56. Fen #2
I studied the canyon walls. The bones embedded in them. The dragons who’d made it this far and died anyway, still wearing their collars, still connected by threads of light to structures that had drained them until they couldn’t go on.
How many had died believing the collar was sacred? How many had been told that the metal around their necks was a gift that made the bond possible?
Every single one of us.
The alternative was watching our dragons die, drained by columns that had been killing bonded dragons for longer than any of us had been alive.
Aristus bellowed in agony. The collar was burning against his scales now, the metal so hot the smell of singed flesh hung in the air.
There was no version of this where I didn’t lose something.
I’d spent most of my life keeping Aristus alive through control. Who touched him. How he was trained. What he ate. Every variable I could manage, I’d done so, because control was the only form of love I’d been taught.
Eradin was asking me to let go of all of it.
Removing the collar might kill him. If we kept it on, the pillars would finish what they’d started. If we turned back, I would never find out what happened to my father.
Aristus’s heartbeat stuttered under my hand. Too fast and too irregular.
Eradin’s fear crashed into me through the bond. Fear for me and what losing Aristus would do to me. She worried she’d watch me break when he died.
Aristus rumbled beneath me, his agreement vibrating through our bond.
And that was what decided this for us both.
“Do it,” I said. “I’d rather he died free than live another day with the collar. I mean it. Whatever happens, I chose this. He does too.”
Through the bond Aristus shared with Selira, I felt her awareness sharpen.
Do it, she said, her certainty cutting through Eradin’s fear. Metal killing.
Eradin urged Selira closer, her hands already glowing so bright the red light cut through the canyon’s gloom. They appeared on fire, like she was burning from the inside out. And she was going to touch Aristus with all that power.
The red light turned her face into something otherworldly. For one moment she didn’t look like the woman I’d loved a short time ago or the stable hand who’d spilled water on my boots. She looked like my salvation.
Her fingers reached for Aristus’s collar.
I curled around his shoulder spike and rested my forehead on his neck, one hand on his smooth scales. His heart beat too fast. Uneven. Failing.
Eradin’s hand covered mine.
She didn’t speak or offer reassurance. She just pressed her palm over my knuckles, her fingers finding the gaps between mine, and holding on.
Aristus’s heartbeat pulsed through both of us.
Tears trickled down her cheeks.
I turned my hand over under hers so our palms met.
“I’m here,” I whispered to her and to Aristus. “I’m right here. I’m not leaving you.”
I’d broken too many promises. Never this one.
Eradin’s other hand reached for the collar.
Her light touched the metal, and the collar resisted, the runes flaring. I thought it was going to hold. Nothing would change. The pillars would win, and Aristus would die wearing the thing my mother called sacred.
Then her magic pushed deeper.
Aristus screamed, the sound slamming through the canyon.
The bond between us exploded.
Pain hit me, and my vision darkened. My grip on his neck slackened. I couldn’t breathe. There was only agony and the bond stretched too thin.
And then the darkness became something else, and I saw…
A hatchling, barely old enough to fly. Small and vulnerable. Spelled stone under its talons. The bonding chamber, decorated for a ceremony. And at the edge of the memory, blurred the way things are when a dragon has no reason yet to care about them, a boy. Small. Waiting to be blessed.
Brought before a man in formal robes who held a collar of metal inscribed with runes. The man’s hands shook as he fitted it around the hatchling’s neck.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, so quietly only the dragon could hear. “I’m so sorry.”
The collar sealed with a flash of blue light.
The hatchling screamed, the same sound Aristus made now.
And the man who’d fastened the collar, whose hands had trembled with guilt even as he’d sealed a hatchling’s fate, looked up.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
My father’s eyes stared back at me.
And the vision released me.
My bonding day. The morning I’d never been able to remember no matter how hard I’d reached. Because it hadn’t faded. It had been taken. Aristus had carried it for both of us under the metal they used to make him forget himself.
My father had been there. Close enough to touch me.
My hands were still on Aristus’s scales, his heartbeat too fast under my palms. Too uneven. The same heart that had been beating since my father’s hands had fitted the collar around his neck and whispered an apology to a hatchling who couldn’t understand.
He hadn’t been weak.
He’d been guilty.
And someone had buried him here, in a story that made his son spend twenty-three years trying not to be just like him.
“Fen.” Eradin’s voice cut through, sharp with worry. “Fen, I need you.”
I dragged myself back.
Aristus started seizing beneath me.
My father’s ghost would have to wait.