44. Eradin #3
I’d thought he was dead, and it felt like someone had reached into my chest and stopped my heart. I’d run without thinking because my body knew before my brain caught up that I couldn’t let him be gone.
“I noticed.” He stroked once across the inside of my wrist, directly over where my pulse was trying to punch through my skin.
“Don’t get stabbed again.”
“I’ll try my very best.” He released my arm, his fingers trailing across my palm. “Eradin? I’m glad you were the one who came.” His voice had gone intimate in a way that made the tent feel even smaller.
The air between us filled with something I didn’t have words for.
Outside, someone called his name again. Louder. Impatient.
The spell broke.
I nodded once and ducked out of his tent.
The cool dawn air hit my face, the grass cold and wet beneath my bare feet. Elite riders had gathered in clusters, and their voices dropped when I emerged. Lady Severine stood at the front of the pack, her eyes tracking my every move.
I didn’t meet anyone’s gaze. Just kept walking back toward the commons camp, my spine straight.
I’d spent my life being practical about what I could and couldn’t have. I had to keep being practical about this.
But I stopped pretending I didn’t know what it was.
I was falling for the crown prince, and he was falling for me.
Aristus stood near Selira at the edge of the elite camp, his midnight scales catching the pre-dawn light. Selira’s satisfaction came through our bond when she saw me approach, her contentment at having him close bleeding into me.
Fen’s tack sat nearby where servants had left it the night before. I grabbed the saddle first, hefting its weight. The leather was soft and supple, spelled to resist weather and wear.
Aristus lowered his head when I approached, his eyes tracking my movement. Through whatever connection the trials had forged between us, I felt his awareness spike.
“I’m helping,” I told him. “He can’t do this himself right now.”
Aristus rumbled, the sound vibrating through his chest. Not disagreement. Permission, maybe.
I urged him to lie flat and climbed up his leg, settling the saddle onto his back, adjusting the position until it sat properly between the spikes.
Used to the procedure, he rose enough for me to secure the straps beneath his belly the moment I slid back to the ground.
My hands moved automatically. I’d done this at least a thousand times.
Check the girth. Make sure nothing pinched or rubbed wrong.
The breastplate came next, the metal segments spelled to distribute impact. I buckled it into place, working the straps with barely a thought.
“There,” I said, stepping back.
I walked over to Aristus’s neck and stroked his scales. His low rumble purred in his chest. He tilted his head, leaning toward me. I gave him a good rub before running my hands across his neck again.
When my fingers came near his collar, heat exploded in my palms.
I jerked back, my breath catching.
The collar didn’t appear any different from the ones all bonded dragons wore. Like the tack, protective runes had been etched into the surface in patterns.
Also like all bonded dragons, the skin around the collar had lifted slightly, the scales growing around the metal the way flesh did around a splinter your body couldn’t expel. The collar magically expanded as they grew, but it always remained snug.
Why the heat and tightness?
My magic had always moved toward things that needed healing. Broken bones and torn flesh. Sickness that ate people from the inside out.
It had never moved toward metal before.
Selira’s gaze met mine. You see now.
“You knew the collars were hurting them the whole time.”
Wild dragons know. Warn young. Stay away from metal-necked ones. They carry the sickness with them.
“How long?”
Since before mother’s mother’s mother. Since always, to us.
I stared at the collar, my magic still recoiling from the heat of it.
She’d known what we were flying into, but she’d brought me here anyway. She’d let me climb onto her back and enter this race with my eyes closed, because she’d understood that some things could only be seen from the inside.
“You chose me because I could see it.”
I chose you because you knelt in mud. The rest I hoped for.
Aristus watched me, intelligence clear in eyes that had seen twenty-three years of what the collar did to him.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t see when I should have.”
He rumbled again, acceptance.
I sensed he’d been waiting for someone to understand for a very long time.
I didn’t know what I was going to do with what I’d just learned. But I knew I wouldn’t forget. Wherever this race took us next, that knowledge would come with me.
I turned away and walked back toward the commons camp where Lyndie and Reece would be preparing for the next trial.
But the collar’s image burned behind my eyes.
Through the bond, Selira sent the memory of grief, carried so long it had sunk into her bones.
She hadn’t been waiting for someone to see. She’d been waiting to stop being the only one who remembered.
My magic strained toward the metal around Aristus’s neck.
Power seeking a wound.