Chapter 8
Eight
It was an awkward flight home, with both of us studiously ignoring each other. I focused on the vast world before me, trying not to listen to the dragon’s occasional grumbles, and certainly not dwelling on his inscrutable expressions.
As we dived over Jhazra Eyrie, the flutter of wings far below caught my eye: ferrymen, riding dark brown wyverns through the narrow canyons of the Krysiens, heading for the crevasse carved low on the mountainside where the eyrie’s wyvern roost was kept.
Fear jolted through me, locking my entire body in place.
They’d followed us all the way from Mistward. I searched the crowd of wyverns, looking for a glimpse of crimson against the brown scales and black stones, then craned my head upwards. A dragon would be high, looking to strike at his prey from above.
There was nothing above us, only clear, pale blue sky. Where was Kalros hiding?
Rhylan let out a much louder growl, his wings beating the air furiously as he lowered us through the eyrie’s dragon door and hit the floor with a thud.
I practically fell out of the saddle in my scramble to get down, and Rhylan shifted before I could take two steps. He gripped my wrist, holding me in place.
“Let go!” I hissed, my heartbeat thumping in my ears. “He’s here!”
Every fiber of me screamed to flee beneath my bed, the only bolthole I had in this whole eyrie. Kalros would smell me from miles away—
“Sera.” Rhylan did not let go, but his grip gentled. “They’re not from Mistward.”
I stared up at him, heart still racing, trembling in his grasp. Rhylan held my gaze, not even blinking as he stroked my wrist with his thumb, right over the tiny patch of skin where my pulse pounded furiously.
“They’re the same ferrymen we see every week. The same kind you used to see in Varyamar. You left Mistward behind. There’s no danger here.”
Slowly, his words penetrated through the haze of panic fogging my brain.
I’d forgotten that ferrymen were a common occurrence in eyries, delivering goods and correspondence. It’d been so long since I’d been home, their presence had been erased from my memories entirely. When I thought of ferrymen now, I thought of Mistward…of wyvern-riders who would squeeze me for every last half-moon, and give me rotting, unwanted food in exchange, and I’d had to be grateful even for that.
I took a shuddering breath, and Rhylan squeezed my wrist.
“Kalros isn’t here,” I whispered, but I couldn’t quite force myself to close my eyes, to believe him. With my back to the large windows, my neck prickled like spiders crawled over me.
“He is not,” Rhylan agreed. He lightly pulled me with him, and I followed on wooden legs as Viros emerged from the storage room, a question already forming on his lips.
Rhylan simply shook his head at him, grimly leading me on.
He opened the door to the interior, guiding me through.
“Breathe, Sera,” he said, one hand on my back as he led me down the hall to the spiral stairs. “You’re in my eyrie. Nobody here will take you against your will.”
I obeyed, unresisting as he brought me into a dark, windowless room and sat me on a plush chair in the corner, where I had a good view of the door.
Kalros was not here. Rhylan was, and he might not be my true mate, but he would defend me.
I was safe. I was as secure as I would ever be.
My chest was tight at first, but as I focused on counting my breaths, my muscles slowly relaxed. From a distance, I heard Rhylan, and then Nilsa; I tensed again when someone entered the room, but the spill of dark hair and the flash of gold revealed the slight figure to be Kirana.
She whispered to someone, and the crystals in the room flared brightly, illuminating a large table in the center and the high walls. It was not a small room at all, but a library, the shelves rising high into darkness.
I drifted forward to the table, finding that having something to focus on was a little more calming than cowering in the chair.
The surface of the table was a massive map of Akalla, with wooden mountains and hills rising from its surface. Ivory tokens carved to look like towers peppered the map, and I realized they marked the eyries.
I rose to my feet, one hand pressed to my cramping stomach, to inspect the ivory token of Varyamar, sitting at the southeastern edge of the map.
It came up easily, unconnected to the wood of the table surface. The entire token was the length of my palm; I held it up to a light crystal, inspecting the tiny crenellations and carved dragon in the light.
Unlike the Jhazra Eyrie token, an arm’s length away, the ivory of my token was worn, rubbed shiny in places from frequent handling.
I frowned at it, and replaced the Varyamar token carefully in its place, nestling it among painted representations of the lakes near my home, Aurae’s Tears.
“Rhylan thought it might be time to refresh you on the Houses,” Kirana said softly, standing on the other side of the table. She fiddled absently with an eyrie token. “Many things have changed in the last few years. They’ve only grown worse since it became clear the Drakkon was deathly ill.”
She wore riding leathers, soft and broken-in from regular use, free of any embellishment. The only ornamentation on her was the healer’s bangle, and the golden rings woven into her braided hair.
Kirana looked down at herself when she saw my questioning look, one side of her mouth quirking up in a smile.
“I ride a wyvern,” she said. “It’s much like the Bloodless ride horses, but with a series of vocal commands as well. My Garnet was trained by one of the Mourning Fangs, and she’s as sweet as sugar to anyone in our family.”
“I’ve never ridden a wyvern,” I said truthfully. My voice wasn’t as shaky as I’d feared it would be. Even my pulse had begun to slow.
“They’re easier to manage than dragons. They don’t have many thoughts of their own, besides food.” Kirana laughed softly. “And of course, our harnesses are much more intricate. Viros is actually fashioning your new saddle based on wyvern harnessing. But a wyvern will always run from battle, and a dragon will always fly towards it. I’ll take a wyvern over a bloodthirsty show-off any day.”
“When did you decide you didn’t want a dragon?” It was a foreign concept to me. A draga without a dragon was like a bird without wings. Wyverns were typically reserved for those brave Bloodless who chose the swiftness of air travel over safer—but much slower—horses.
Kirana circled the table slowly, looking at the map with her brows furrowed. She picked up a tiny golden pawn, moving it towards another ivory eyrie token, where a silver pawn rested.
“I suppose it was while we were in the Training Grounds,” she finally said. “Our parents were…progressive. I mean, they did find each other in a rather unconventional way, after all, and Father wasn’t even part of a House. But after that, our mother decided that her children should have the right to choose their own mates as well, even though we’re of ancient royal blood. The Drakkon was apparently furious, but she refused to back down.” Her eyes flicked up to me for a moment.
“We were all free to pursue who we wanted.” Kirana’s smile was sour. “And none of us got who we wanted. It was a bad time for our family. I decided to become a healer rather than a rider.”
I couldn’t bring myself to ask who she’d wanted as her dragon. It was too personal a question, one that would cut to the bone for any spurned draga.
But her story stoked the fires of curiosity in me. It was almost unheard-of for a royal dragonblood to enter the Training Grounds without already knowing who their mate would be.
My arrangement with Tidas had been a common occurrence. Even Yura had been arranged to form a mate bond with a dragon from the Iron Shards. How she’d broken that arrangement without fomenting bad blood between their Houses, I didn’t know—but if Doric and Elinor’s intelligence was true, then she’d somehow managed to offer something worth losing a bond in the House of Gilded Skies.
I wondered if Kirana’s bitterness—the dragon she hadn’t gotten—was why she, and her entire House, hated Yura so deeply.
“Your mother didn’t argue against you leaving the Training Grounds?” I held my breath after asking the question. Now that I knew the history between our Houses, the subject of Anjali was fraught with peril—and I had asked a terrible question. Kirana had left after I’d been exiled…which meant Anjali had been dead by the time she left.
But Kirana simply shook her head. “She always gave me her love and support. Anything we chose to do, she championed. I thought she would understand.”
“That was kind of her. My mother would have dragged me back by my hair if I’d tried to leave.” I said it without thinking, although it was true.
Still, it made me feel oddly disloyal to her memory, as though I slandered her.
Nerezza had been a draga of exacting standards. If someone else in the Training yards got higher marks, I was expected to eat, sleep, and breathe whatever I’d failed at until I could beat them all.
Never in a million years would she have permitted me to leave the Training Grounds of my own volition. It was only the Drakkon’s sentence that had ended my studies there.
Kirana was silent for a moment, turning over another eyrie token in her hand before replacing it. “For some of us, choice is simply not in the cards.”
Before I could respond, a figure filled the doorway, blocking the light from the hall. My shoulders tensed fractionally, even though I knew it was Rhylan; the sheer width of his shoulders was a giveaway. He’d pulled on simple clothes, dark pants and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows.
It occurred to me that he had deliberately placed Kirana in here to calm me, and I couldn’t fault him if he had; something in his sister’s soft manner was soothing, even if I wasn’t entirely comfortable with her.
Nilsa was on his heels, carrying the tray of food I’d come to expect in her presence. As she balanced it on a side table, carefully avoiding the map, Rhylan poured me a glass of fruit juice.
He pressed it into my hand, his solid bulk only inches away, between me and the door. And in spite of the guilt nipping at me for being so playful with him when he was my enemy, I felt secure with him there.
I drank the tart juice, the feeling of safety more an irritation than a soothing thought. The fear that I would become reliant on his presence was creeping up on me, a slow awareness that I couldn’t push away and ignore.
I chose to distract myself from that thought with a ham-filled chunk of bread, watching as Rhylan inspected the map.
He touched a fingertip to the eyries that Kirana had adjusted, tapping it as he considered the change.
“I got the same message as you,” Kirana said irritably, leaning against the other side of the table with her arms crossed. “And I confirmed the news with the herbalist. Maristela and Gaelin are in Diraek Eyrie for the foreseeable future. They believe Yura will make a move on Diraek first, if she does so at all. They need to fortify their defenses, but the Shadowed Stars have been demanding that Maristela return home.”
Rhylan raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t questioning your judgment. The Mourning Fangs are a relatively recent and weak House, the dragonbloods of Diraek Eyrie. They’ve been building their wealth through their wyvern breeding.” I realized he was explaining this to me, and moved closer despite myself. Rhylan took up so much room that I felt like I was pushed up against him no matter where I stood. “Kirion Eyrie, the Shadowed Stars’ home, has been—”
“I’m aware of who Kirion belongs to,” I said, swallowing the last soft bite of bread. “I’ve been a part of dragonblood society for as long as you have.”
“No need to be so prickly about it.” Rhylan turned his head to look at me, hooded blue eyes flashing with amusement. “This is just a refresher. You need to have these re-memorized in the next two weeks, and there’s been plenty of mate bonds formed since we finished training.”
“Hmm.” I was unwilling to confess aloud that I was well behind the times, and did in fact need the refresher.
Kirana tapped the gold and silver pawns she’d moved. “Maristela and Gaelin are now mated. That wasn’t the wisest choice, but I don’t believe Maristela was ever truly vying to become Dragonesse. She’d been secretly seeing Gaelin while they were in training.”
“She wasn’t. That was her mother’s doing. Chantrelle is nothing if not ambitious.” Rhylan took out two more pawns from a drawer set beneath the table: silver and gold. He placed them next to the Jhazra Eyrie token.
“Am I silver or gold?” I asked, watching the scarred back of his hand flex.
I didn’t meet his eyes, but I felt his gaze on my face. “Whichever you desire.” There was a playful tone in his voice that made me want to step back. We didn’t need to fake adoration in Kirana’s presence.
“Silver, then.” I touched the tiny pawn that represented me, the metal cool against my fingertip.
Princess Maristela had chosen a lord—he was a dragonblood, but not of any ancient line, his Ascendant having been born no more than five hundred years ago. With that alone, she had essentially destroyed her chances to become Dragonesse.
She had almost certainly mate bonded for love, not power.
“Where are Yura and Tidas?” I asked, looking around the map for other royal tokens. Maristela and Gaelin were housed in Diraek, and we were in Jhazra, but I saw no others.
Rhylan produced another pair of pawns, silver and gold. He frowned at the map, rolling the pawns in his hand. “They’re living in the eyrie of the Gilded Skies, but according to the wyvern-riders, they’ve been out of residence as they seek alliances.”
He placed the pawns by the Gilded Skies’ eyrie in the west, Talariel, but his frown didn’t fade.
Kirana unfolded her arms as she studied the map, bracing both hands on the edge of the table. “Cryla believes they were seen near the Iron Shards’ territory. My herbalist contact,” she explained, seeing my questioning glance. “She was my trainer for my final year of study, and she has a finger in every pie.”
“We can discount the Iron Shards. I’m relying on other Houses to back us in a Court.” Rhylan’s arm brushed against me as he moved, his body heat soaking into my icy skin. “The Lunar Tides are committed. I believe the Jade Leaves will throw in their lot with us. They stand to lose too much territory to the Iron Shards and Gilded Skies.”
“Not to mention the Wildlands Hordes,” Kirana murmured. “I believe Yura has taken a page from our mother’s book and sent emissaries to them, promising lands and gold for their aid.”
A chill ran over my skin. Few eyries wanted to face down a full Wildlands Horde. Only Anjali’s mate bond to Cratus, a Wildlands warrior, had stopped recent incursions into Akalla by the Hordes.
Their parents had been almost single-handedly responsible for much of the peace along Akalla’s southern border in recent years, given the ambassador work she’d done since mate bonding to Cratus.
Anjali’s death must have tipped that balance back into wartime, with constant raids on the southern eyries. Many of the Hordes had been fond of their adoptive Akallan draga. They would have taken her murder as a personal insult to their honor.
“What makes you believe the Jade Leaves will back us? Or rather, me?” I stared at their eyrie token, carved with a dragon wrapped around a tree. “I…I heard as much on Mistward Isle. Someone claimed that they wished to know where I was, but no one ever came for me. Not until you.”
Although most of my plans had revolved around eventually making my way to their eyrie, I still was unsure of their allegiance, or why they’d give a damn about a traitor’s child.
I looked up to find Rhylan and Kirana exchanging glances, communicating silently in the way of siblings.
“Sera…most of Akalla believes you are dead,” she said delicately.
I stared at her.
“The plan is to upstage whatever Yura and Tidas have planned at the First Claim by revealing Drakkon Nasir’s eldest daughter to be alive, well, and mate bonded to another royal dragon. Shock and awe.” Rhylan’s lips pulled into the cocky grin that used to melt my heart. “No amount of intimidation on their part will rival that. It’ll completely change the stakes for all the Houses—your House is ancient and godsdamned wealthy, and as his firstborn, you have the rightful claim as his heir.”
His words slid right through my ears. They’d all believed me to be dead?
I had wondered why no one had retrieved me, or sent so much as a single message after my mother had died. Once she was in the ground, my sentence should have been over, or at least given second thought.
I’d crept into Farpost not long after burying her, spending my last three stolen half-moons to send a brief message to Koressis Eyrie, informing the Drakkon of her death.
But no one had come for me. No one had responded.
That message had turned into two more years of loneliness, of fear and heartache and homesickness, of barely clinging to life at times by the tips of my claws…because my father did not want to acknowledge that I still lived.
“That’s why no one came for me,” I said, my lips numb. Everything was numb. “That’s why I was left alone in that hellhole.”
Rhylan’s smile slipped, and he reached for me. I darted out of reach, hugging myself. “Did you know?”
“The Drakkon himself claimed you were dead,” Kirana said quickly, her eyes darting between me and her brother. “And we all believed it until three weeks ago, when he made his deathbed confession. We, and the Jade Leaves, were the only ones who were told otherwise. We weren’t permitted to retrieve you, Sera. It was a direct order of the Drakkon that you remain on Mistward Isle until his last breath…and he said to leave you there, if we could.”
Gods, my chest hurt. If a clawed fist punched its way through my ribs and gripped my organs, it couldn’t hurt worse than this.
I turned and fled the map room, blindly bouncing off walls as I ran anywhere but there.
“This way,” a shadow whispered in a chorus of voices. Erebos surrounded me, a cloud of smoke and scales that herded me down corridors until I found myself standing in my borrowed bedroom.
I couldn’t find the voice to thank him. The Ascendant vanished, leaving me blessedly alone.
I slammed the door shut and locked it, bracing my back to the wood and sliding to the floor.
My cruel, hateful father…the Nine Hells were not cold enough for him.
Had he hated me so much that he couldn’t stand to see me alive? Why not simply order the execution, instead of allowing me to die slowly?
I buried my face in my hands, but no tears came. I simply felt empty.
“Serafina.” The soft voice on the other side of the door belonged to Rhylan.
I bared my teeth against my palms.
The door creaked as a weight pressed against it from the other side. There was the soft sound of cloth sliding against wood, and when Rhylan spoke again, his voice sounded closer.
He was sitting back to back with me, on the other side of the door.
“It was strictly forbidden,” he said. His voice was quiet, but the silence in the eyrie was almost deafening; I heard every word clearly. “It was the one order I’ve ever seen him enforce with pure viciousness. When you were first sent away, I wanted to go after you, and…your father threatened to cut off my wings if I tried.”
To threaten to cut off a dragon’s wings was one of the worst threats anyone could make. Even death was preferable.
He must have truly despised me. I clutched my stomach, willing the stabbing pains to go away.
“He told me you died shortly after that. I spent years believing you had perished out there. And after he took ill, he shocked us all when he told us you’d been alive this entire time…and told us, that if by the grace of the gods you had made a life for yourself on Mistward…that we were to leave you there.” Rhylan was silent for a long moment. “I wasn’t given a reason for that. We made our plans while we waited for him to die, and I left as soon as I heard that last breath. I was determined to bring you back before the news arrived on Mistward, but the damn ferrymen were just as quick. I had to search for you, you see. I had no idea where you would be, so I went into the tavern hoping to dig for information. But when you walked by me in there, I smelled you, and I knew—”
He stopped himself. I listened to the sound of his even breaths.
“I didn’t have much time to work on the plan. I didn’t know what to expect when I found you. I didn’t even believe you would accept my offer and come with me, even though I needed you for this.”
I sat silently, letting his words fall into empty air. I had nothing to give him. As I had been before, so I was now: merely a pawn. A silver piece on a map, to be moved around at will until he had what he wanted, then put back in a drawer. The same way my father had moved my pawn piece to the prison isle, to be left alone and forgotten.
For the first time, I understood why Kirana would deliberately choose to forgo a mate bond.
Who wanted to be a pawn to a dragon?
My mother’s lovely face floated behind my closed eyelids. I pictured her black-and-silver hair, the stark silver of her eyes. In my mind, she was healthy, beautiful, not the tired, drawn corpse she’d been in the end.
Not a pawn for long, she said in my mind. You have no mate bond. When you become Dragonesse, you need never lay eyes on him again.
The pain in my chest and stomach was still there, but it had dulled. I cradled myself, leaning my head back against the door.
I had to remember that I would not always be a pawn. I would move myself on the map, and soon I would have my sister in chains, and Rhylan could walk away with Tidas’s head.
I would steal my father’s throne. I would be the one passing Judgments.
And then I would be free.
“Talk to me, Sera,” Rhylan said softly. “I know you’re in there.”
I directed a humorless smile at the ceiling.
“What is there to say?” I sounded calm, in control. A far cry from the enraged, lonely creature screaming inside me. “I’m glad you finally decided to share your plans with me. Is there anything else you’d like me to know before we continue? Any other insignificant details?”
It was his turn to be silent. I wondered if he actually cared, or if he was rolling his eyes, cursing himself for choosing a princess who could barely hold herself together.
But…how could I? When I now had incontrovertible proof that my father had meant for me to die on those lonely shores, forgotten and unmourned.
“Or, answer me this: why ask me to become your pretend mate? The Drakkon made it clear he’d do damn near anything to keep me away from Koressis.” I swallowed the tightness swelling my throat. My eyes were still dry. “Why go against his orders, if they were so important?”
Rhylan shifted, the muffled rustle of fabric coming through the door. “He had a change of heart,” he finally said. “He never showed it, but I think he regretted what he did.”
“Some excuse.” I picked at a fraying thread on my sleeve, pulling it out until the fabric wrinkled. “I don’t believe it.”
“If I’d known you were alive, nothing could have stopped me from coming for you. It was my fault you were there at all.” There was the thump of a fist against stone. “I know it was my testimony that caused it. All I wanted was for Nerezza to pay for destroying our family, not to send you into fucking exile for years. I did everything I could to convince him to release you, until the day he held a knife to my wings and told me he’d take them if I dared to go after you.”
I winced a little despite myself.
“A month later, he told me you’d died of a consumptive disease. And he was convincing, that was the worst part. I truly believed him.
“When he became my Preceptor, he spoke to me about honor. About how sometimes a thing that seems dishonorable on the surface disguises a deeper motivation. That sometimes the Law must be bent in order to not break it. When he told me that…I thought he was full of shit. It wasn’t until he was dying, until he told us you were still alive, that I realized he had been speaking of you at the time.”
But I didn’t give a damn what he’d been speaking of. My stomach had tightened in a clench again, stabbing deep.
“He was your Preceptor?” I whispered, betrayal choking me.
In the year before a dragon graduated from the Koressis Training Grounds, they were assigned a Preceptor, a mentor who would bring them into the world and instruct them on the Law, the draconic code authored by Larivor of the Wind and Naimah of the Flame, and on how to uphold the honor of their House.
Usually, dragons were assigned like to like. A royal dragon could almost certainly expect a Preceptor from a royal eyrie.
But the Drakkon had not taken a student in years, since well before I was born.
He could have meant only one thing by taking him under his wing: he had been grooming Rhylan as the future Drakkon.
And I had not been meant to be a part of that.
I heard a sigh. “Yes.”
I could not speak of this anymore. Knowing that Rhylan had been instructed by my own father—and would have had a much stronger bond with him than my father would ever have had with me—made one thing clear: he had asked me to join him not because of my ancient dragonblood, or because I was worthy of the throne, but out of pity for what his mentor had done to me.
For what he had done to me.
I despised pity. Pity did not feed a draga, or keep her warm at night.
Rhylan could keep it to himself. He had ruined me, but I would become Dragonesse, whether out of his misplaced compassion or not.
“Go away.”
“You should open the door.”
“You should fuck off.” I gritted my teeth, not wanting my questions to spill out.
I remembered a time when my father had picked me up and carried me on his shoulder, telling me stories of the first dragons as he brought me to the Eye of the Gods, a time long before he had sentenced me to exile without even having the courtesy to look me in the eyes as he passed his Judgment.
Had he been that same dragon when he’d instructed Rhylan? Had all that warmth and love gone to others, while leaving me out in the cold?
If Rhylan had told me all of this when he’d found me, perhaps my answer would have been different.
Perhaps. But I was my mother’s daughter, and an opportunity must never be permitted to slip away.
“Fine. When you’re done sulking, Princess Serafina, I’ll be waiting.”
A low growl tore out of me. “I’ll be done sulking when you decide to be truthful, Prince Rhylan.”
I waited until I heard footsteps disappear down the corridor. Then I got to my feet, rubbing my stomach again, and searched the shelves full of books. When I found the one I wanted, the most recent copy of the lineage and eyries of the Houses, I curled up in a chair in the corner, giving myself a good view of every window and door.
It was not sulking if it was time spent brushing up on my knowledge. And I damn sure did not need Rhylan and pawns and maps to help with that.