking faintly in Portia's hand, the memory of the blood-wax stink , and the wolf in me has already drawn the map.
Find the brothers. Find the father. Take an army through whatever door these dragons came in by and make the men who wrote one piece at a time understand the sentence from the inside.
My hands are shaking with it. Not fear. The other thing.
The thing Ferb warned me about, the weapon other people aim.
"We leave tonight," I hear myself say. "I have men. Keith has more. We go to Dragonia and we end this before they touch him."
"No." One word, flat, and she does not even look up from the letter when she says it.
"No?" The wolf does not like the word. The man makes the wolf hold still. "Portia, they are threatening to dismember your father."
"I can read." Now she looks up, and her eyes are the worst kind of calm, the calm of deep water with everything dangerous living under it.
"You think I do not feel every word of that letter in my teeth?
You think the thing in me is not screaming louder than yours right now?
It is. I have simply had longer to learn how to be screamed at from the inside without doing something stupid about it. "
That lands. I make myself breathe. The bond carries it both ways, I keep forgetting.
She can feel the heat coming off me the way I can feel the ice coming off her, and the two of us standing in this sunlit room are a weather front, a place where a cold mass and a warm one meet and make a storm out of nothing but proximity.
"Then tell me the smart thing," I say, "because right now the only plan I have is teeth."
Something in her shoulders eases, just slightly, at the question.
As if she expected me to keep pushing and is surprised, in some old worn-down place, that I stopped to ask.
"The smart thing," she says, "is to understand what they actually want before we move, because if we move wrong we hand it to them.
Listen to me. My brothers did not send that blade in here to kill me.
If Kael wanted me dead I would have died nine years ago, quietly, in Dragonia, where no one would have made a song about it.
" A flick of her eyes at me, dry. "No offense to your profession. "
"None taken. Go on."
"They want me to come home. The blade was the threat and the letter is the leash.
They need me there, alive, inside their walls, and the only reason a dragon prince ever needs his sister inside his walls is blood.
" Her hand finds her own throat, over the hidden mark, an old gesture.
"The Ember Cup runs on the blood of the old lines.
My father is old line. I am old line. If they have my father in a ritual, as I think they do, then he is the cup they are already drinking from, and I am the spare.
They are not going to waste me on a knife.
They are going to bleed me slowly for years. "
The room tilts a little. The wolf goes very quiet, which is worse than the snarling. "Then we do not send you anywhere near them," I say.
"We send me exactly there," she says, "because that is where my father is, and because a leash only works on someone who runs from it.
I do not intend to run." She sets the letter down on the silver tray with a control that costs her, I can feel it cost her, the bond does not let her lie to me about that even when her face does.
"But I walk in on my terms, with the ground prepared, knowing where the doors are.
Not tonight. Not with teeth. With a plan. "
"Then we make a plan together." I close the distance, and I take her hand, the burned one, careful, and she lets me.
"Here is mine. You lead the dragon side.
All of it. Their court, their factions, their relics, the things I do not understand and will get us both killed pretending to.
That is yours. I do not overrule you in your own country. "
Her eyebrows go up a fraction. She did not expect that either. "And in exchange?"
"In exchange you do not walk into a room full of people who want to bleed you without me in it.
Ever. That is the whole price. You run the war.
I will not let it run you alone." I feel the wolf agree with this, finally, a low satisfaction settling, because it is not teeth now, but it is never apart, and the wolf can live on that. "Deal?"
She looks at our hands for a long moment. "You are far more reasonable than your reputation," she says quietly.
"My reputation sells records. Do we have a deal?"
"We have a deal." And the bond, when she says it, gives a single warm pulse, like a struck note finding its harmony, and for one second the storm front in the room becomes something gentler, two weathers learning to share a sky.
The how comes together over the next hour, and it is, I will admit, the one piece of this that the pop star is good for.
"You have a tour," King Ferb says, when we bring it to him, and there is a gleam in the old man's eye that tells me he is three steps ahead again.
"A great loud traveling circus of trucks and crew and security that moves between countries and no border guard questions, because the whole world expects the singing prince to be excessive.
" He taps the cane. "Announce a memorial tour.
For your mother. Grief is unimpeachable.
No one searches the grief of a prince too closely.
And under the staging and the sound equipment and the busloads of people no one counts, you move whatever you need to move, wherever you need it. "
"Soldiers in the road cases," I say slowly. "Keith's people as crew."
"Allies as fans," Portia murmurs, and there is something almost like admiration in it, aimed sideways at me. "Hidden in the one crowd too large and too loud to audit."
It is a good plan. It is a genuinely good plan, and for a moment the three of us stand in the light of it, and I let myself believe the next part might be survivable.
Then Varrik finds me alone in the corridor, the way he always seems to, like damp.
"A tour," he says, falling into step. "How moving. The grieving heir, singing for his dead mother across the continent." He smiles. "Tell me, Your Highness, do you know what I do, while you sing?"
"I try very hard not to think about you at all."
"I gather things." He produces a folder.
Old paper. A photograph clipped to documents I cannot read upside down but recognize the shape of, the shape of records, the shape of proof.
"The night the sea gave you up. The men who took you.
Who paid them? Who profited from a lost heir, and who has been profiting quietly ever since.
" He lets me see just enough, then tucks it away, neat as a card sharp.
"I have the whole story of what you are, Leon.
Where you come from. Whether your claim is even clean.
And I will sell it to whichever throne pays best, unless you give me a reason not to.
" The smile widens. "Your dragon would make an excellent reason.
Hand her to the people asking, and your secrets stay buried with the rest of your childhood. "
The wolf wants his throat. The man holds the leash, barely, because Ferb's voice is in my head, a king who only does what his wolf wants is a weapon other people aim, and I will not be aimed by this.
"You just made one mistake," I tell him, and my voice is very calm, which frightens him more than shouting would.
"You told me you have something I want. Now I will spend the rest of my life taking it from you instead of buying it.
" I lean in. "Sing your story to whoever you like, Varrik.
But the next time you say the word her in a sentence about a trade, I will stop being the reasonable one.
You will not enjoy the version of me that lives underneath. "
I walk away before he can answer, and I find Portia waiting at the end of the corridor, and she has heard all of it, the bond told her the shape of it before her ears did, and her face is doing something complicated.
"You should have taken the deal and learned what he knows," she says. "About your past."
"I know what I need to know about my past." I take her hand again. "It tried to drown me, and it failed, and it left me here. The rest can wait. You can't."
And the bond, when she finally lets herself lean into me, just for a breath, in an empty corridor where no one is keeping score, sings the same single note it sang in the hall, the one that sounds, if I let myself hear it, dangerously like home.
Dearest Readers,
He wanted to take an army and level a kingdom, and she said no, and he stopped and asked her for the smart thing instead.
I want the young men reading this to notice that. He stopped. He asked. He handed her the war and kept the promise.
But Varrik has a folder, loves, and folders are more dangerous than blades in my experience. He has the whole story of the night the sea took a boy of five. Who paid. Who profited. Whether the claim is even clean.
And Leon walked away from it. He chose her over the truth about himself.
Was that love, my darlings?
Or was that the first genuinely reckless thing our careful prince has ever done?
Turn the page.
Your author.