36. Fen
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
FEN
Iwas drowning in a body that wasn’t mine.
Small. Cold. Lungs two-thirds the size of the ones I’d breathed with for thirty years, already screaming. The hands I lifted in front of my face were narrower than my own, and scarred, thin red lines crisscrossing the palms.
Eradin’s hands. Eradin’s body. And somewhere in the murk, mine, with her locked inside.
The trial had cut us out of ourselves and traded us like coins.
I did what I always did when the ground went out from under me. I looked for the rules.
The dead stood around us in the silt, stone-locked, their arms flung toward a surface they’d never reach. This Scorching’s first cull, the ones the lake took on the crossing. Recent.
The place holding them was not.
A dome arched over the whole graveyard, clear as glass and just as final, and its surface crawled with binding runes.
The old language, the same marks the priestesses magically stitched into a dragon’s tack and sealed around a hatchling’s throat and called sacred.
I’d read a hundred of them, spoken them, cued Aristus with them and watched his pupils shrink on command and called it a bond.
The runes had been worn soft with age and were older than the race and the crown that ran it. Whatever this place was, it had stood here long before anyone thought to call it a trial.
It hadn’t been shaped to test how well we flew.
By every count I knew, Eradin’s smaller lungs should’ve given out a dozen breaths ago. Yet we were both still awake. The dome held us at the lip of drowning, and I’d bet anything it would soon let go.
One rune near the base wasn’t like the others. It ran backward, an unmaking of the shape the rest repeated, unlike any I’d seen in the archives. My eye kept snagging on it and sliding off, as if the place didn’t want it read.
An impact shuddered the dome.
Beyond the clear wall, in the open water, Selira and Aristus threw themselves at it.
Aristus hit it hardest, driving his whole weight into the place above me, again and again. Each time he hit the outer part of the dome with his snout, the collar at his throat flared white and buckled him with pain.
He didn’t stop.
I’d spent my life making certain I never needed saving, and now I hung useless in a body built for none of the things I knew how to do, watching my dragon batter himself bloody on a wall I couldn’t break.
My own body came at me through the murk, my hands reaching out, touching my—Eradin’s—arm. My own face had gone wide with a fear I’d never once let it wear. Eradin, behind my eyes, driving my body harder than I ever had.
She caught the hand I was wearing. Hers.
Every lesson my mother had carved into me said let go. Need no one. A hand in the dark is a leash, and a leash is how they take you. I’d believed it since I was seven.
I gripped back anyway.