23. Eradin
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ERADIN
Iwas going to die in these woods, and no one would ever find my body.
The scale in my pocket was proof.
I’d been walking for hours. The fortress had been gobbled down by trees that grew thicker the deeper I went. My burned foot screamed with each step, and exhaustion ripped at my shoulders, a beast with claws.
Elite riders spent their entire lives training with dragons. I had…four or so hours to catch up.
The math didn’t work. It rarely did.
I kept walking anyway.
The scale’s heat intensified, a brand against my thigh that made me want to dig it out and throw it into the underbrush. Except I couldn’t. The pull was too strong now, dragging me forward.
The forest changed around me. The trees grew older, their trunks thick enough that three people couldn’t wrap their arms around them. Moss coated everything, and the air tasted different, mineral-rich and ancient.
I’d never been this deep in the forest. I doubted anyone had, not even the hunters. This was the part of the world marked on maps with warnings written in red ink.
The scale flared hotter.
My foot caught on a root, and I stumbled, snapping my hand out to catch myself on a tree trunk. My fingers came away sticky with sap. The sweet smell mixed with a scent that made my brain go quiet.
Cinnamon.
Not the sulfurous reek of aerie dragons, the ones who’d been fed grain and hay and kept in pens their whole lives. This smelled cleaner. Wilder.
The sound of water reached me, a roar that said the water had been falling for a long time and would keep falling after I was gone.
A chill swept through the air, carrying spray that beaded on my face.
I pushed through a stand of ferns taller than me and stopped.
A ravine gaped ahead, cut deep into the upper mountain range. Water plunged over a sheet of white quartz mixed with onyx, crashing into a pool below before disappearing into the boulders and curving around a bend. Spray misted the air, catching light and throwing rainbows.
I’d swear the scale was trying to burn its way through my leather pants.
I pulled it from my pocket. The stone-gray-purple surface gleamed in the filtered light, and for a moment I saw my reflection in it. Not the person I was now, but a woman who looked like she belonged here.
The pull yanked hard enough my knees almost buckled.
I started down, though the path wasn’t really a path, just a series of ledges and handholds shaped by water. My boots slipped on wet stone. Moss gave way under my fingers. By the time I’d reached the bottom, my hands had been scraped raw, and my left foot had gone numb.
A pool stretched ahead, dark and deep. Spray soaked my face, hair, and clothing. I couldn’t see through the falls from here, just the hint of a cave behind them.
The scale burned so hot I dropped it. It hit the stone and bounced before tumbling toward the water. I lunged and caught it, my fingers closing around heat that should leave blisters but didn’t. I straightened, and the pull yanked me up a narrow trail and to the right of the falls.
Behind.
And into…
…Home.
The word wasn’t mine, but it felt true.
I couldn’t hear myself think, couldn’t hear anything except water beating stone and my own heartbeat thudding in my ears.
I stepped forward, and the world went white before plunging back into darkness.
My boots wanted to stop. Every survival instinct I’d honed said this was the moment to turn back, that crossing this threshold would result in something I couldn’t undo.
I stepped deeper into the darkness anyway.
A cave stretched ahead, tall enough I couldn’t see the ceiling and wide enough to fit ten of our cottages inside. The walls weren’t rough like I’d expect. They’d been smoothed and scored with claws to form patterns like writing.
Shed scales speckled the floor, glinting in the weak light filtering through the falls. Stone-gray and purple, each one the size of a child’s fist.
I knelt and picked one up. Smooth on one side, ridged on the other. Beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with polish or display.
Tolross would’ve loved this. He would’ve painted it, trying to capture how the light caught the purple undertones. Then he would’ve written a poem about freedom and scales and things that grew wild.
I set it down gently.
Wild dragons weren’t savage or the monsters tales made them out to be, the threats that the elite believed needed hunting and control.
They were just free.
The aerie dragons were the broken ones. The elite had taken creatures that could be this and turned them into tools that responded to pain.
Movement erupted in the shadows, and I froze, my hand going to the talon-blade at my hip.
Selira stepped into the light.
She was smaller than I remembered, though she still towered over me and could’ve swallowed me in just a few bites. But compared to the aerie dragons I’d tended, she was compact. Built for speed, not spectacle.
Her stone-gray coloring caught the light and threw it back in shades of purple. The pale stripe along her snout stood out like a scar, marking her as wild-born. The wound on her leg where the trap had bitten deep had healed to a darker patch, slightly raised but closed.
Her eyes found mine. Intelligence looked back at me.
A lifetime of surviving screamed at me to back away slowly and run. Wild dragons killed. That’s what the stories said. What the elite believed. What I’d been taught since I could walk.
Except she’d had chances to kill me. In the clearing when I’d freed her. When she’d stood on the trail ahead of me. Even now, cornered in her own den, she could end me before I drew breath to scream.
She didn’t move.
“Why me?” The question came out raw. Not servant-small or careful. Just…raw. An ache bloomed in my throat. “Why would you want me?”
The stillness between us stretched, and I realized she was waiting, though not for permission. Wild dragons wouldn’t ask for that. She was waiting to see what I’d do.
I could leave. Walk away and pretend I’d never found this place. Beg to register a different dragon. Find another way.
Except there was no other way. And my feet weren’t moving toward the exit.
I took a step forward.
Selira’s nostrils flared, scenting me. Her pupils narrowed, then widened, studying me in the same way I’d seen Heartsbrim do when I’d first approached her stall years ago. Reading intent.
Another step.
The cave felt smaller now. Or she was bigger. The space between us hummed with something I didn’t have a name for yet.
“I freed you.” My voice echoed off the stone. “In the woods. The trap.”
She knew, but speaking it aloud made it real.
“I don’t know why you came back or why you’ve been following me. Dropping a scale and a talon like breadcrumbs.” My throat choked off. “I came because you called, but I don’t know what you want from me.”
Her head lowered, and she watched me with eyes that said she’d been expecting me all along.
Pain stabbed through my chest, almost too sharp to manage.
Choice.
The feeling hit me before the word formed. Not mine. Hers.
I froze.
Her eyes held mine, unblinking, and the feeling came again. Stronger.
I chose.
“You’re choosing me?” I whispered.
The certainty that flooded back wasn’t language. It was too big for that. But I understood it the way you know thunder means rain is coming.
Yes. You.
My knees wanted to buckle. I locked them in place.
“I’m nobody,” I said. “I’m a commons woman who steals herbs from the forest and can’t save her own little brother.”
Warmth cut through my spiral. I know what you are. I chose anyway.
I took a step forward. Another. Moving until I was close enough to touch her.
My hand lifted.
She didn’t back away.
“This is my choice too,” I said.
I wasn’t just being claimed. I was claiming back. This dragon. This impossible thing. This choice that would probably kill me.
Yes.
The pull snapped taut, a line drawn between us that I could almost see.
Then it hit.
The world inverted. My stomach dropped like I’d stepped off a cliff, but I wasn’t falling. My ribs cracked open to let something massive inside. Heat flooded every vein at once, so intense I couldn’t tell if I was burning or freezing or both.
Feelings, sharp and overwhelming, slammed into me with enough force my knees gave way and I dropped to the rocky ground.
You. The human who knelt in mud with gentle hands. Who freed metal jaws. Who pushed warmth into torn flesh and hummed a song that said safety when everything else screamed run.
You freed me.
You healed me.
YOU are MINE.
Hunger came next, days of it, gnawing away at her soul. She hadn’t hunted properly since the trap. Flying hurt. Landing hurt. Everything hurt, and the predators sensed her weakness.
Then loneliness, so vast my lungs couldn’t expand past it. Wild dragons were solitary by necessity. The elite hunted them. The world feared them. And being alone was how you survived.
Until a human with soft hands and a voice like home had knelt in a clearing and chosen kindness over fear.
The claim wrapped around everything else, a declaration that vibrated through my bones.
MINE. I choose this. I choose YOU.
I pushed back as Tolross’s face, pale against his pillow, flashed through my mind. The sound of his breathing when it caught. The poem he’d given me like he was handing me a piece of himself to carry.
“This is why,” I said. “This is who I’m fighting for.”
Understanding washed back through the bond.
She had her own reasons for choosing. Now she knew mine.
My palms erupted in heat. The red lines glowed bright enough to see through my closed eyelids.
The scale in my hand blazed, no longer separate from me but a part of me, a piece of her I’d been carrying since she’d decided.
My eyes snapped open to see it shrinking…
Shrinking… Until it was the size of a coin and magically strung on a thin chain.
I secured it around my neck with trembling fingers.
Wear. OURS.
I could feel her heartbeat, bigger than mine. Slower. Steadier.
My vision blurred. I blinked and wetness spilled over, tracking down my cheeks in lines that wouldn’t stop. I drew in a sharp breath. Another. And I cupped my face. The scream I tried to swallow lodged in my throat.
The sound that came out instead was animal. Feral.
Grief like that lived in bones until something cracked them open. I’d locked it down the day Mother stopped breathing, and now it was tearing free, every loss I’d swallowed and moment I’d made myself small. Every night I’d listened to Tolross struggle for air and known I couldn’t fix it.
Selira pressed her snout against my forehead, her breath warm on my face.
I stayed there until the shaking stopped, and I could breathe freely.
When I finally lifted my head, Selira was still there. Still watching with eyes that saw all of me and hadn’t looked away.
She lowered her head, an invitation I suspected dragons had been offering since before humans learned to write their names.
When I stood, I felt different. Taller, though my height hadn’t changed. I’d been compressed into a too-small space my whole life and now I’d finally expanded.
Fenian had killed for me, but he’d seen a commons who needed saving.
Tomorrow he’d see this.
The thought sent heat through my chest that had nothing to do with the bond.
I placed both palms on her snout.
I could almost hear my mother’s voice. This is what you were always building toward. With every creature you sang to in the dark.
I started humming her tune, the low, wordless melody that meant I’m here. I won’t hurt you. Breathe.
Selira stilled beneath my palms.
Mine.
Underneath the certainty of mine lived something else, older and quieter. And she pulled me along with her, showing me something that had been passed down through generations of wild dragons, the way migration routes were inherited and carried in the body.
A thing in the mountains. It had been there longer than the kingdom. It ate what came to it, and it had been eating dragons since before elites learned to put metal around their necks and call it sacred.
Selira had always known this the way she knew the air she flew through and the ground beneath her.
She’d understood where old hungry things lived and gave them the right distance.
Until mine had overridden everything else.
Now the distance was no longer possible.
The vision released me.