Chapter 7
Seven
Nilsa said nothing about my unusual sleeping arrangement the following morning, but I suspected she mentioned something about it to Rhylan while I was in my room, forcing down Kirana’s godsforsaken mixture and pacing back and forth near the toilet.
When I arrived at the eyrie’s dragon terrace, wearing simple, fleece-lined leathers that had been tailored to my frame, he had an odd look in his eyes as he took me in.
That look, which might have been misconstrued as sympathy by a less cynical draga, vanished as Viros joined us by kicking open the door to the storage room.
I peered past him at the carefully-organized harnesses hanging from chains set in the ceiling, ranging from basic leather configurations, to the gleam of a full set of dragon armor in the shadows at the back of the room.
It was a well-tended eyrie, everything neatly labeled and organized, with a desk set near the storage room door. Maps had been pinned to the wall above it, and an enormous ledger was laid open on its surface. All Eyrie-Masters kept exacting records of which dragons entered their eyries.
Viros caught my attention, holding out a measuring tape. “Good morning, Princess Sera. We’ll need to take fittings for the final harness this morning, but this one should suffice for practice flights.”
The title almost made me twitch, but I needed to get used to it. Once, I’d thought nothing of being referred to as ‘princess’ by the Bloodless people of Silvered Embers, though it’d often been prefaced with a diminutive ‘little’ until I’d been enrolled in the Training Grounds and began preparing for my majority.
I nodded to Viros, allowing him to begin whipping the measuring tape around my legs and waist.
“Have you worked on any more of our silent code?” I asked Rhylan, managing to question him without actually meeting his eyes. “We’re going to need more signals than what we worked with the first time.”
Gods, it was ludicrous that I couldn’t look him in the face without cringing. He’d managed to knock me so thoroughly off-kilter with that almost-kiss that it actually pissed me off.
I despised this dragon. Not as much as my father and Yura, it was true, but enough that for the first time in my life, his presence made me wish I were Bloodless, and no longer subject to the biological drive to find a strong mate that was ingrained in all draga.
“I’ve given it some thought.” Rhylan held several leather gloves. I forced myself to hold still as he took one of my hands, his fingers pressing lightly into my palm, and began to slide one of the gloves on me. “This one’s too large. We should keep the basic signals—I’ll remember them easily. But maybe you should decide on the ones for other problems. I can feel it when you touch my back. Perhaps a touch system would work.”
The gloves were all well-worn leather, lined with soft fleece. The third glove was a perfect fit, encasing my arm almost to the elbow and flexing as easily as my hands.
“Why the change of heart?” I spread my fingers, made a fist. “I thought you wanted to control the flight.”
Rhylan peeled the glove off, and it was probably my imagination that he held my wrist a little more delicately than he really needed to.
I didn’t miss the warning look Viros gave him, either. The Eyrie-Master didn’t look like a man who would tolerate any foolishness in his domain.
“You are the one in danger during flight,” Rhylan finally said, checking the size of the glove rather than meeting my eyes. “I was rushed and desperate when I came to retrieve you. If this is going to work, I need you to be as comfortable as possible with flying on me.”
I stared at him, taking in the sharp blades of his cheekbones and the way his jaw flexed. He knew he was being stared at, and I could almost see the discomfort written in the broad lines of his shoulders.
Meeting my demanded level of comfort and trust should have been obvious from the beginning, but…peace. We had promised each other to try harder.
“Thank you for thinking of me,” I said carefully. “I think a tap system might work best, since I’ll need to be able to keep one hand free for emergencies.”
Many mate bonded draga wielded weapons during flight. That would be almost impossible without the mind-speech, but I would need to be able to ride while keeping one hand free. It would look odd to any other dragonbloods if I clutched the reins with both hands like my life depended on it.
“We can keep your system as well,” I quickly amended. “It’s easy enough for the major issues.”
Rhylan nodded, passing the discarded gloves from hand to hand. “Look, your comfort matters to me. But don’t forget I’ll still be in control during the flight, so don’t be shocked if I choose to—fuck.”
If he chose to what?
But his eyes were focused somewhere over my shoulder. I whirled around, taking in the mountain vista through the columns of the eyrie’s peak, at first seeing nothing but shredded wisps of cloud wreathing the jagged black Krysien peaks.
Then I saw a glimmer of pale blue in the sky, and heard the distant snap of a wing beat.
“Get in the storage room,” Rhylan said, focused on the incoming dragon.
Viros held the door open for me, waving a hand. I went to him in a hurry, not in any rush for a dragon and rider to see me like this. We weren’t even close to ready.
Viros nudged me behind the door. “Stay here,” he said quietly, and for whatever reason, he tapped on the far edge of the door, near the hinge, before leaving and shutting it behind him.
The pleasant scents of leather and polish filled the air. Moving quietly as the wing beats grew louder, I shifted towards the corner, and saw why Viros had tapped it.
There was a slight crack at the edge of the door, and between the wood and the stone wall, I had a narrow slit to peer through. I could make out a thin slice of the terrace, a hint of Viros’s white hair to the left, one of Rhylan’s shoulders to the right.
They stood back, watching as the dragon descended through the dragon door and settled on the terrace.
He was not as large and bulky as Rhylan, his form thinner and sleeker, glimmering the pale blue of glacier ice. A silver-coated muzzle sprouted long feelers that waved in the wind, and the simple riding tack was vivid white leather.
As the dragon tucked in his narrow wings, I got a closer look at his rider.
The draga on his back wore a set of pure white leathers to match his tack, an expensive outfit even without the silver embroidery accents and tiny, sparkling blue topazes studding her gloves and boots. Long blonde hair was braided and pinned into an elaborate coil at the back of her head, disheveled by the wind, and her cheekbones gleamed with dusky blue scales.
“Prince Rhylan,” she greeted, sliding from the blue dragon’s back. He shifted into a tall male, slithering from the tack and stepping to his mate’s side.
Like his dragon form, his up-tilted eyes and the scales on his chest and arms were pale blue; his hair was a deep chestnut, trimmed short.
“Lady Elinor, Lord Doric.” Rhylan nodded to them, his arms crossed. It wasn’t warm and friendly, precisely, but neither was it hostile. “Are you here for Kirana?”
Elinor pushed blonde flyaways back from her forehead. The lovely draga looked tired, with dark circles under her eyes; her paleness made the tiny scales on her cheeks stand out like old bruises. “Not this time, but I’d appreciate it if you told her I’d said hello. We’ve just come from the Shadowed Stars. Maristela has officially mate bonded to a dragon from Mourning Fang. She ran off last week against her mother’s wishes to do it, and their House is in uproar.”
She shook her head wearily, and Doric wrapped an arm around her. I envied that simple gesture of affection.
“The lord is newly graduated from the Training Grounds, but they’re hoping the Jade Leaves will throw in their support.” Elinor leaned her head against Doric’s stiff shoulder as he spoke.
Rhylan frowned, exchanging a glance with Viros. “The Jade Leaves are more concerned with House lineage. A boy barely out of the Training Grounds from Mourning Fang isn’t going to hold their interest.”
Elinor let out a small, tired laugh. “I tried to tell her, but Maristela wouldn’t have it. She’s weakened her House and claim with this. Yura is going to eat them both for breakfast without batting an eye, and at the rate she’s collecting promises, we’re all going to have a problem. This is just a rumor, but I heard she was courting the Iron Shards to back them as a Court. There’s a good chance they’ll stand by her side after the First Claim, and she’ll have the right of might from the beginning.”
In my hidden corner, I gritted my teeth at the mention of my sister.
Doric met Rhylan’s gaze, his mouth turned down at the corners. “And what of you? You haven’t announced a mate yet. Lunar Tide stands ready to lend their support to your House.”
I saw the muscles in Rhylan’s back tense. “If you can trust me on this, wait for the First Claim.”
“Have you found one?” Doric asked sharply, his eyes narrowing. “We should know before—”
Rhylan shook his head. “Not now. You’ll find out soon enough.”
Both draga and dragon peered at him suspiciously. I could see from the way Elinor’s head tilted towards her mate, the way Doric tapped his fingers against her shoulder, that they were speaking mind to mind.
“There are few princesses left with direct blood-claim to the royal throne,” he said delicately, his gaze moving around the room to the table laden with gloves and harnesses, clearly ready for use. “Now that Maristela has been mate bonded…that leaves very few options I can fathom standing a chance against Yura and Tidas.” The edge in his tone could put a freshly-honed knife to shame.
“After all the years of friendship between our Houses, I’d hoped that you could put a little more faith in me,” Rhylan said, his blue eyes burning. Black scales shifted down from his shoulders, creeping over his golden skin.
Doric squeezed Elinor, their mind-speech resuming. Finally she inclined her head. “We’ll trust you…for now. But the First Claim is going to be ugly, Rhylan. They’re poised to annihilate half the Houses if this turns to war.”
“Not if we have anything to say about it,” he replied with a thin smile.
Doric raised a brow, but didn’t attempt to refute him. “We should leave now, or we’ll be flying through the night,” he told his mate.
Elinor smiled up at him, but the expression left her lips as she looked back at Rhylan. “I hope you’re right. Give Kirana my love, please. And don’t let us down.”
Doric stepped back into his tack and shifted, and Elinor quickly adjusted and rebuckled the harness before climbing onto his back with the lithe grace beaten into us in the Training Grounds.
I needed to re-learn that grace in the next week or so, or all of Rhylan’s promises would be for nothing.
He raised a hand as the blue dragon darted into the air, Elinor clinging to the harness with the confidence borne of a mind-speech bond.
I didn’t emerge from the storage room until the dragon was a speck in the distance.
“No more princesses? Looks like you’re stuck with me,” I commented, shading my eyes to watch as Doric vanished into the clouds. I pursed my lips in a mocking pout. “Poor Maristela, missing out on a big, strong dragon like you.”
“Or are you stuck with me?” Rhylan murmured in my ear, warm at my back. My skin prickled into goosebumps from my neck all the way down to my toes. I was glad I wore long-sleeved leathers to hide it.
“I suppose we’ll find out, depending on which one of us tries to kill the other first today,” I said cheerfully, gathering the gloves he’d selected as a pretense for stepping out of his shadow.
Viros handed me a thick belt, to which I’d attach a sword on future flights. I buckled it, settling it around my hips, and looked up to find Rhylan watching me with an unreadable expression.
“Yes?” I asked impatiently, pulling my gloves on. We still had to go through the process of fitting a harness that would keep me from falling off before we could fly, and he hadn’t moved an inch.
He finally shook his head, reaching for the harness Viros had brought out. “You were…different in the Training Grounds.”
As they pulled it into the middle of the open space in the terrace, I found myself watching him with a frown, mulling over his words.
Of course I’d been different. I’d been a royal princess, secure in my position, confident of my inheritance, still ignorant of starvation and terror and grief.
In the Training Grounds, I’d had to watch every step, every word that came out of my mouth, for fear that Yura would use them against me. I’d had to be the perfect draga for Tidas, knowing that any misbehavior on my part might cause the Razored Cinders to reconsider our mate bond arrangement.
I chose not to say any of these things. They didn’t matter now, and I didn’t owe Rhylan an explanation.
Tidas was mate bonded now, and to be truthful with myself, I had to admit that I didn’t care in the slightest. In fact, all I felt at knowing I had no obligation to him was relief. He was not who I would have chosen for myself.
Rhylan stepped beneath the stiff upper half-circle of the harness and began to shift, the bulk of his dragon form taking up much of the eyrie’s breathing room.
He crouched, giving us access to his chest as Viros showed me how to buckle the harness around him.
I ignored the warmth of the dragon’s scales, focused purely on maintaining a cool distance as I buckled the massive straps.
The harness was designed to be stiff, so that a male could step beneath it before shifting and end up with the seat roughly where it should be, and the rider could simply buckle it into place with a few adjustments.
I patted the buckle when I was done. “Is this comfortable?”
Rhylan showed me all his fangs in a dragon grin.
“It’s lined,” Viros said, showing me the edges of the straps. A much softer leather was used for the inner lining, to prevent a dragon’s scales from being chafed, and the outer leather was treated to withstand the elements and combat.
Before mounting, I made an effort to remember my time in the Training Grounds. My practice saddle had been much smaller; the training masters had given me a practice dummy modeled on Tidas’s dragon form, per the request of my mother.
I’d gotten used to leaping up and landing in a saddle on a dragon nearly half Rhylan’s size.
Rhylan stretched, settling the harness into place, and knelt for me. He bent one leg, giving me a convenient step up.
I planted my foot there, jumping up into the saddle the way I remembered. The muscles in my legs protested, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. All of the food I’d devoured in the past day had given me a burst of energy I hadn’t had on Mistward for that first awkward mounting.
Viros raised his brows. “I expected…well, something a little clumsier.”
I wriggled a little, taking up the reins attached to the saddle while I ensured the harness wouldn’t slip sideways. “There was a time I could’ve done that in my sleep.”
Literally. The Groundskeepers had roused us from our beds at times with pots and pans, forcing us to run out to the ‘stable’ of dummy dragons to mount up. I’d developed most of my strength in those days.
Fortunately for me, what little body mass I’d retained on Mistward was mostly muscle, wasted though it was. The years spent hunting and foraging had ensured I wouldn’t be entirely out of shape.
Every day that I drank the horrible slop Kirana made, I would gain a little strength back. The successful mounting made me resolve not to complain about it any more.
“Now, let me show you the modifications,” Viros said, dragging over a step-stool to reach my height. “These were pulled from the designs of a wyvern-rider’s harness and saddle, which fully buckles the rider into place. Obviously, they need to have much stronger connections at the cost of mobility, but I managed to tweak them a little.”
He had attached thin leather bands to the saddle itself, their darker color almost hidden against Rhylan’s hide, with silver hooks attached to the ends.
As I watched, he slid a finger into the seam of my pants by my inner knee, revealing a strip of fabric I hadn’t noticed before.
“How delightful,” I murmured, copying his movement on my other side. The tailor had stitched reinforced flat loops into my riding leathers, all but invisible against the seams. The bands on the saddle hooked through them, effectively holding me in place.
“They won’t hold up against anything more turbulent than an average flight,” Viros warned. “That would be impossible without the bonds being more visible, and if we tie you to the saddle like the Prince is a wyvern, we may as well announce our deception to the world. But they should be enough to give you peace of mind in the air.”
He climbed back down, pulling the stool aside.
Rhylan rose on all four legs, his tail thrashing. This time I was far more comfortable, holding reins that were securely attached to my saddle, rather than looped around his neck.
Even when he climbed up through the dragon door, his claws digging into the black rock of the mountain as he headed towards the peak, I didn’t feel the terror of that first flight, when I’d clung to the ropes with such desperation.
My stomach fluttered from nervousness, knowing what was coming, but some of those flutters were anticipation. This was almost going to be a true ride, the kind I’d trained for.
He climbed towards the peak, and I leaned forward in the saddle, bracing my feet in the molded stirrups. There was a slight tug as gravity pulled me down, but the straps kept me from sliding backward more than an inch or so.
Rhylan turned his head, eyes flashing at me.
“Yes, I’m obviously ready, or I’d still be down there on the ground like a sensible person,” I told him, gripping the reins tightly. “Get on with it.”
There was a dragon grin again, a rumbling chuckle that I felt through the saddle.
He bounded the last few feet to the peak, and flung us out over the other side into open air.
For a horrible moment we dropped, my ass sliding forward in the saddle. My stomach jumped straight up into my throat as the wind tore at my hair, my third eyelids coming down on my next blink.
Then his wings snapped out, catching the wind gusting between the mountains, and we glided out over the Krysiens.
I exhaled slowly, adjusting my grip on the reins. It wasn’t perfect, but the modified saddle provided security I hadn’t felt before. It was easier to adjust my posture to his motions now, adapting my own body to move with his.
I patted his back twice, right on top of the knotted, silvery scars. “This is going to work. We can do this.”
He pumped his wings, racing further into the mountains. At times he canted, making me feel unsteady, but I dug my heels into the stirrups, leaning low against him. It had been a long time since I’d ridden a practice saddle, but muscle memory began to come back to me.
I knew how to do these things; I’d trained for it ceaselessly, knowing that my life, and my mate’s, would depend on my abilities one day.
Letting my dislike of both Rhylan and the lack of mind-speech slide away, I focused on nothing but the massive dragon beneath me, the currents of the wind, the awareness of open air between me and the ground.
We flew over the mountains, leaving behind shredded clouds for a brighter sky. The jagged Krysiens gave way to smaller mountains, some capped with the thinnest, sparkling dust of snow.
Even without the mind-speech, this flight might have been the greatest peace I’d ever known. There was nothing but the sky and the air, the dragon and the wind.
This would work.
I raised one fist in the air, letting out a wild scream of victory. Rhylan shook his head, the motion rippling through his entire body, blasting out a roar that echoed over the mountains.
He drifted lower, gliding over the mountain tops towards a round, deep tarn, dropping low enough that his claws brushed through the icy, pitch-black water and left froths of foam in his wake.
Then he raised a clawed hand, flicking the icy water over his shoulder at me. It splattered across my mouth, the taste clear and mineral, and as the wind whipped my wet skin, my face froze numb.
“You son of a—”
Rhylan barked a dragon’s rough laugh, veering upwards. I gripped the reins tight as he circled the tarn, the water reflecting us as perfectly as a mirror.
“I’ll get you for that,” I promised, though he couldn’t hear me.
He continued on, flying past the tarn and towards a plateau in the distance. I scrubbed droplets of ice off my cheek, my legs tensing as he moved in for a landing.
Rhylan moved lightly for a dragon of his size, the landing smoother than I’d anticipated. There was only one brief moment when I hadn’t braced myself and just about got my teeth jarred out of my mouth, something that wouldn’t have occurred with a warning via mind-speech.
Don’t complain about what you don’t have, I reminded myself. I neither needed nor wanted that particular bond with Rhylan. The safety straps had worked just fine.
The top of the plateau was heavily cracked granite, limned with ice. I unhooked my safety straps with two quick tugs, sliding down Rhylan’s shoulder with much more grace than I’d achieved the previous day.
My legs and back ached, but I felt a thousand times better than I had before. I whirled to face the dragon, and found Rhylan in his male form, ducking under the curve of the harness, every inch of golden, scale-dusted skin exposed.
Black scales coated his heavily-muscled thighs, receding as I watched. His heavy cock swung between them, and though nudity was nothing to dragonbloods, not when they shifted so often, the primitive instincts of a draga came clawing from the depths of my mind.
Flashes of daydreams ripped through my brain: all that golden skin, those dark scales, covering my body with his, driving deep…
Immediately I averted my eyes out towards the lake, ignoring the flags of dull red burning on my cheeks. “That was a beautiful success. I had my doubts, but now I have to say, there’s a chance.”
Despite my embarrassment over the thoughts I’d just been entertaining, I couldn’t stop the grin from spreading across my face.
Maybe it wasn’t perfect; he wasn’t my mate, the dragon I’d trust implicitly with my life.
But it had been a real flight, almost exactly like the ones I’d dreamed of as a rider trainee.
“We’ve got this,” he said, grinning back at me. The brightness of the white sky made his eyes seem more brilliant than ever, bringing out a tinge of blue highlights in his black hair. “That was smooth as silk. A little more practice and we can win the Houses over, Sera.”
I looked up at him, realizing he was only inches away. If I just rose up on my tip-toes…
Everything in me revolted, wanting to step back, but this was part of the ruse, too. We couldn’t just fake being a riding pair; we had to convincingly appear to be mates, indivisible, a united couple against all enemies.
If I jumped away from him like a scalded cat every time he got within two inches of me, we’d fail.
I grew roots, planting myself right where I was, refusing to move an inch from him. “You’re still going to pay for your little stunt with the ice water.”
“Am I?” he purred, eyes nearly glowing. “If I recall correctly, I’m the big, strong dragon here.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Wait until your back is turned. You’ll never see me coming.”
“Ooh, dangerous,” Rhylan breathed, his grin growing wider. “Just the way I like—”
He stopped himself as abruptly as if he’d run into a wall.
My heart thumped unsteadily once, twice. I looked away, pushing my hair back as a pretext for hiding my face, sure that my cheeks were still burning.
This was too much pretending.
“What did you mean, that I was different?” I asked, changing the subject abruptly. “In the Training Grounds, I mean.”
Rhylan’s smile had faded. “You said about three words to me the entire time we were there. You wouldn’t even look me in the eye.”
It would take a team of rabid wyverns to pull the truth from me, that I’d been so hopelessly enamored that simply breathing in his vicinity had been a trial. I’d feared my face was breaking out in pimples every time he so much as glanced in my direction.
Finally I settled on a reasonable excuse. “Tidas was a jealous dragon. I didn’t speak to any of the other dragons, really. Just a few of the other riders.”
That was a lie. I had hardly spoken to the other draga, either. But… better a lie than the truth.
“Do you regret not mate bonding with him?” he asked, carefully studying the mountains in the distance.
That made me laugh. “No, that’s probably the one thing I can thank you for, actually. Who wants to be bonded to a dragon who sulks every time you so much as breathe in another dragon’s direction? You might’ve had a hand in sending me to Mistward, but you saved me from that, at least.”
I immediately realized my mistake in mentioning his role in my imprisonment. The aura of good will between us vanished, tension pressing down on us like a hand.
His lips tightened, but he didn’t try to apologize again. “We should return to the eyrie. Viros will want to make adjustments to the saddle now that we’ve had a practice run.”
That was fine with me. Despite all the wide open space around us, I felt crushed now, pinned in against Rhylan.
“Let’s go, then.” I patted his shoulder twice without thinking. I couldn’t feel the silkiness of his warm skin through the gloves, but just knowing I’d made physical contact with him sent a jolt through me.
His smile faltered. “What does it mean when you pat me twice?”
I blinked up at him. I had patted him when he took off, right on top of those strange scars, without any self consciousness. The physical contact was a little easier when he was in dragon form. “Reassurance, I suppose. That all is well.”
Rhylan stared back at me for a moment. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, his expression once again opaque to me.
“Is that fine with you?” I asked irritably. “Or should I stop?”
Gods, if he wanted me to assign a secret signal directive to it, he might as well have just said so.
“It’s fine.” He turned, heading back towards the harness. “I don’t mind.”
I had seconds to move.
Dropping into a crouch, I dug a handful of frost from the cracks in the granite, packing it against my gloves. I dashed towards him, running lightly on the balls of my feet in the soft boots.
He let out a snarl when I slapped it on the back of his neck, his warm skin breaking out in goosebumps even as the ice melted immediately.
Steam wafted from his golden skin as he spun around, glaring at me.
I smiled sweetly into those flashing blue eyes. “Like I said, you won’t see me coming.”