Chapter 13
Thirteen
With wind whistling in my ears, I bowed deeply forward over the saddle, watching Rhylan’s horned head flow up and down as his wings pumped us ever southward.
The sun shining on my skin felt so good after years of Mistward’s gloom and the week of coldness in the northern reaches of the Krysien Mountains. Even after nearly twelve exhausting hours of clinging to a dragon, focusing on the rocking motions to keep myself from shattering with excitement, I couldn’t help but luxuriate in the warm touch of light on my hair and sun-starved skin.
He had chosen a direct route over Akalla, passing over the southern portion of his territory, and skirting the edges of the Mourning Fangs and Lunar Tides territories. The mountains gave way to hills and finally to green plains, then the lush forests that stretched across much of southern Akalla.
With stiff legs, I stretched and popped my back, then, over Rhylan’s shoulder, I saw what lay ahead of us with a fresh surge of elation.
I had never seen my own territory from the sky before. I was used to the view from the eyrie itself, but from dragonback, I had a view of the shimmering lakes before us, the blue jewels known as Aurae’s Tears, and the spire of my eyrie rising like a granite needle from their midst.
My Ascendant had once told me the story of how she’d created this eyrie; the range of karst mountains that had surrounded the Tears had been destroyed, one by one, until only the tallest remained. It had been lovingly carved and molded into an eyrie, while the forest had slowly crept over its fallen siblings at its feet. Now, ten thousand years later, there was no sign there had ever been other mountains at all.
“Varyamar,” I whispered, my eyes burning with unshed tears. I took a deep breath, but we were still too far to smell the jasmine of my home.
I leaned over Rhylan’s side as far as I dared, taking in the settlements that dotted my territory, and for the first time my elation took a blow.
No lanterns were lit, even as twilight fell; I focused on a wyvern-rider post, and saw that vines had crept over several buildings, nearly disguising them in the surrounding forest.
My people…were not there. Maybe they had taken refuge in the eyrie itself, but doubt assailed me as we flew closer towards the stone spire, and still no lights announced the presence of anything living.
Fear crept in on silent feet. When my father had struck Silvered Embers from the rolls of the great Houses, surely he had not also sentenced the Bloodless under our aegis. Even if my mother had lied about her hand in Anjali’s death, they would have been innocent of any treason.
But…the land below was empty. Not even other dragonbloods had encroached. All was still and silent, nothing but the breeze and wildlife moving below.
Or, nearly as bad a prospect as my father condemning them, perhaps they had simply left. Without a House to run the eyrie, without dragons to defend them, perhaps the Bloodless of Silvered Embers had found protection elsewhere.
I was finally home, and yet it was a hollow, empty victory. I had no army to back my House, no tenants of the land. We had never been able to boast of cities in our territory, but even the smaller outposts were hidden under a cover of verdant canopy, lost and forgotten.
It was my territory, and yet it was a wasteland.
Exhaling a sigh and letting it get lost in the wind, I reached out and pressed my palm flat against Rhylan’s scarred back. The warmth of his scales reassured me, pushing the fear back.
This could be fixed. As soon as the Silvered Embers were re-listed in the rolls, I could send word far and wide that my people were welcome to return home. I could make offers of land to new Bloodless, expand our territory. Perhaps I could even start the seeds of a proper city, right on the banks of Aurae’s Tears, and leave a legacy for…not for my children, as I would not have them in this life without a proper mate, but for whoever came after me.
Rhylan snorted and tossed his head when I removed my hand, and I patted him. “Almost there.”
The closer we flew, the more details stood out. My House’s eyrie was a thing of beauty, the single karst mountain carved into a terraced spire from top to bottom, and crowned with an open-air atrium. The gardens overfilled their terraces now, bursting over the ledges in wild abundance so it seemed to be dripping with greenery.
Now I could smell the jasmine, taste the moonflowers on the breeze. A tear slipped free, rolling down my cheek and flying off into the wind.
I wiped my face hurriedly as Rhylan circled the peak of the eyrie, where a pale terrace awaited us, the circular dragon door nearly crusted over with jasmine vines. He dropped through, crushing vines underfoot and filling the air with the bright scent of sap and heady perfume of trampled petals.
I groaned as I dismounted, my legs taking more than a few minutes to loosen up. I paced the terrace as Rhylan shifted, giving him a moment of privacy to dig through the packs and pull fresh clothes on.
It was harder than I’d expected to avert my eyes, but still…it was the polite thing to do, even if dragons were used to walking around completely naked half the time.
Besides, I’d only fuel the fires of his ego if he caught me peeking.
Instead, I examined the dragon terrace. It had appeared overgrown from the air, but on foot, it was utterly wild and untamed. During my pacing, I almost caught my foot in a lush tangle of moonflower that was strangling the marble columns.
Four years, I reminded myself. When had the Bloodless left? If it was right after our sentencing, then these doors had been sealed for four years.
Something touched my shoulder. I whirled around, finding Rhylan only inches away from me, wearing a pensive expression.
“Sera…”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “I know. My people left. I can’t say I blame them…we weren’t here for them. There was no House to protect them so they did what they had to do. And when Silvered Embers returns from the ashes, I’ll send out the call to come home, and they’ll have…me. They’ll have me to watch over them again.”
I’d almost said us, but there was no us.
They would have the future Dragonesse Serafina, which would be enough of an aegis on its own to reassure my dragonbloods and Bloodless.
Rhylan’s gaze swept around the overgrown balcony, the riot of jasmine hanging overhead. “They’ll come back. I can’t imagine who wouldn’t. But I wonder why your Ascendant wasn’t enough to keep them here under her protection.”
His gaze was shrewd when it came to rest on me. I self-consciously tucked a loose lock of hair behind my ear.
“Myst? Maybe she…” I sighed deeply, unable to speculate. “I don’t know. There’s no use speculating until I see her with my own eyes. Maybe she went into the Dreamlands with no descendants to watch over.”
It was common for Ascendants to enter the Dreamlands when their nest was empty, or when peacetime guaranteed they wouldn’t need to go to war. It was a state close to hibernation, allowing them to dreamlessly slumber away the decades. Thanks to the history lessons I’d had as a child, I knew that scholars had speculated that the Dreamlands allowed the Ascendants to maintain their sanity over the millennia, that watching their bloodline incessantly cycle through living and dying would cause any sane creature to eventually fracture.
If Myst was in the Dreamlands, it would be nearly impossible to rouse her. I could only hope that she was only in a normal slumber, awaiting her bloodline’s return.
“Maybe.” Rhylan narrowed his eyes at the doors to my eyrie, the tall, elegantly carved slabs of white ash wood. “But let me go first, all right?”
I crossed my arms over my chest, simultaneously elated and deathly nervous to open those doors. It would be preserved exactly as I had left it when I was sixteen. “What, do you think I’m afraid of my own eyrie?”
Rhylan raised a brow at me. “No, but if another dragonblood with even a hint of Silvered Embers bloodline moved in, there’s every chance you’ve got an unfriendly reception waiting for you. If you’re killed, the next strongest of the bloodline inherits all this.” He spread his hands wide, encompassing my eyrie, and the miles of territory around it.
“Myst wouldn’t allow anyone to harm me in my own eyrie,” I scoffed.
But…it was true, there were other dragonbloods with a touch of Myst’s blood in them. Distant cousins, bred into other Houses, and it was possible that another House had produced a scion of Silvered Embers. They would have a claim if I didn’t establish myself as the Princess of the House immediately.
“Can we be realistic again for a moment, Sera? It’s your eyrie, yes, but you haven’t been here in years. You need to reestablish control before you let your guard down,” Rhyland said, repeating exactly what I’d just thought.
I looked at him oddly for a moment, wondering if he’d heard me…but no. The inside of my head was silent except for me.
It almost made me laugh aloud, to think even for a second that a non-physical bond might’ve formed between us during the flight. Of course it hadn’t; it was just the obvious thing to conclude.
I had certainly not felt a tendril of hope bloom inside me at the idea, though.
Shaking my head at my own absurdity, I stepped towards the doors. “Fine, fine...you get to go first. But I get to open the doors. I want Myst to feel that it’s me.”
I took a deep breath and looked up at the doors, at the dragons carved into the snow-white wood and embossed in silver. So many times I’d come bursting through these doors. So many times I’d peered off the edge of the dragon terrace and dreamed about my first flight.
A lump rose in my throat as I braced my hands on both doors, the touch-worn wood as smooth as glass under my palms.
One of the jagged crystals on either side of the doors flickered briefly, then went out.
“Yes, I’m home,” I whispered to my Ascendant, but they didn’t flicker again.
No eyrie would remain locked to a welcome scion of the bloodline. I braced myself, and pushed.
Almost too hard; the doors abruptly swung open in welcome, and I would’ve gone sprawling if Rhylan didn’t immediately loop an arm around my waist and haul me upright.
He kept a grip on me as he gently pushed me aside, nose raised to breathe the air.
If not for the open windows of the terraces, it would’ve smelled terribly stale, but even in the sealed eyrie, the breeze and jasmine permeated. I took a deep breath and couldn’t hold back the wide grin that stretched across my face.
“Just like always,” I said, luxuriating in that scent. I wanted to bottle it, to never again be in a situation where I couldn’t just uncork a stopper and take a deep, calming breath of home.
“I don’t smell other dragonbloods,” he said doubtfully, examining the dusty floor for footprints. Sadly, the breeze had done nothing to prevent the build-up of dust and pollen over the years. “But that doesn’t mean it”s empty. They could have entered through the base of the eyrie.”
“Whatever you say, Sir Suspicious,” I said cheerfully, reaching out to run my fingers over the inlaid-marble walls. Rhylan’s eyrie was a dark jewel, encrusted with gems, warmed by a volcano. My eyrie was light and bright, filled with breezes and night flowers, a dream world encased in a spire. “Ahh, I missed you so, so much.”
Rhylan prowled ahead, peering into the sitting rooms that had once been filled with dragonbloods taking tea and gossiping, and wyvern-riders passing through. My mother had loved to entertain at the top of the spire; during her time as the Drakkon’s concubine, when he bothered to visit our eyrie, she always entertained him up here, with a view of Aurae’s Tears sparkling below.
I passed a parlor where a tea service was still laid out, covered with dust, the tea long since dried to a brown film in the bottom of the porcelain cups.
“How come you never say you miss me with that same wistfulness?” Rhylan complained playfully, but he kept his voice low.
“Because you’re always around. How can I miss you if you’re constantly underfoot?” I asked sweetly. “Maybe you should leave me here for a while. They do say absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
Immediately I wanted to sew my own mouth shut. He was loosening up again, and there I went, jabbing sarcastic needles at his attempts to play.
“You wouldn’t last longer than six hours,” he scoffed.
Silently, I thanked the gods that he hadn’t taken my sarcasm as a sign to back off. “Give me some credit. Twelve.”
“Actually, six is too long. I’d come back in three to find you woefully lamenting the lack of dragons in your life.”
He flashed me a grin over his shoulder as we reached the end of the hall, where another set of ash doors led to the spiral that descended through the direct center of my eyrie.
Where Rhylan’s eyrie reminded me of a warren at times, sprawled throughout the width of a broad mountain, my eyrie made me think of a nautilus shell, the staircase a spine supporting each tier that flared further outward the closer they got to the ground.
I rolled my eyes skyward as I touched the doors, opening them with ease. “Yes, in three hours I would pine away from the lack of you. Every minute we spend apart, I simply sit there and think, this moment is completely wasted without Rhylan here to strip for me.”
The spiral stairs led down into darkness. Since that first flicker on the outer doors, I hadn’t managed to get a single crystal to light up. Perhaps Myst was in the Dreamlands, and I was too late to awaken her…
“Oh, so you were ogling me,” Rhylan purred in my ear. He held an arm out, taking the first few steps down the stairs like he was expecting an attack from around the curve.
“Ogling makes it sound so…undignified. I prefer ‘studiously inspecting’. Only the strongest, most intimidating dragons for me, thank you very much.”
“You can ‘studiously inspect’ me anytime you’d like, darling. I’m the strongest one around.”
We exited onto the next tier, where the open terraces wrapped all around the exterior of the spire. The hall leading to the rooms here was so short, and yet so familiar.
Being here again choked down the acerbic reply I was already preparing for that comment. I still remembered the last time I’d walked this corridor, arms loaded with textbooks, wearing my training leathers…completely unaware of how drastically my life was about to change.
“My bedroom is down here.” I drifted down the corridor in a dream, retracing my exact footsteps. The ash door was cracked ever so slightly, and I pushed it all the way open.
It was almost exactly as I’d left it. Dead leaves from the climbing jasmine had piled in drifts below my open windows, and the sheer curtains were a little tattered, but my bed was still in place, dust heaped on the fluffy bedding. My Training Grounds medals were still pinned to the walls, tarnished now, the colors of the ribbons no longer distinguishable.
Rhylan prowled past me, taking in every facet of the room. “So this is where Perfect Serafina lived.” He examined a few of the medals, an unreadable expression on his handsome face.
I shot a sharp look at him, looking up from the treasure box I’d opened on my dresser. It contained pretty stones I’d collected from summer days spent on the banks of Aurae’s Tears, feathers that had gotten caught in the jasmine, bits and pieces of childhood treasures…all of it meaningless now. “‘Perfect Serafina’? What do you mean by that?”
I didn’t mean in the literal sense; my mother had pushed me to be the best. I had been perfect. I’d earned every one of those stupid, meaningless medals with blood, sweat, and tears. I’d outshone every other draga by the skin of my teeth, exhausted and weary, knowing it was all for show—after all, I’d been promised to Tidas at the time. The Razored Cinders would not have broken our agreement simply because I came in second place at archery in the Training Grounds.
But I’d never heard of such a nickname.
“Everyone called you that when you weren’t listening. You had to have top marks at everything,” Rhyland said distantly, his gaze roving to the pile of textbooks on a desk, sitting precisely where I’d left them four years ago. He twitched a bit of parchment from between the pages, filled with my tidy handwriting. “I remember going out for a flight one night, and you were out there in the training yard. At three in the morning. All the other draga were sleeping, and you were hacking away at one of those dummies with a sword like it had personally insulted you.”
I watched him put the notes aside and run a finger down the spines of the books.
There’d been so many nights like that in the Training Grounds, I couldn’t remember that one in particular. I’d had no idea Rhylan had even seen me during one of my nighttime extracurricular sessions.
“So I watched for a bit. You went at it for a solid hour, then you sat down and cried.”
My back stiffened. No, I did remember that particular night, when I’d thought my body would break down from sheer exhaustion, not knowing at the time what exhaustion really was.
My mother had not been pleased when Elinor of Shadowed Stars had outshone me at swordplay. Her next letter had been stern and worded in no uncertain terms: I could come home when Silvered Embers could face the other Houses without shame.
And thus had begun a nightly tradition of losing precious sleep.
“My House maintained high standards,” I said stiffly. “Excellence is expected in all we do.”
It was like he didn’t hear me. “I thought a lot about you, back then. Tidas liked to remind everyone about your arrangement. I thought it was interesting that you had an ironclad agreement between your Houses, and you were still out there breaking yourself to pieces to impress him.”
My lips twisted in a sour smile. Impress Tidas? I’d stopped remembering his existence the first time I saw Rhylan in the dragon yard.
“Is that what made you think I was snobbish?” That still prickled a little.
“No.” Rhylan picked up an ornament, set it back down. He was examining my room in a way that made me a little uncomfortable, like he was reading a subtext I didn’t quite see for myself. “It was that I once asked you to spot me in the training yards, and you just stared at me, your eyes like silver ice, and walked away without a word. At the time, I figured you thought you were too good to be bothered. You already had Tidas waiting.”
Funny, how two people could remember something so differently.
I remembered Rhylan walking up to me, a giant in ebony scales, my lungs suddenly clenching with hope and terror and the awful fear I’d make a fool of myself, and he’d asked me to spot him…and I’d realized that if I spoke to him, something so much worse than sounding like an idiot would occur.
I would feed that flame of useless hope inside me, and when I graduated the Training Grounds and mate bonded with Tidas it would be extinguished, and I would be dead inside forever after.
Better to walk away. Better to stay on the straight and narrow, where hopes could not be crushed and mothers with exacting standards wouldn’t be disappointed.
“It wasn’t that I thought I was too good for you.” My voice came out gruffly and I cleared my throat, staring out the window. “I…didn’t think that at all.”
Was that when he’d returned home and told his Ascendant about the haughty draga, who couldn’t be bothered to say a simple yes or no?
I really had turned out to be a fool, after all.
“Anyway, I started coming out at night, watching you train. I saw all your little screw ups; you’re still a little weak on your left side when it comes to swords. I even thought about giving you some pointers, but I figured if I showed myself, you’d either ignore me, or you’d stop coming out at all.”
I stared at him as he picked up a framed portrait of the Drakkon from my bookshelf.
I hadn’t had the slightest clue that he’d been watching me that whole time. Gods, if I’d known then…I would’ve died of mortal embarrassment.
Rhylan put the portrait back on the shelf, examining the history books behind it. “It gave a different dimension to Perfect Serafina, you see. During the day you were so polished, so flawless, so…untouchable, like a statue of a draga come to life. It was almost unnatural, how you were the best in everything. But at night you cried and bled and fell down. I saw you push yourself to the breaking point over and over again, and when the scores went up, of course you were on top. Perfect Serafina. Nobody else saw you work yourself sick to make it there. Every time those marks came out and the others grumbled that you were on top again, I silently cheered you on. I saw how much it took for you to get there.”
I took a breath, holding it and counting to five before I exhaled. “That wasn’t the breaking point. Not even close.”
“At the time it was. What would you have done if I’d come over while you were sobbing on the ground in front of a fucking training dummy?” Rhylan laughed, bitterness suffusing the sound. “You would’ve hated that.”
I would have, but for completely different reasons than he thought. “I don’t know. I have no idea what I would have done.”
I would have begged Larivor to tear open the earth and swallow me whole. And then I never would have been able to look at Rhylan again.
He took a medal down from the wall, turning it over between his fingers. “The room says a lot about you. Or about ‘Perfect Serafina’, at least. There’s not much in here that’s actually yours, is there? Besides that.” He nodded at the treasure box. “It’s all medals and classwork. No notes from friends, no love letters from Tidas, no—”
“Why does it matter?” I asked sharply, hating this sudden turn, that Rhylan had known far more about me than I’d ever suspected. It made me feel…naked. The fa?ade I’d worked so hard to maintain my whole life, now exposed. The old, familiar vitriol came pouring out of me in an unstoppable rush. “I didn’t need friends at the time. I couldn’t have friends, because they were my competition. Tidas didn’t have to write me love letters because our parents had decided we were going to mate bond one way or another, and they didn”t give much of a damn how I felt about it. And who cares if I trained at night and cried and bled or puked or whatever? I had to do something to uphold my mother’s standards. Nobody becomes the best by sleeping through it.”
Rhylan looked up from the medal, his eyes meeting mine across a gap that was only ten feet and yet felt like a thousand miles, those dark flames burning in them.
“It matters because I was out there with you,” he said slowly. “You didn’t know it, but I was with you. And Tidas wasn’t.”
My feet remained frozen in place. I couldn’t even blink, seeing those flames, taking in what he was saying. My heart thumped unevenly against my ribs, so loud its beat seemed to fill the room.
My mouth opened, closed, opened. What could I say? Nothing made sense anymore, the universe and all my preconceptions turned upside down and inside out.
The words were finally on my lips—Would you have taken his place? In your heart, was I yours, too?—and I braced myself to shatter the frozen moment, to give voice to something that both thrilled and terrified me to hear the answer to, but something else broke the taut silence first.
A long, drawn-out wail, heartbroken and piteous, from the depths of the eyrie.
Rhylan was at the door in an instant, shielding me with his body as he checked the corridor, but I pushed him into the hall. “It’s Myst! She’s not in the Dreamlands!”
Grabbing his hand, I practically dragged him to the spiral staircase, vaulting down several levels so fast we smashed into several walls.
The House vault was much further down, where the needle-like aspect of the eyrie began to widen. Unlike the floors above, there were no open-air terraces here; this was not only the eyrie’s most guarded floor, but the personal domain of our Ascendant.
I dragged Rhylan out of the staircase and into the small vestibule of the vault. These doors were not white ash, but solid, banded iron; they would open only to the touch of the Ascendant, or a scion of this House.
Another gut-wrenching wail, from behind the door; Rhylan’s fingers tightened around mine. “She sounds like she’s injured. Be ready for anything, Sera.”
My stomach dropped to the floor at the thought of my Ascendant injured, possibly locked in and so weak she was unable to escape; with Rhylan blocking me, preparing to be my shield if any intruders awaited inside, I reached out and brushed my fingertips over the ice-cold iron.
Immediately the locks inside the door began to whirl and click, the sound of gears whirling faster and faster, and then…it swung open.
The crystal lights overhead flared to pure, brilliant life, illuminating the sea of silver before us. All over the eyrie, the lamps flared, lighting up Varyamar like a beacon.
As I had promised Rhylan and Kirana, my House’s treasure was vast. We slipped over millions of coins; strings of diamonds dangled from the hands of ancient statues; the emeralds alone could create a mountain of their own.
And in the middle of the Vault, in a vast pile of silver that had been scraped into a vaguely bed-like shape, a creature the size of a large dog lay sprawled across a silver shield inlaid with elaborate scrollwork, curled around the massive ruby in its center.
The true dragon was as pale as snow, each perfect scale an iridescent pearl edged in silver—just like the ones on my own body that marked me as her undiluted blood. She wore tiny silver rings on her claws, each set with an amethyst or sapphire, strands of pearls encircling her throat. Her wings, glistening with the same nacre-like hue of her scales, were outspread beneath her.
I knelt before my Ascendant, the first of my blood, reaching out with shaking hands to touch her. Her pulse was strong; there was no sign of blood. There was no sign of anything wrong at all, in fact.
“Myst?”
A tiny eye cracked open, revealing the molten silver hue of her irises, so like mine. “S-Serafina?” Her normally high, fluting voice was weak and rough, and she slipped into my hands.
“I’ve come back,” I whispered, my throat thick with unshed tears. My Ascendant lived. “I’m so sorry, I—”
I couldn’t speak anymore. Myst twisted her little head slightly, horns scratching at my palms, teeny razor teeth gleaming as she sat upright to peer into my face.
I expected something like, “How could you leave me like this?” or “I’m so glad you’re alive and home”, but instead…
She wailed again and flopped back onto the shield, no longer weak and pathetic as she flung an arm over her eyes. “I’m staaaarving!”