24. Eradin
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ERADIN
The bond sang between us, a living thing that had rewritten every certainty I’d ever held about who I was and what I was meant to be. But singing didn’t mean I knew how to dance to the tune.
I pushed myself up, my legs threatening mutiny. Selira watched me with sharp eyes. Wild dragons didn’t have patience for human hesitation, but she was waiting to see what I’d do with what she’d given me.
“I need to ride you,” I said. “If, um, that’s alright with you, I mean.”
Her head tilted. Amusement rippled through the bond.
Yes.
“I don’t know how. I’ve never—” The words got stuck. “I’ve only ever ridden Lykor, and that was with a saddle. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
More amusement. Then something else. Determination that matched my own.
We learn together.
She lowered her shoulder, extending her wing, creating a step.
My voice died in my throat, but I made my body move.
Such an undignified climb. It was good that she didn’t know better. I scrambled up her leg, my boots slipping on scales slick with water. I latched onto her wing strut when I started to slide back. She shifted her weight, steadying me without being asked.
I hauled myself up onto her back, straddling the ridge spikes between her neck and spine where a saddle would normally sit.
There was nothing to hold onto. No stirrups or reins or saddle horn. Just heated scales under my thighs and back spikes rising ahead and behind me, their tips sharp enough to slice through flesh.
I settled my hand on the base of the spike jutting up between her shoulders.
Terror slammed into me.
Hers.
“You won’t hurt me,” I said. My voice shook, but the words came out steady. “I trust you.”
The terror eased, replaced by a fierce feeling of pride.
She turned and launched, her wings snapping out to catch air, her powerful legs driving us forward.
Straight through the waterfall.
The world exploded into white. Water hammered my head and back, trying to shove me off her spine. I leaned forward, my fingers white-knuckled on the spike, and my teeth clenched tight.
We burst through into open air.
My belly plunged downward. The ground tilted sideways and I was slipping.
Falling.
Plummeting into the ice-cold water.
The pool gulped me down, the cold of it shocking through my system. I thrashed, my boots finding stone, and burst up to the surface, gasping.
Selira perched on broad stones beside the pool. Her head tilted, and her humor through the bond was smug as anything.
“That wasn’t funny,” I sputtered, swimming toward the edge.
Warmth and happiness flooded back.
I supposed it was a little funny.
I dragged myself out, water sluicing off my leathers, my hair plastered to my skull. My boots squelched with each step.
Selira extended her wing for me to mount again.
Anticipation thrummed through the bond. Eagerness.
I climbed back up, even more undignified now that I was soaked. After settling, I gripped the spike.
She shot forward, and I pitched backward immediately, my fingers scrabbling for purchase on wet scales. The spike I’d been gripping slipped through my grip and I was sliding, sliding—
I fell again, splashing into the water, sinking deep.
Kicking hard, I climbed back up through the water, my head popping above the surface. I sputtered, and it was all I could not to vomit everything I’d eaten today. I paddled back to the shore and scrambled out, much slower this time.
When I was seated and clutching the spike again, I gritted my teeth and nodded. “Ready.”
We tried again. And again. My body became a mess of new pains. Scraped thighs, bruised ribs, and fingers that wouldn’t uncurl from their death grip on her spike. The pool stopped being cold and started being just numb.
By what might have been the tenth attempt, something shifted.
She lurched upward, catching the wind with her wings.
One slight tilt to the right, and I was sliding again, my leathers wet-slick on her hide.
But my boot caught on a ridge of scales.
I hauled myself forward, flattening myself against her as best I could without being impaled by her spikes.
My heart tried to punch through my ribs.
She banked, and I overcorrected, leaning too far into the turn. My body slid…
She shot up toward the sky.
My thigh scraped over scales. Pain lanced through me, and I clutched the spike with both hands, holding position, trying not to think about how high we were or what falling from this elevation would mean.
She leveled out, her wings beating in a rhythm I could feel through my entire body.
Sorry, came through the bond. She didn’t know how to carry a rider, and I didn’t know how to be carried.
“It’s okay,” I gasped. “Just take it slowly.”
She tried. I felt her intention to bank gently, felt the muscles bunch under me as she prepared to turn. But I didn’t move with her. I stayed rigid, braced against movement that hadn’t happened yet. So when she turned I was already off-balance.
I pitched left. My grip on the spike loosened.
Selira rolled into my fall, catching me with her body. I slammed back into position hard enough my teeth clacked together.
She climbed higher, and I clung to the spike, refusing to be the one thing the wind finally managed to peel away. My thighs ached and my hands cramped, but I did not let go.
The wind screamed past me. Below us, the forest spread like a green sea.
I closed my eyes.
Feel, came through the bond. Not a word. A suggestion.
I didn’t know what that meant. I was feeling everything. Terror and pain and the spasms in my muscles.
No. Feel me.
My breath shuddered out. The rigid fear in my spine started to unknot, vertebra by vertebra.
Selira’s heartbeat throbbed against my inner thighs. Steady. Stronger than mine. And before she banked, I felt the shift in her breathing. The bunch of muscle under my left knee.
We banked together, our bodies locking into a shared rhythm that felt as inevitable as gravity.
Selira’s surprise bloomed through the bond, matched by her fierce joy.
“Holy fuck,” I whispered.
Pride. Hers and mine, tangled together.
She banked again, a lazy spiral, and I leaned into it. My body remembered what my brain didn’t know.
Except it wasn’t memory. It was her. Selira’s knowing poured across the bond and settled into my tendons like heat into cold hands, a lifetime of wind and wingbeats, lent to me for exactly as long as I stayed open to her.
When I braced, the knowing thinned to nothing. When I trusted, it flooded back.
I wasn’t learning to fly in an afternoon. Nobody could. I was being carried by a body that had always known how, and taught, wingbeat by wingbeat, to stop arguing with it.
We weren’t controlling each other. We were listening.
Borrowing. The way Tolross borrowed my hum.
When she dove toward the treetops, I flattened myself against her neck. When she pulled up sharply, my thighs clamped tight and my hands found purchase on her spike like they’d always known where to go.
We rose higher.
The fortress poked through the clouds in the distance, a dark smudge perched near the top of the mountain. Mist shrouded the castle above it. Somewhere in that castle, Fenian was probably in his rooms. Running through Scorching strategies he’d practiced since childhood.
My chest ached from the impossible need for a man who’d stepped into darkness for me but who lived in a world that would destroy me just for existing.
Selira’s curiosity hummed through the bond.
“It’s nothing,” I whispered. “He’s nothing. Just another thing that can’t matter.”
If her rumble sounded skeptical, I pretended not to notice.
I didn’t know what disturbed me more. That he’d killed for me without hesitation, or that some twisted part of me had felt alright watching him do it. He’d moved like violence was a language he spoke fluently, and I’d understood every word.
Selira and I flew.
It wasn’t smooth or the polished flight of dragons who’d been trained to compensate for their riders’ every movement. This felt wild.
Noble riders controlled their dragons with reins that bit and rune magic that forced. I was partnering with mine.
The realization settled into my bones.
Selira’s happiness drowned out everything else.
Flying. Finally flying with her human on her back. The human who’d healed her and chosen her and was learning to move with her instead of trying to force her into submission.
The bond hummed between us, tightening.
I stopped trying to control anything and just felt. Wind screaming past. The mountain peaks rising around us. And a sky so blue it hurt to look at it above us.
I laughed, the sound ripped from my lungs and scattered across the sky.
And then the price hit me.
A flash of vision—not mine. Stone walls and iron bars.
A dragon muzzled, its wings clipped. The elite did this to dragons who bonded wrong.
To dragons who chose for themselves. If they saw what we’d done, they wouldn’t just kill Selira.
They’d cage her first. Study her. They’d try to break what we’d built and remake it to fit the system they’d lived with forever.
My stomach lurched. I’d just signed her death warrant along with my race registration.
Through the bond, I felt Selira’s defiance. A sense of let them try so fierce it scorched through me.
Right. We’d chosen this together, which meant we’d face what came together too.
Selira’s pleased rumble vibrated through her body, into mine. A purr that said yes, exactly, this.
Bonds were not about control or submission. Not about runes that forced and harnesses that bit.
But choice.
She banked again, and I moved with her, anticipating the turn before she made it. We dove, the ground rushing toward us, and she pulled up at the last second, skimming above the treetops, her talons brushing leaves.
My face hurt from smiling. Cramps ripped through my hands gripping her spike. And spasms wracked my thighs from holding on.
None of it mattered.
We flew until the sun shifted lower and my body remembered it hadn’t slept properly in days. Until the hesitation in Selira’s wings showed the first hints of strain.
She turned back toward the falls and dove through the water again, landing in a spray of droplets that caught the light like jewels.
I slid off her back. My legs gave out, and I smacked on the ground, shaking.
My wet hair slapped against my face and my soggy clothing clung.
I was shaking again, but for a different reason now. I slumped onto my side, and Selira curled around me, her body forming a wall on three sides, her wing draping over me in a blanket that weighed more than I did. Her body heat seeped through my soaked leathers.
In the aerie, dragons tolerated touch.
Selira was offering it. Choosing to curl around me.
I pressed my face against her foreleg, letting myself be small for a moment. Tomorrow, I could be big and brave again.
Tonight, I could be me. I could be held.
Safe. Mine. Protect.
“Yours to protect,” I said, my voice breaking. “And you’re mine.”
I lay there, savoring the sun peeking through the falls and just…being.
The practical part of my brain finally resurfaced.
“The race begins tomorrow at dawn,” I said.
Her attention sharpened.
“I’ll have to ride in front of the elite. The people who’ve been hunting you.”
Curiosity came through the bond. And underneath it, smugness.
Let them try hunt.
“They’ll see you’re wild.”
We fly together or not at all.
“I registered your name. Selira.”
My lungs twisted in my chest. Lykor was safe in the aerie pens, his scorched wing healing, his body used up by the system that had broken him.
He’d saved me in the fire maze. Shielded my body with his when the flames came.
And I’d repaid him by registering a different dragon.
It didn’t matter that racing him would kill him or that this was the only choice that gave either of us a chance at surviving.
It still felt like betrayal.
“I had another dragon,” I said quietly. “Before you. His name is Lykor. He’s… He’s been through enough.”
Understanding flooded back through our bond. And approval.
You chose mercy. For him. Now choose victory. For us.
“After I win,” I told her, the words a promise to Lykor and to myself. “I’ll make it right.”
Selira’s approval flooded the bond. She understood debts owed, the honor among those who flew.
“It could get us both killed.”
Her head swung toward me, and her eyes held mine.
Then we die together.
But we won’t.
The certainty hit me like a splash of cold water. My lungs forgot how to expand. I lay there, not breathing, until the burn forced air back in.
She believed we’d survive. Believed it with the same bone-deep knowing that had made her choose me in the first place. Her certainty was infectious. Or maybe I’d been drowning in doubt for so long that accepting her faith made me feel lighter than air.
“Tomorrow, we’ll fly in front of everyone.”
Yes.
“Tomorrow we’ll show them what a real bond looks like.”
Yes.
“Tomorrow I’ll stop being invisible.”
Never invisible. Not to me.
I shifted closer, her cinnamon-stone scent surrounding me.
“I have to go back,” I said.
Selira puffed smoke from her nostrils.
Stay.
“I can’t. The race starts at dawn. They’ll look for me tonight.”
Stay. Safe in stone and water. Away from world that wants us dead.
She didn’t understand why I had to leave or why I’d go back to people who’d cage dragons and call it bonding.
“I don’t want to go,” I said. “But I have to race.”
Understanding filtered through slowly. Then resignation.
Dangerous.
“It is.”
They hurt you.
“I still have to go.”
She huffed, and I felt her acceptance settle into place. Acknowledgment that I’d made my choice, and she’d honor it even if she thought I was being stupid.
“Thank you for choosing me,” I said.
Warmth flooded the bond. Always my human.
I slid out from under her wing. My legs felt steadier now, but leaving was the same thing as tearing off skin.
When I reached the falls, I turned back. Selira watched me, her eyes glowing in the cave’s dimness. “Tomorrow at dawn.”
By the time I reached the trail through the forest, full night had descended. And by the time I slipped through the servants’ entrance on the side of the fortress, my boots squelching across the floor, I knew exactly what I was walking into.
A race I couldn’t win.
A bond I shouldn’t have.
And a dragon who’d claimed me despite everything.