37. Ravel
RAVEL
The decisive moment seldom brings new wisdom; it crystallizes what has long been forming unseen.
—From the journal of Commander Ravel Nidar
"Something is wrong!" Onyx said in my head, but his panic had already registered.
I looked up to where Kailin was flying above me, and my heart stopped.
Her saddle had slid half around, and for a moment, my mind couldn't process what I was seeing. Was she performing some new acrobatic maneuver? Something that idiot Morek had talked her into?
Except, Kailin didn't do stupid things.
She was falling.
The only woman I had ever loved was about to die.
The two realizations hit me at the same time, and they would have knocked me out if not for decades of experience kicking in.
Onyx was already shifting after her.
Thank Elu we'd been below Morgateth instead of above or to the side as we usually were. We had a one-in-a-million chance to save her, but it was better than none.
I leaned into the dive, urging him to go faster, but there was no going against the simple laws of physics, and given the aerodynamics, he was going as fast as his large body could manage.
The dive yanked the floor out of my stomach and punched the breath out of my chest. The peaks were coming up at us, and Kailin was dropping down toward them, and by Elu's grace, Onyx threaded the two targets together with the kind of precision I could never have managed on my own.
He leveled off, and then rose into her fall, aligning his great body beneath where her trajectory was taking her, and then climbed the last of the distance to meet her.
I came half out of my saddle with one hand locked in the harness and the other arm thrown wide.
She hit my arm, and the impact nearly tore both of us off Onyx's back, but I had her and I wasn't letting go even though my arm felt like it was being torn from my body.
I hauled with everything I had and then some, dragging her up and across, and then down hard against me. Instinctively, her hands came up and fisted in my jacket. She held on tight, locked against my chest, and I was never letting go.
"I've got you." I could barely hear my own voice. "I've got you, I've got you, Kailin. You're not going to die. Thank Elu, I've got you."
She was shaking.
We both were.
Her face was buried in my throat, and her heart was hammering hard enough for me to feel it through the layers of clothing between us.
Mine was drumming a similar beat.
Onyx leveled off and was just gliding on the current, slow and steady, waiting for us to regain our breath and feeding us both his strength because Morgateth was nowhere to be seen. The coward must have ditched the scene of the crime while Kailin had been still falling.
She hadn't called out to him or me when she fell. She only asked him to tell Alar that she loved him and was sorry. Onyx heard her, and I heard her through him, but the words hadn't penetrated through the panic.
They penetrated now, and dear Elu, they hurt.
In what she'd believed were her last seconds, Kailin had reached out with all of herself with a final message for Alar.
The sound of wings above us had me looking up, and I saw Morgateth, who hadn't bolted after all, and I was ready to take back my angry words, but then he folded and wheeled, climbing away from us so fast he was a dark smear against the sky as though something was hunting him.
At least he'd seen that Kailin was safe before bolting, but it was still a cowardly thing to do.
He must have made the same instinctive calculation I had, reaching the same conclusion that he could never catch her in time. Thankfully, Onyx and I were far enough below to make the physics work.
Miraculously.
A one-in-a-million chance.
I held on to Kailin, my arms wrapped tightly around her. "Your asshole of a dragon flew off as if he was being chased by demons."
"Because he was," she whispered into my chest. "The ghosts of his past are the demons chasing him. He couldn't handle one more death."
On some level I understood, but I couldn't accept it. I wouldn't. Morgateth wasn't fit for a rider. He was unreliable.
"Ask him," I said. "Ask him why he left."
"He left because he knew you caught me. He knew I was in good hands."
She couldn't have seen him hovering above and bolting only after I caught her. She'd been busy falling to her death.
"How do you know that he waited to see that you were okay?"
She lifted her head off my chest and looked into my eyes. "Because I felt his terror, and then his relief, then his fury."
"What was he furious about? Letting you down?"
"Yes. Even though none of this was his fault."
She was probably right, and I was already thinking about the hell I would rain on everyone who had access to her saddle. But I was furious too, and at the moment my fury was directed at the dragon who should have stayed by his bonded rider.
"If you don't want to talk to him and give him a piece of your mind, I'll ask Onyx to do it."
"He's blocking me," Onyx said. "You gave us all quite a scare, Little Warrior."
"Sorry," Kailin said, and her shaking intensified again.
"It's not your fault." I rubbed her back.
"I should have double-checked everything like Alar told me to. I checked only once, and I was distracted."
I wouldn't let her take the blame for something that wasn't her fault. I'd seen her go through the routine, and she hadn't missed a thing.
"You didn't make any mistakes," I said. "Someone must have sabotaged your saddle, making it seem as if everything was working fine, and I'm going to find out who."
"The saddle fell down to the ravine," Onyx said. "Do you want me to go down to look for it?"
"No!" both Kailin and I said at the same time.
"I'll go looking for it later, after I put you two on solid ground. It seems like you both need it."
"Yes, thank you." She rested her head on my chest again, and despite everything that had happened, I cherished the closeness.
Onyx knew where to take us. I didn't need to direct him, and he also knew to go slow and not make any sharp turns because Kailin simply couldn't take it.
I kept gently rubbing her back, acknowledging that it was as close as I'd ever get to her, and that I'd better enjoy it while it lasted.
"I can't reach him," she said after a few moments. "He's blocking me too."
"Coward."
"He's hurt," she said.
"He is not hurt, Little Warrior. Wherever he has gone, he used his own wings to get there."
Onyx brought us to the shoulder of bare rock we'd rested on before. Kailin said that it looked like the top had been sliced off by a giant hand. The resulting platform was big enough for two or three dragons to rest on.
He set us down so softly I barely felt the rock take our weight.
"Are you okay to go down by yourself?" I asked.
She shook her head.
Onyx crouched as low as he could, flattening his belly on the rock so we wouldn't have a long way down.
I got Kailin off his back and onto the ground, and as soon as her legs touched the rock, they went out from under her, and I went down with her, the two of us folding onto the cold stone.
For a while, neither of us said anything, and I just held her while her tremors subsided. Onyx settled himself between us and the drop, a wall of warm dark scales, and watched the sky where Morgateth had vanished.
The wind moved over the rock.
"It happened like this in my dream," Kailin said.
Ice slithered through my veins. "You dreamt of dying?"
Kailin's dreams were not the normal kind that could be ignored. They were prophetic, and if she'd dreamt about falling, it might come to pass, but I was only aware of her dreaming about Alar's death.
I tightened my arm around her, and she let me because she needed my warmth, and maybe my strength.
She shook her head, and the dread drained out of me.
"In my dreams, Alar died exactly like that.
A sharp turn between two peaks, no room to maneuver, the saddle sliding, and him falling to his death.
That's why I encouraged him to go back home.
He didn't listen, but Elu must have heard my prayers and made Alar's parents demand his return.
" Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Visions and dreams are often cryptic.
They are meant to point us in a certain direction, and we need to solve the puzzle on our own.
What if I substituted Alar for myself? He's more dear to me than my own life would ever be, so it's possible that the warning came with his face on it to make me take notice. "
Twist the knife, why don't you?
He was more dear to her than her own life.
I knew she loved him, but some selfish part of me, the part I didn't want to look too closely at because I was ashamed, wished it was just youthful infatuation and that it would end one day.
When she was older. No longer a cadet. And I could swoop in and claim the woman who had always been meant to be mine.