Chapter 21
Twenty-One
“Bring her over,” Alriss said gruffly.
I carried the corpse of the woman from the water, holding her in my arms like she was spun glass, fragile enough to shatter, although it didn’t matter now.
There was a sense of obligation. We hadn’t saved her life; we hadn’t come in time to save a single life in this tiny village, not so much as one soul. All we could do was build up the pyre, and send a prayer to Sunya on their behalf.
But I could carry her gently one last time. I hoped Aurae had taken her into loving arms, that all the pain was left behind when she shed her mortal body.
I laid her down next to a twisted form, arranging her hands so they were folded over her stomach once more. She was one of the few who was still recognizable as a person; many of the others Rhylan had retrieved were well past that.
It was a necessity to send them off in this manner, even if they had died of a dragon’s flames. Nakasha preferred for customs to be observed in the old ways.
I looked up from the dead woman and saw Rhylan wiping his face. All he did was smear soot around; his blue eyes glittered dangerously in a black mask.
He had brought out many of the worst ones, refusing to allow me or Kirana to enter the still-smoldering cottages. Kirana had examined my nose as he worked; it was unbroken, but would remain tender and sore for a while.
Now Kirana sat on the edge of the well, coughing slightly between gulps of water. The smoke was still thick in the air. Alriss made a count, arranging the bodies over the pyre we had all built.
“Sixty-two souls,” she said, rising from her crouch and staring at the forms. “Everyone. That was everyone in Coldburn.”
Nobody answered. The destruction was too stark.
After a long silence, Rhylan gestured to the woman at the end of the row. “She was the last. I’ll…do it now, if anyone would like to say a word.”
Alriss and Kirana both looked at me. Because I was making the claim for Dragonesse, I couldn’t sit here and wallow in guilt and anger. Saying the final prayer would be expected of me.
But as I stood in front of the carnage, caked with sweat, blood, and soot, I found my mind utterly blank. All I could think about was how tiny some of the forms were, how ruthless this had been.
Rhylan began the shift, scales shimmering down his arms and legs, and I closed my eyes, searching for what I could say.
There was no way to make it up to them, no way to fix this. All I could do was send them on with empty words.
Heat curled around me, a dragon’s warmth. I opened my eyes, letting tears wash the smoke away, and leaned forward to rest my forehead against Rhylan’s scaled jaw.
“This is so…” I started to whisper, but I couldn’t find a word to encompass it all, and trailed off.
I rested my palms flat on his neck, focusing on the ridges and bumps of the scales under my hands.
He rumbled in agreement, smoke curling from his nostrils. We stood like that for a few minutes, until Rhylan slowly uncurled, nudging me forward.
I stepped up to the widespread, hasty pyre, the dragon arching his head over me. Listening. Waiting.
My lips were dry and cracked, and I tasted blood and salt as I licked them. “Aurae of the Fang, hear my words. Take their souls with love, guide them safely to the Gates. Nakasha of the Scale, I beg you to heed me: they were sent with flame and prayer. Allow them through your Gates, under your aegis.”
A small, curled form wavered in my vision. I blinked hard, again and again, my voice temporarily stolen.
“Sunya of the Claw, I beg one request. These were not children of Larivor and Naimah, but I ask you to weigh them lightly, to release them into the Eternal Cycle. Give them another chance. Please.”
My voice broke. Rhylan’s claws squeezed me, and then the dragon reared back as he took a deep breath, chest puffing up like a bellows.
He breathed over them, black flames rushing forward to claim what was left. The sharp crackle of flesh, the popping of wood…my teeth gritted together, and I backed away from the inferno. Ash swirled into the sky, a whirlwind of death.
We observed several moments in silence.
“We need to get back to the eyrie.” Alriss offered Kirana her own waterskin, the creases near her eyes carved even more deeply as she glanced at Rhylan. “It’s unwise to have all members of Erebos’s blood in the killing grounds.”
Kirana stood, walking woodenly at Alriss’s side to the forest. They had tied their wyverns there, far from the destruction. A wyvern wouldn’t know any better than to try to…to eat what was left.
And I couldn’t take offense that Alriss wanted to rush Kirana home. She was right.
If Yura and Tidas were waiting for an opportunity to annihilate the bloodline of the Obsidian Flames, she had a perfectly golden moment right here, with the two remaining siblings out in the open.
I leaned into Rhylan as they walked away. When I was sure I wouldn’t be overheard, I murmured, “She’s right. From this moment on, you and Kirana must go nowhere together. If the worst comes to pass, one of you must survive.”
Rhylan tilted his head, that coal-gleaming eye focused on me. I rubbed soot and blood off my lips and raised a brow, though I didn’t feel a speck of levity. “Don’t argue. You know it’s true. Yura’s got her little band of exiles now, after all.” I laughed bitterly, and it turned into hacking for an alarming moment. My lungs ached from all the smoke. “She could spring a trap at any moment.”
Rhylan let out a rumbling growl, cast a glance at the saddle we’d hurriedly affixed to him, and snorted. I had no idea what that meant, until he scooped me up in his claws, cupping me in a carefully-formed cage, and took flight.
And I appreciated it. I curled up in his grasp, my limbs aching from hauling bodies, my chest aching from hacking up smoke and soot. The last thing I wanted to do now was sit in a saddle and fake any sort of confidence.
I didn’t open my eyes again until he touched down through Jhazra’s dragon door. He deposited me gently on a woven rug, and shifted back into his soot-streaked male form.
“Come with me,” he said, eyes still glittering in a way that said he was on edge. He walked on two legs now, but the scales still covered most of his skin, an incessant, dizzying shift between flesh and dragonhide.
He’d just lost his people to an attack; of course he was walking a fine line. No dragon could hold back from the urge to destroy whatever had harmed their territory or their people.
I needed to be here, needed to be a pillar of stone he could lean on. Unbending, unbreaking, unyielding.
He led me down into the eyrie, and as I pushed my door open, he came in on my heels. Close enough that I felt the heat of his skin against my back.
I couldn’t think like that. Not right now. “Whatever you need, I’m h—” I started to say, wanting to give him whatever small comfort I could, but Rhylan pushed my door shut firmly and took my face in his hands.
He kissed me hard, the taste of blood and smoke between us, the harsh press of his lips full of hunger.
Without thinking, wanting to forget everything I’d just seen, wanting just a small sliver of time in which I wasn’t terrified or grieving, I wrapped my arms around his neck. Met his lips with force of my own, nipping his lower lip and drawing a groan out of him.
His hands tangled in my hair, pulling my head back, exposing my neck to him. He didn’t give a damn about the soot, the blood, the sweat; teeth grazed my throat, and he kissed a trail from the hollow to my jaw.
“I don’t want to do this alone, Sera,” he breathed against the pulse racing in my throat. “I don’t want to be alone.”
Fire and blood…I still tasted ash and dragon flame when I reclaimed his mouth, silencing him.
“You’re not alone,” I whispered against his lips, kissing, biting. “I’m right here.”
He pushed me backward and I let him, feeling the slither of scales under my hands, the warmth of skin. I wanted more, to silence the screaming in my head, to take happiness with both hands for once in my life…
My knees hit the bed and I fell back, taking Rhylan’s full weight over me. He kissed like he was dying, like this was the last time he would ever touch someone, like I was just as much an escape for him as he was for me.
He arched over me and I felt his thick, hard shaft against my thigh. The sound he made when I moved against him sent heat flaring through me, a demand to strip away every layer between us.
Rhylan laced his fingers in mine, pinning my hand above my head. He stopped kissing me for a moment, staring down at my face like he was reading something there.
“What if it wasn’t fake?” he asked hoarsely. “What if everything was real?”
I gazed up at him, the heat still licking at my veins, driving me towards something…something I had sworn not to do. I couldn’t touch him like this. It was forbidden.
“I…” My voice died out as he kissed me again, desperate and driving.
“You could be mine, and I could be yours.” He nuzzled my ear, gently bit my lobe, traced burning kisses across the silver scales on my cheekbone. “What if we belonged to each other, if all of this was yours, too?”
I pushed back against the primal instinct shrieking at me to say yes, to take him, to make good on what he offered now. To make the bond and lighten his burdens, to carry some of the load that weighed him down.
To be his undying, eternal bond, to support him through ashes and embers and flames.
“You’re grieving,” I whispered. “You only think this because…because of grief.”
Rhylan had just seen his own people annihilated. He wasn’t just hurt, he had been flayed open, and now would have to live with knowing the horror of their last moments, knowing that he couldn’t save them.
He wasn’t in his right mind.
“No.” He breathed the word in my word, his cheek pressed against mine. “Not just grief. I don’t want to be alone…not in my head. I want you with me, I want to feel what you feel, I want to know…that I’m yours. That when I need you, it’s all real.”
The desire in me didn’t die, but the coolness in my mind had detached from everything else. From the primal instinct, from my own wants.
This must stop now, or I would lose myself to the pull of the dragon atop me.
I braced my free hand on his chest, pushing back. “Rhylan. We need to stop. We need to think about this. This is…”
Because you’re hurt, and you want comfort, was what I didn’t say. But I couldn’t let it go any further. If the bond formed, the gods only knew how long it would be before I felt the regret emanating from his soul.
I would rather die than feel that.
“This isn’t for us,” I said, forcing myself to sound firmly, utterly convincing. “I am here for you, and it is real, but…not with a bond.”
He stared down at me, eyes shadowed. “You don’t…gods. You do mean it.”
I made myself nod. Made myself disengage my hand from his, curling my own fingers into a fist.
Rhylan rose up, backing off the bed. His chest rose and fell rapidly, and he pushed his hair out of his face as he moved towards the door.
He opened his mouth, wanting to say something…and shut it again, looking away.
He left silently, closing the door behind him.
I waited, half expecting the door to open again. Thirty seconds of silence. A minute.
Five minutes.
He didn’t come back. I curled up on the bed, uncaring of the reek of death that clung to me, fighting the scream of despair that rose up from somewhere deep inside.
“What idiocy,” Myst commented, coalescing from the air. She moved like a cat, delicate claws hardly making an impression on the thick bedding.
I swallowed the scream, and waited for the thick lump in my throat to subside. “What is?” I asked flatly, when I had control of myself.
“You.”
“Me?” I sat up, aghast. “For not getting myself into a terrible situation?”
My Ascendant sat on her haunches, raising a foreleg to inspect the silver rings glittering around her claws. Her tongue flicked out, wiping a smudge from a pearl, and those slit-pupiled silver eyes moved to me. “It’s idiocy to pretend to a bond that could do nothing but help you. Why go through all these silly motions? Make the bond, child.”
I laughed silently, clutching my sore stomach muscles. “Because all the silly motions mean I’m free in the end.”
To my horror, Erebos’s voice joined the choir of temptation. “It is all rather tiring, is it not?” his deep voice rumbled. “Watching the little charades go round and round…going nowhere.”
The dragon himself slid from a patch of shadows in the ceiling, in a form not much larger than Myst. I supposed the bedroom was a little small to support his full-fledged size, but there was something disconcerting about two ancient Ascendants prowling my bedroom, one now tiptoeing over my dresser on feet no bigger than a dog’s paws, his jewels jingling with every step.
“Oh, are you two in league now?” I asked in acid tones.
Myst stretched like a cat, the light playing on her silver-snow form. “A certain dragon may have put aside his rather overblown grudges for the sake of sanity,” she allowed. “This is ridiculous, Sera. No descendant of mine should be playing games, breaking the Law, because she’s afraid. I gave you my blood! And we’re no cowards.”
“I’m not afraid. Also, you thought breaking the Law sounded exciting, last I recall—and don’t forget, you didn’t exactly approve of Rhylan.”
“Even an Ascendant can make hasty presumptions.” She directed her silvery stare at Erebos. “We’ve decided that the glory of our Houses would be greatly increased by a bond between our descendants. Honestly, Sera, you had a perfectly good opportunity right there and you wasted it. No—you didn’t just waste it, you set it on fire and threw it out the window. Shame on you.”
It was Erebos who alarmed me far more than Myst and her talk of glory—he looked at me with huge dark eyes, twining around my legs in a rather feline manner.
“Do you wish for my House to die out?” he asked sadly, turning that liquid gaze upwards from my knees. “You would deprive me of descendants, Sera?”
“Oh, no no no,” I said, drawing my legs up on the bed, out of his reach. “I’m nowhere near thinking about children. Right now I’d just like to make it to the Second Claim without dying.”
“You might breathe a little easier,” Myst said slyly, “If you didn’t have to play pretend all day.”
I shot a glare at my Ascendant. “That’s a low blow, Myst.”
And I thought I had hidden the crushing weight on my chest every night so well.
“Is it?” She curled her head over her shoulder, preening her flawless scales and gazing at me sidelong. “Or do you waste effort and energy on this nonsense when you could simply…oh, I don’t know…abide by the Law our Great Father laid down? Look at you. How can you rule when you cannot even see?”
I jumped off the bed when Erebos leapt up, curling around my shoulders. “It’s funny how you suddenly decide it’s no longer amusing to break the Law when you think you might get more descendants out of it. I have my reasons for…for all of this.”
I waved a hand wildly, as though ‘this’ was something that could be encompassed with a wave.
“Good reasons? Or do you cling to the comfort of familiar falsehoods?” Erebos asked. He had grown in size while my back was turned, now taking up most of the bed. The dragon cocked his enormous head, sending chimes of golden coins through the room. “You believe my descendant is not worthy of you, when he has proved his worth time and again.”
I sucked in a breath, fury coursing through me. The heat of Rhylan’s touch still hummed under my skin, demanding acknowledgement, demanding commitment.
But the anger…now it burned hotter.
“He sent me to Hell!” I snarled, fists clenched so hard my claws dug into my palms. “He destroyed everything I had, everything I was! I spent years terrified I would die at any moment, starving, offering to sell myself for the sake of safety… and you think I can just get over that? That it’s all forgotten because he was nice to me after he pulled me out of misery of his own making?”
Neither Ascendant responded. They simply gazed at me in an even, uncompromising way that made me feel about three inches tall. The look on Myst’s face mirrored the ones I used to see on my mother when she thought I was being foolish.
I wanted to shrink in on myself, but I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of knowing…what? That I felt tiny under their assessment of my character?
That they were right?
No. They were utterly wrong. Rhylan and I had entered into an agreement knowing we would both walk free from each other in the end—because he had sent me there.
I still felt the icy rocks under my bare feet, cutting up my palms, smelled the thick, deathly stench of the tides, felt the gnawing pain of hunger in my belly. I still woke in the throes of terror, cold sweat coating my skin.
I had promised myself on those nightmare shores that I would not forget. Mistward lived in my bones now, a permanent part of me, just as Rhylan’s role in that was a part of me.
But these Ascendants…all I could do was bare my teeth in a silent snarl of defiance, and whirl into the bathroom, locking the door behind me.
They were wrong.
I slept curledup in the bathtub, knowing that at any second one of the Ascendants could simply choose to appear over me, ready to resume their defense of Rhylan.
But they left me alone. I woke up sore and stiff, and didn’t have to do much but throw my filthy leathers over the side of the bath before filling it.
But I wasn’t the only one in the eyrie who was disturbed. I wandered to the training rooms several hours later, when I could no longer bear to hide in my room, and still couldn’t bring myself to face Rhylan.
Kirana was there, her hair still wet from her own wash, but instead of practicing, she was simply sitting on the polished floor, twisting a dagger back and forth and watching the light play over it.
She was curled up like a child, knees drawn to her chin. “What’s wrong, Sera?” she asked, noting the tension in my shoulders, my clenched fists.
I opened my mouth, wanting to tell her that our Ascendants had finally put aside their enmity for the all-important goal of me producing offspring…but I didn’t want to talk to Kirana about Rhylan, about the tangled snarl of emotions within me that I couldn’t possibly hope to untangle.
“Yesterday,” I lied, forcing my hands to loosen. “I’m fine, really. Why are you here? Is it Coldburn?”
A brief smile crossed her lips. “You would think so, but…no.” She offered nothing else, and I sat next to her, crossing my legs.
Maybe it was because my own feelings were still sore over the Ascendants and their argument, but I gave in to asking the question that had been lurking in the back of my mind. “It’s Cai, isn’t it?”
She flipped the dagger again in silence, and finally let it droop towards the floor. “The First Claim was the first time I’ve laid eyes on him since I left the Training Grounds. I almost didn’t go, because…I knew if I saw him, I would remember everything I could have had, and let go.”
I leaned my head back, watching the opposite wall. Kirana leaned back, her legs unfolding, and dropped the dagger. It hit the floor with a solid clunk.
“When Loralei died, I saw what happened to a mate when a bond was broken. Jaien was…out of his mind. The healers weren’t sure he would ever come back, and honestly, he never really did. Not all the way.” Kirana raised a gnawed claw to her mouth, then lowered it again. All of her cuticles were freshly scabbed around the edges today. “I was a coward when I was younger. I saw what happened, and thought…there was no way I could live if Cai died before me. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t even really say goodbye; I thought if I just left, he’d move on and find someone else. A clean break.”
I sighed. There was no clean break for such a thing.
If there was, I wouldn’t be considering why I still resisted the temptation of the dragon who had sent me to Mistward Isle. I would have held onto that hate with tooth and claw.
“He clearly didn’t. You could still have a bond,” I said quietly.
Kirana shook her head. “How could I ask him to do it now? I ran away. I’m not worth it and I don’t deserve him.”
My back straightened in outrage. Kirana, not worth it? She was mad.
But I didn’t get the chance to tell her exactly how worth it she was—that she should seize her chance, because happiness wasn’t always guaranteed.
Alriss appeared in the training room door, and we both jumped to our feet. My heart was already racing, expecting the worst—who had Yura killed this time? Had she set her exiles on more innocents?
But Alriss didn’t look concerned. Tired, weary, but not concerned. She held a letter, this one sealed with deep blue wax that had been impressed with stars.
“Princess Maristela sends her regards,” she said, handing me the letter.
Kirana and I glanced at each other, and I ripped the wax seal away to expose Maristela’s flawless writing across no more than a few sentences.
My mother does not speakfor us all. Rhylan, Serafina—come to Kirion Eyrie. Gaelin and I would stand with you, but we must bring my House around. Elinor is here, and she believes she can help you in bringing Undying Light to the alliance.
We will wait for you.
The letter was signedby both Maristela and Gaelin, her name in delicate loops, his in a sharp, heavier-handed print.
“If Maristela doesn’t have control of her House, I don’t see Chantrelle giving in,” I said, handing the letter to Kirana. “But we have to try.”
“Oh, the joys of politics,” Kirana said glumly. “I would love to see them again, but I’m preparing for the trip south. The sooner I make it to the Wildlands, the better.”
I looked at her, still wanting to tell her that she was worth everything, but Alriss cleared her throat. “Shall I send a reply?”
I nodded, refolding the letter. “I’ll go get Rhylan ready. Tell her we’re coming tonight.”