37. Eradin
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
ERADIN
We were going to die holding hands in an underwater graveyard, and some stubborn part of me refused to make it that easy.
I’d counted my way through worse. My mother’s last breaths. Tolross’s lips going blue. Every night, I swore I’d claw together one more day and then went out and found it. Dying quietly had never once been on my list.
Fenian’s memories flew through me like water through a cracked hull, leaking into a skull that wasn’t built to hold two people. I reached along the thin, frayed thread where his bond to Aristus should’ve roared, and I flinched from how little I found there.
The dragon he’d loved had been worn down to the marrow.
A collar. A hatchling’s throat. His own small hand.
Exhaustion. Not physical, though that was there too, but the muscle-deep kind that came from carrying weight too long without rest. Fear that he wasn’t enough, had never been enough. That he’d fail at the one thing he’d been built to do.
Desperation to prove himself. To his mother, the kingdom, or himself?
The feelings bled together.
I saw things I had no right to see.
He’d learned that trust was weakness. Letting someone else have control meant giving them the power to destroy you. His tutors had drilled it into him until it became reflex to assess the threat, maintain the advantage, and never show vulnerability.
Fenian as a child, small and grief-stricken, standing at his bedroom window while his father’s funeral pyre burned.
His mother towering over him, gripping his shoulder because she was furious with something he’d done.
Your father wasn’t strong enough, she said when she found him crying in his father’s study after the funeral. She’d crouched down to his seven-year-old height, her hands tight on his shoulders, and for a moment, he’d thought she was going to comfort him.
Instead, she’d said, Don’t make his mistakes.
He’d stopped crying that day. He’d stopped a lot of things that day.
The only way to survive was to need no one.
Then I saw Fenian at twelve, asking about helping miners. His tutor’s dismissive response. The way his face smoothed as he filed away the question.
Fenian older, signing documents. Watching servants. Doing what he could while people like my father worked themselves to death.
I felt his shame. Real, bone-deep shame that he’d been complicit in a system that killed others.
Need no one. He’d built a hollow life on this statement.
And I’d hated him for the crown without once asking what it cost to wear it.
His grief was an ocean, and it wanted to pull me down into it. For a breath, I lost track of which drowning was mine.
Then I remembered Tolross. My name. My own hands, wherever they’d gone.
I was Eradin. I would not die as Fenian Lancifer, wearing his face and mourning his father, in a lake that ate people and called it holy.
I let go of his hand and made myself think.
Past the clear dome, two shapes hurled themselves at the barrier over and over. Selira and Aristus. Locked out, they were tearing at a wall that wouldn’t tear, fighting for us with everything they had left.
I’d fight too.
What you need will be delivered to you. What you do with it decides if you live.
I’d only half-heard the herald’s words.
My gaze dropped to the small glass rectangle sitting on the silt, and the pale bead underneath it—the moon—glowing on its scrap of cushion.
I swam to the nearest statue, a woman locked mid-stroke, a stone knife still frozen in her fist, and locked Fenian’s strong hands around the hilt and wrenched until the stone shattered and the knife came free.
I brought it down on the small glass rectangle. Over and over until the surface shattered.
The bead came loose and rose toward the top of the dome, air bubbling off it in a thin stream.
I swam after it and grabbed it, then did what any drowning animal does with air. I brought it to my mouth.
Sucking at it did nothing.
Panic tightened its hold on the edges of my sight. So I shoved the whole bead past my lips, and it settled on my tongue. Cold air poured down into Fenian’s burning lungs.
I breathed. Fates help me, I breathed, in a dead lake, in the wrong body, off a pearl I’d smashed out of a glass case.
After a few deep breaths of air, I was able to think more clearly.
A short distance away, my own body had quit fighting. The red-lined hands hung open. My hair drifted loose.
Fenian lived behind my own slack face.
He didn’t have the pearl.
I floundered over to him, the bead between my teeth.
I caught my own jaw with Fenian’s hand, pressed his mouth to mine, and pushed the bead across.
My body jerked, my spine arching.
Fenian came back to life, and his stricken gaze met mine.
My lungs roared, starved for precious air already.