Epilogue
Pip
I was riding my own horse, on my own, and I’d never been more proud of myself in my life. Periwinkle was pretty thrilled, too. I could tell by the arch in his neck.
Aeldryc was ahead of me on Bram, full dress leathers, his cloak snapping behind him in the wind. He looked like something I’d invented in a daydream and somehow gotten lucky enough to keep.
“I see you back there, Crane!” Vaelith called over her shoulder. “Stop staring at your husband and focus on the road!”
“I’m not staring at my husband!” I lied. I’d been staring at my husband for hours. It turned out that Periwinkle could handle going down a road behind other horses without much instruction from me at all, which left me ample time to gaze.
“Aeldryc,” I called, picturing the cramped, careful handwriting on the missive that had arrived yesterday. “The troll who wrote for you to come, the one who saw my posters of Sky. Do you think he’s reliable?”
“His name is Moerrven. He has a solid reputation.”
“You know him?”
“I know of him. He’s a well-known author. Why?”
“I was just wondering... could he be exaggerating? I mean, how dangerous is a dragon, on a scale of one to ten?”
He turned his head a fraction, then slowed Bram to walk beside Periwinkle. “Depends on what you’re comparing it to?”
“Compared to something mildly dangerous, like a spider.”
He smirked at me. “Spiders are not at all dangerous.”
“Some are venomous!”
“Compared to a venomous spider, a dragon is a forest fire with a bad attitude. Imagine that spider was the size of that tree over there, with wings and a mouth full of fire.”
“That tree over there?” I pointed to a very small tree, feeling hopeful.
“No, the one behind it.”
“Oh. Um. Cool.” I did not feel very cool. Fuck. Was Sky even still alive? How had he managed to get himself kidnapped by a dragon? Due to the small amount of information that could be attached to the leg of a carrier pigeon, we had very little information.
Vaelith was laughing, and I turned back and glared at her.
“Thinking a dragon was the size of that tiny bush. Oh, Pip, you make the best jokes,” Vaelith said, slapping her thigh. Ilyndra, riding ahead beside her wife, glanced back at me with the small patient smile.
“I’m sure your friend is quite healthy, or we’d have had another missive,” she said.
“Most dragons don’t eat humans,” Aeldryc added.
“Most?”
“It is statistically rare, but it would be inaccurate to say all. Some do.”
“Aeldryc the Ironstorm. My husband. My heart. My literal lawful life partner. You cannot say most dragons don’t eat humans and consider that comforting. The word most is what’s spiking my anxiety, because if there’s a most, there’s also the few who break that rule.”
Aeldryc’s mouth had done the thing where the corner threatened to move and he was pretending it hadn’t.
Periwinkle held the pace beautifully, a testament to the lessons we’d been taking every morning for almost two weeks, since just after I’d walked my horse through the hedge maze.
I shifted in the saddle, feeling the genius of the culottes I’d designed.
They were cut on the bias for movement, with reinforced inner-thigh panels to avoid the chafing my usual shorts caused—a feature my husband would appreciate later.
I’d been working on them since I’d finished my wedding suit, a proper pair of riding garments, just a little longer than knee-length and quite beautiful.
They flowed when I walked and gripped when I rode, and they were the prettiest dark blue, with silver embroidery down the outer seam. Lyriel had gushed over the design.
“You’re doing well, Pip.” Aeldryc’s voice interrupted my thoughts. It had gone soft around the edges the way it did when he thought no one was listening, even though Vaelith was thirty feet away and had ears like a fruit bat. “Your seat is much improved.”
“You’ve been watching me ride?”
“I am always watching. I find watching you bounce in a saddle to be quite… pleasing.”
“Because of my skill?” I asked.
“Of course, husband.”
“Why thank you, husband. I love saying that word. Don’t you?”
“I haven’t noticed feeling one way or another about it, husband.”
“And yet you say it quite a lot, husband.”
Aeldryc chuckled. “That must be a coincidence, husband.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, if either of you says the word husband again, I’m going to murder you both and use you as chum for the dragon,” Vaelith called.
I swallowed, hard. “Dragons need chum? Like sharks?”
“She’s fucking with you.” Aeldryc shook his head and did not, this time, manage to suppress the smile. It was small. The corner of his mouth, mostly. But it was there, and it was happening more frequently. Perhaps the muscle in his cheek was getting stronger.
The road climbed. We still had at least one more day’s ride to Stonedeep.
What if we weren’t moving fast enough? Worry crept in around the edges every time I forgot to keep talking.
The idea of Sky being kept captive anywhere for more than about forty-eight hours had always seemed implausible on its face.
But, factoring in pigeon transit time and our ride, it had been at least four days since the dragon had snagged him. I didn’t want to think about it.
“Aeldryc, how statistically rare?”
“I have known nineteen fire dragons in my life. Only one was a man-eater.”
“Aeldryc.”
“That is a favorable ratio. It’s even better if you count the ice dragons, who tend to be vegetarians.”
“That is not a favorable ratio. Even one in a hundred is not favorable if my best friend could be, at this very moment, being turned into some dragon’s stew.”
“I don’t think they bother to make a stew,” Vaelith said, snickering. “Hopefully he’s still alive, I’m looking forward to a good fight.”
“He’s fine,” Ilyndra said, in a way that made me wonder if she knew, magically somehow, or if she was just trying to ease my panic.
“Pip.” He’d slowed Bram fully and his hand found my thigh through the culottes. The contact was steadying, the way it always was. “Sky is your friend. We will get him out. The Grey Guard is the best of the best.”
I looked at him. He had that face on. The proposal-face. The wedding-face. The one that meant he had decided a thing and was Aeldryc the Ironstorm and his decisions were facts of the world now.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I believe you.”
He squeezed my thigh once and continued by my side, his booted foot brushing mine every now and then.
I rode in silence for a while. I tried to remember Sky’s laugh. The way he could not be still when music was playing. The fact that he was the only person in the world who had known me longer than three months and still answered the phone.
I tried not to imagine a dragon.
Some miles later Vaelith fell back so she was riding beside us. “You holding up, Crane?”
“I’m holding up.”
“You’re quieter than I have ever heard you.”
“I’m conserving my screams for the dragon.”
She barked a laugh, reaching over to slap me on the back so hard that I pitched forward. “That’s the spirit. The troll Moerrven wouldn’t have sent a missive if Sky had been eaten. And if the dragon had eaten him, there would be no reason for anyone to summon the Grey Guard.”
I tilted my head and thought about that. “You know what? That’s actually helpful, thank you.”
“I’m a giver.” She shot me a cheeky grin, then kicked her horse forward and rejoined her wife at the head of the column.
By mid-afternoon I was exhausted, and I had no idea how the rest of them looked so relaxed. After years of dance, I considered myself in excellent shape, but I had nothing on these soldiers, and I started to nod off. Aeldryc noticed right away.
I pulled Periwinkle to a stop for a moment, as Aeldryc hauled me up into his lap, looping Periwinkle’s lead to a ring on Bram’s saddle. The familiar fit of my back against his chest, his arm around my waist was so absurdly comforting that I almost cried.
“Don’t get used to it,” I muttered into his shoulder. “I’m still riding tomorrow.”
“I would not dream of underestimating you. But my lap is here should you ever need it, husband.”
“Don’t think I didn’t hear that,” Vaelith called back.
“Mm.” I closed my eyes. The world rocked gently with Bram’s stride. Somewhere ahead, Vaelith was telling Ilyndra a story I couldn’t hear the words of, just the cadence. I was asleep before the next mile.
I didn’t wake until the constant steady pounding of hooves came to a stop.
“Pip.” Aeldryc’s voice was close to my ear, warm with amusement. “We have arrived.”
I cracked an eye. We were in a town. It was bigger than Sorrend, smaller than Feravael, with stone buildings with steep slate roofs climbing up a hillside.
Mountains rose behind it in granite sheets.
The air smelled of cold rivers and woodsmoke.
A market square spread in front of us, busy with afternoon trade.
I rubbed my face. “Where are we?”
“Stonedeep proper. The seat of the county.”
“Did I sleep the whole way?”
“I suppose you needed it.”
I straightened up and looked around. The Grey Guard had dismounted.
Ilyndra was speaking with a troll who appeared to be some kind of official.
Vaelith was leaning on her saddle, watching the square with the alert disinterest of a woman who had been a soldier for three centuries and was professionally bored.
“PIP!”
I knew that voice. I had known that voice since I was fifteen.
I was off Bram before I’d processed how. My boots hit the cobblestones and I turned, and there, sprinting across the market square in what appeared to be a borrowed troll-sized tunic belted with a leather cord, hair longer than I remembered, eyes wider than the sun, was Sky.
He was uninjured. So uninjured that one might even say he was glowing.
He hit me in the chest at full speed and we both went down on the cobblestones in a tangle of limbs and curses. He was laughing. I was crying.
“You’re alive.”
“Of course I’m alive.”
“You were KIDNAPPED. BY A DRAGON.”