25. Fen
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
FEN
Icouldn’t think about all the ways Aristus was going to die any longer. That was why I left my bed at midnight instead of sleeping like every other rider entered in the Scorching.
The fortress corridors had gone quiet, the silence heavy.
I’d learned the castle and fortress’s rhythms by the time I was ten. Most people were asleep by the second bell. The imps flew at dawn.
Midnight belonged to me.
The faelights lighting the hallways had dimmed to almost nothing, the sprites inside barely glowing anymore. The dying ones would be replaced tomorrow with fresh ones, bred for this purpose, their short lives spent generating light for people who’d never see them as anything but tools.
Aristus’s stall was in the elite wing of the aerie, third from the end. Large enough to hold three dragons, with enchanted braziers that kept the temperature perfect and a feeding trough that never needed filling because servants handled that before we even noticed it was empty.
When I signaled the magical light, his head swung toward me, his silver-touched scales catching the dim light. He tracked my movement, his pupils sluggish.
That was new. Or newer. They should’ve contracted when I turned on the light.
“Hey,” I said softly.
He made a low sound in his chest.
I crossed to his side and ran my hand along his neck, feeling for the spot at his jaw hinge that usually made him relax. I pressed gently.
His eye half-closed. The tension in his neck eased.
But his pupils stayed too wide. I counted, the way you count the seconds between lightning and thunder to see how close the storm is.
How close the end is.
I had to swallow twice before I could keep scratching.
His wings twitched. Again. The tremor had a rhythm now. Every three seconds. His next exhale hitched. The one after that caught as well.
I felt his discomfort through our bond, though not pain. More that something was wrong, and he didn’t know how to tell me.
Healers had suggested I retire him and bond with another. I didn’t want to bond with anyone but Aristus.
Tomorrow, he’d fly until his wings gave out if that’s what I asked of him, because he loved me as much as I loved him.
He nuzzled my shoulder, his breath warm against my neck.
Then his head turned to the mesh gate covering the exit to the enormous valley beyond. I followed his gaze but found nothing there but moonlit darkness. He made a low sound, almost a whine. His body tensed, his attention fixed on whatever it was I couldn’t see.
This wasn’t the usual unease I felt when I was with him. This felt different.
Aristus rose and lumbered toward the mesh, stopping to peer out. His tail lashed.
“What do you see?”
I tried to sooth him, joining him at the opening to scratch his jaw hinge again.
His uneasiness coming through our bond intensified. And underneath it, a pulling sensation. A rope tied around my sternum, tugging me toward…
I didn’t know what.
Aristus was here in front of me, his scales solid under my hands, but part of him was elsewhere, with something I couldn’t see or sense.
What if I lose him?
The question was a blade I swallowed daily. It cut on the way down and kept going, dealing slices with every breath I took. He’d been mine longer than I’d been my own person. If he died, what would be left of me?
Now I stood next to him and felt like I was shouting across a void.
I looked at my hands, noting the tremor running through my fingers, the first physical crack in the control I’d spent my entire life perfecting.
I couldn’t stand in this stall watching him suffer with no way to fix it.
That made me the worst kind of coward. The kind who loved something and abandoned it anyway because staying hurt too much. My mother had taught me a hundred ways to endure pain. She’d never taught me how to sit with helplessness.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. “Rest.”
As I left, he turned back to the opening, staring out.
The fortress swallowed me back into its embrace.
A guard passed me in the main corridor and nodded once. “Your Highness. All’s quiet tonight.”
“Good,” I said.
But I could hear the mines working and a faelight dying in a nearby cage and Aristus’s uneven breathing echoing in my head, and none of that sounded quiet to me.
I only made it three corridors before I had to stop. My hand found the wall, the stone cold under my palm. I stood there breathing like I’d run the length of the fortress.
Aristus was dying. Dragons could live a hundred years—in the wild. Why didn’t ours live as long?
My hand curled into a fist against the stone.
I taught him to fly when I was seven—or he taught me. He was a hatchling. Neither of us knew what we were doing. My tutors said the bond would guide us. That I’d know instinctively how to command him.
They were wrong.
For weeks, every flight ended with both of us bruised. Frustrated. I’d cry at night where no one could hear, and he’d keen in his stall.
Then one morning, I stopped trying to command him. I asked. And he answered. That’s when I learned the bond wasn’t about control. It was about trust.
Yet I was losing him, and all the trust in the world couldn’t save him.
I made myself keep walking.
An older servant was replacing a burned-out orb near the east stairwell, standing on a low stool, her back to me. She stepped down from the stool and turned, startling when she saw me.
“Your Highness.” Her bow was automatic. “Forgive me. I didn’t hear you coming.”
“It’s fine.” I stopped. “You’ve worked here a long time.”
“Thirty-one years this winter, Sire.”
“Do you remember the last Scorching?”
Fear flashed across her face so fast I nearly missed it. “I do, Your Highness.”
“My father competed.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“You must remember that.”
Her hands tightened on the burned-out orb. “I remember there was a great deal of grief afterward.”
“Why afterward?”
“I misspoke, Sire.” She scurried away before I could question her further.
I didn’t stop her. Didn’t press. The same way I hadn’t pressed the healers when they said Aristus just needed rest.
Asking questions meant hearing answers I wasn’t ready for.
A clang rang out in the distance, the mines running the night shift. It was part of the castle’s background noise, and I’d learned to filter it out the way you stopped noticing your own breathing.
Now it felt overly loud in the gloaming.
I’d gone down into the mine three months ago. One of the support beams had cracked, and my mother’s council said it would be “handled in the next quarter or the one after that.”
I’d ordered the repair, then checked on it the next month.
And the month after. Not because I cared.
Because if I cared, I’d have to admit I’d been walking past those people my entire life without seeing how horrifying their lives were.
The way I’d walked past Eradin for years until she’d spilled water on my boots and looked at me like I was a person who could be called on his cruelty.
A floating orb drifted past at shoulder height. The fae inside pressed against the bars of its cage, its wings beating frantically. It looked at me the way Aristus had been looking at me lately, trying to tell me something I didn’t know how to hear.
Caged things always knew before their captors did.
I dragged my gaze away and kept walking.
A sound echoed in the kitchens ahead. No one should be there at this time of night. The guards had their own dining area, with food provided for each shift.
My hands went to the blades sheathed at my side, and I pulled them, moving silently, tracking the noise.
The kitchen door stood slightly ajar.
I approached from the side, staying in the shadows, and peered through the gap.
Eradin stood at the center prep table, holding a cloth bag.
Her hair hung lank, coiled at the ends. Why wet? And her leathers clung to her curves, dark with moisture. Muddy boot prints tracked across the clean stones, leading right up to her.
She was stuffing food into the bag. Bread. Oil-cloth wrapped cheese. Dried meat and fruit.
Stealing.
My first thought wasn’t to stop her. It was that her leathers were soaked through, clinging to her in ways that made my jaw tighten for reasons that had nothing to do with protocol.
My second thought was wondering where she’d been that left her wet and muddy at midnight.
My third thought was that I was about to walk into the kitchen and demand answers.