22. Midnight visits
22
MIDNIGHT VISITS
Someone knocked on the door to Anahrod’s room as she was getting ready for bed.
She had a feeling about who it was before she opened it.
“Can I help you?” she asked Ris.
Her clothing hadn’t changed, but she seemed different somehow. Smaller and more drained. Anahrod supposed even dragonriders grew tired.
Ris responded to the question with one of her own. “May I come in?”
That was a bad idea. Without question, a bad idea.
“Sure.” Anahrod gave the woman enough room to squeeze past.
She did, and Anahrod closed the door behind her.
“I like the curtains in this room.” Ris purposely glanced in every direction except at Anahrod. “Cute little ruffles.”
Anahrod sat on the edge of the bed and watched her silently.
Ris wiped her hands down her coat and oriented back toward Anahrod. “I came to apologize.”
Anahrod tilted her head. “Are you sure you’re in the right room?”
“Who else would I—?” Ris stopped, and her expression grew irritated. “I am not apologizing to Sicaryon.”
“How could you? You don’t even know where he lives.”
Ris barked out a laugh. “Yes, apparently not in the Deep, much to my surprise.”
“On the bright side, we don’t have to go back.”
“Assuming he’ll give us the sword.”
“Ah, yes. I think that brings us back around to the apology part and the things we do for diplomacy.” Anahrod studied Ris in the dim light of the bedroom. She should’ve pulled off some of the lamp covers, but Anahrod liked the way the other woman’s eyes glittered in the shadows, like looking at a candle flame through an emerald. “I expected him to stampede over everyone. It’s a cultural thing with his people. I wasn’t prepared to see you do it, too. And I don’t really understand why you did.”
“He thinks he’s so smart,” Ris complained.
Anahrod raised both eyebrows. “That’s because he is. Don’t underestimate him. His uncle made that mistake.”
She didn’t think she needed to add that Sicaryon’s uncle didn’t live to regret it.
Ris drew in a deep breath and gazed up at the ceiling. The dimly lit room gave the impression that she was praying. “He’s the reason you reacted so strongly to the idea of getting even with Neveranimas.”
It wasn’t a question.
Anahrod rubbed her forehead. There was really no sense in lying about this either—to either herself or Ris. “Yes.”
“I’m not him.”
“For many, many reasons,” Anahrod agreed. “And I apologize for… for treating you like his twin. There was a time—” She sighed, lowered her arm. “Not making excuses. Just found it hard to watch him twist himself into knots trying to kill his uncle. Couldn’t keep doing it. I’d seen how far he was willing to go, what his limits were—”
Ris didn’t ask, but Anahrod heard the question anyway, just sitting there perched on red lips.
“He didn’t have any,” Anahrod said. “No limits at all. And I feared—” She swallowed thickly. “I feared that if we both kept going the same direction, I’d find out that I didn’t have any either.”
Ris didn’t respond, a heavy, pregnant silence.
Then: “Huh.”
Anahrod tilted her head back, gave the other woman a cool look. That had been singularly unhelpful. “What does that mean?”
Anahrod couldn’t help but wonder what Ris was doing in her room, what her purpose was. Maybe she was just searching for more information on her newest enemy—Anahrod was a good source.
“It’s just funny. He doesn’t seem that bad,” Ris finally said. “I mean, yes, he was an ass, but I can respect that. He wants to protect you.”
“It was never my endangerment that was the problem.”
Ris looked vaguely disgusted, but Anahrod didn’t think the emotion was aimed at either herself or Sicaryon. “You need to know—” Ris swallowed, looked away. “I’m not like that,” she said. “Or—no. I have been… like that. But I’ve been trying so hard to do this the right way, so only the guilty suffer. That must count for something.”
Anahrod grimaced. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you sound like you’re trying to convince me you can stop drinking any time you want.”
Ris gave her a horrified yet also insulted look.
“Pretty sure you just took it the wrong way.”
“Did I?” Ris snapped, but then she steadied herself, took long, slow breaths. “I’m trying to say I don’t mind having limits. Even if I don’t have them myself, if it’s just that you’re the one holding my leash. I wouldn’t mind. I’d thank you for it.”
Once again, Anahrod didn’t think they were talking about the original subject anymore.
Or maybe… maybe they were.
In which case, she was in a lot of trouble, since she had rarely wanted anything more in her entire life. However, it was precisely that intense desire that made Anahrod hesitate. The higher the mountain one climbed, the farther one fell if they slipped.
Anahrod stood up, moved swiftly to stand before Ris. She picked up the other woman’s hands. “Would you?” she asked, nothing in her manner flirtatious. “Ris, you barely know me.”
The other woman’s gaze was remarkably calm. “And yet. Maybe I just want to trust someone. Feel worthy of that trust.” A smile darted across her face and vanished just as quickly. “Peralon doesn’t count.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She ran her thumb ever so lightly over Ris’s jaw, then lower, tracing the path of a collar. “You might be jumping ahead in the race too early. Trust given too quickly is devalued from the start. I would rather your trust mean something.”
She already knew the woman had secrets of a more exquisite flavor than the common variety. Anahrod didn’t demand to inspect the interior of every closet. That was its own lack of trust—to a point.
Ris lifted her chin, bared more of her neck. It was almost—no. It was a dare. “What do you suggest, then?”
Anahrod cradled the back of Ris’s neck with one hand. She drew the other woman closer until the smallest movement would brush their lips against each other. “We start small, for a start.”
She closed the gap and felt fire alight along all the points of contact between them, but most especially their lips. Ris’s were every bit as sweet as she’d imagined. Sweet and softer than rose petals.
“We have all night,” Anahrod whispered.
Ris smiled—and then her eyes widened, and she cursed.
Anahrod felt dismay. “What—?”
Ris put her hands on Anahrod’s arms, shook her head. “It’s not you. I’m so sorry, but it’s not you.”
Anahrod’s gut tightened unpleasantly.
“No,” Ris repeated. “I mean it’s really not. It’s just that we don’t have all night. I stopped by here to apologize, but also because Peralon wants us to meet up at Tiendremos’s lair so he can hand over your gift. It’s important.”
Anahrod remembered to breathe. Oh.
Ris wrinkled her nose, looking thoroughly upset with herself. “We should’ve done the exchange earlier today, but I let myself be distracted by—you know—”
“The pretty Deeper king?”
“Pretty annoying,” Ris sniffed.
“He’s that, too,” Anahrod agreed. “But the pretty part is hard to argue with. You should see him wearing nothing but body paint.”
“That sounds like a crime against nature.” Ris made it sound like something other than a compliment.
Anahrod picked up Ris’s hands, kissed her fingers. She felt giddy and more than a little drunk, even though she was sober. “Are we sure this trip up to the lair can’t wait until morning?”
Ris sighed and shook her head. “It really can’t. We’re expecting Tiendremos back in the morning.”
Anahrod’s focus sharpened. By extension, that meant Peralon didn’t want Tiendremos to see whatever it was Peralon had brought back. “If we met somewhere else—”
She stopped herself. This wasn’t Crystalspire. “Somewhere else” would have to be the top of one of the dragon towers. Did she really want to climb three hundred feet of spiral staircase, totally open to the elements, with who knows what sort of railing to stop a strong wind from knocking her over the side?
No, she did not.
She grabbed her mantle. “Tiendremos’s cave it is, then. Let’s hurry.”
Which they did. There was just one minor problem.
Tiendremos didn’t come back the next morning—he came back that night.
And he was very angry.
In hindsight, Anahrod should’ve known something was wrong when the storm rolled in so quickly. Not all the Seven Crests mountains interacted with weather systems in quite the same way, however, and she wasn’t familiar enough with Duskcloud’s normal seasons to know the difference.
So, she and Ris had both been to the cave for shelter. They’d arrived laughing, shaking the rain off their mantles as even as they complained about the cold, too preoccupied with each other to notice the giant scaled mountain looming in the darkness.
Then Anahrod heard him.
[Where is she? Where is that red-hooded snake? I’ll rip her out of her skin—] The dragon was fuming, ranting a litany of insults and complaints with no purpose except to vent his anger.
Anahrod turned to Ris, wide-eyed, but the dragonrider was still laughing. She couldn’t hear Tiendremos.
Tiendremos was back early.
“Call Peralon,” Anahrod said. “We need him back here right now.”
“What’s wrong? He’s already on his way—”
Anahrod realized too late that she should’ve sent the message herself, so it would be silent, so Tiendremos wouldn’t hear.
But he had heard. The gigantic dragon lunged, heart-stopping in his enormity, but instead of attacking them, came to rest against the cave mouth. Anahrod’s confusion quickly turned to panic as she realized what he’d done.
Tiendremos had blocked the only exit.
Still, it limited his movement, and even the smallest dragon couldn’t hope to follow them into the servants’ tunnels. Ris must’ve had the same thought, because she grabbed Anahrod’s hand. “Run!”
Just as they started walking, a whip of white-hot electricity tore through the darkness, blocking their path to safety. The lightning hadn’t come from the dragon.
Or rather, it hadn’t come from the dragon’s body.
Ris staggered as another strike of the whip landed too close. The lightning bolts lit up the cave enough to see the source of the attacks.
Tiendremos-in-Jaemeh’s-body was scowling as he advanced.
“Do you really think that I’m so na?ve that I will tolerate you handing out orders like I’m a servant? Do you think that just because your pathetic excuse of a dragon allows you such liberties that I am as much a fool?” Electricity arced between his fingers.
Ris had said Tiendremos would be angry when he returned, but Anahrod had assumed…
She’d assumed he’d be reasonable. Rational.
Anahrod still didn’t have her sword. She vowed she was going to carry the damn thing on her everywhere from now on, and to hell with the odd looks she received. She tugged at a weather vane, tried to pull it free from its stand.
Tiendremos-in-Jaemeh was not trying to have a conversation. He struck again, but this time Ris swept her hand up. The lightning flattened against some kind of invisible wall, deflected before it could reach her.
“Think, damn it,” Ris spat. Her expression was more hateful than Anahrod had ever seen before on the woman. “I’m trying to protect you.”
“Don’t claim beneficence when your real motive is concealing how you intend to betray me.” He did something then, a hand concealed behind his body.
The weather vane in Anahrod’s hand vibrated and ripped free of its base. It jerked in her grip, too, racing toward Ris.
Every weather vane in the cave did the same thing. All of them were aimed at Ris.
Oh, Anahrod thought distantly. That was why Tiendremos kept the weather vanes around. They were a trap.
Faced with the coming onslaught of metal spikes and spears, Ris’s expression wasn’t fear or panic. She looked annoyed.
Then Ris’s eyes changed color.
They turned gold, molten and glowing as Peralon took possession of his rider’s body. He snapped his fingers, and the sound wasn’t the expected pop but a deep, clear bell-like ring.
The weather vanes exploded.
The weather vanes were pushed back by an invisible wave of force, causing them to shatter into flying shards. Anahrod hissed as she felt the stings of shrapnel connect.
Peralon-in-Ris snarled, “You forget yourself, hatchling.”
Tiendremos’s unconscious draconic body was flung from the cave mouth, rolling across the floor. Since there were no longer any weather vanes to stop his momentum, he rolled all the way to the back.
Tiendremos-in-Jaemeh stared, mouth open, shocked.
Anahrod’s mouth fell open, too, as Peralon—Peralon the dragon—swooped down into the now cleared cave opening. But Peralon—
She looked back at Ris, who stood triumphant and furious, then again at Peralon. Ris, whose eyes still glowed gold, who still channeled Peralon’s voice. If Peralon was possessing Ris, then the only way the gold dragon could be conscious and mobile was if…
The gold dragon moved impossibly fast, little more than a blur before he—no, before she —had her teeth poised to rip out the larger dragon’s throat.
The gold dragon’s eyes were green. They’d turned green.
Anahrod had assumed the link was one-way, or that human riders didn’t have the strength to deny their dragons, just as Overbite had never had the strength to deny her. When Tiendremos asserted control, the dragon pushed Jaemeh to the side, rendered him powerless within his own body.
But Peralon and Ris had switched bodies .
“You—you would dare? You would let your rider take your body—!” Tiendremos-in-Jaemeh seemed to have come to the same conclusion Anahrod had—that somehow Peralon and Ris’s connection was two-way. Peralon had taken Ris’s body, and Ris had taken Peralon’s.
“Dare? She’s my partner. For her, anything is permitted. Everything is allowed. As for you—” Peralon-in-Ris bared his fangs. “You seem to think I am no threat to you. Would you care to reevaluate that belief?”
Ris-in-Peralon made a noise, such as she could with fangs poised at Tiendremos’s throat, the slow drip of saliva from Ris-in-Peralon’s open mouth sparkling in the inscribed light of the cave. She’d laughed.
The giant cave fell silent, save for the sound of breathing and a few lingering buzzing noises from the electrical discharge. Anahrod’s hair would’ve been standing on end if she didn’t have it braided back.
“You need me,” Tiendremos reminded Peralon, but his tone was uncertain.
Shocked, Anahrod thought, and had to bite her lip to keep from laughing hysterically at the awful pun.
“You should thank Eannis for that,” Peralon replied. “Because it’s the only thing that saved your life tonight. I was old when your great-grandparents were nothing more than lumps of flesh hiding inside eggshells. If you had concerns, the appropriate response was to come to me. Not… this.”
Tiendremos was wide-eyed with fear, so much so that Anahrod wondered why he had stayed inside Jaemeh’s body. But as she glanced back at that giant scaled form, she knew why. Tiendremos recognized that Ris, not Peralon, was the one who had her teeth gripping his throat. He was at the mercy of a human .
If the storm dragon could delay returning to his own body until Ris released him, Tiendremos could pretend it had never happened.
She understood Tiendremos’s distress. It was fine for a dragon to love their rider, but for a dragon to love and trust their rider so much that they’d allow them to swap places? Who had ever heard of such a thing? Not even in the parables of Zavad and King Cynakris had Zavad granted such freedom to a human.
But it was worse than that. Out of the various reasons dragons might need a rider, the most urgent was the toxic effect of magic on themselves. Dragons were incredible wellsprings of power, capable of extraordinary acts, but every spell brought them that much closer to an unstoppable frenzy from which most dragons never recovered. For a dragon to go rampant was for them to lose themselves in such rage that everyone around them was in danger, including other dragons.
Humans were so much weaker—but immune to rampancy. An Eannis- blessed human might cast magic spells every minute of every day of their lives if they had power enough, and never lose control.
So, what did that mean for a dragonrider possessing a dragon? Ris had pushed aside Tiendremos’s entire weight as though it were nothing . But Peralon had also used magic, tearing apart several tons of metal with a finger snap. Would Peralon pay the price for that later? Would Ris?
Anahrod was unprepared for the emotion that drowned her concern for Ris and Peralon. A burning wave of fire spread out over her, so intense she felt dizzy.
She was worried for the pair, yes. Concerned, definitely.
But mostly, she was jealous.
Her hypocrisy tasted like ash. She saw her sins reflected in the glint of Peralon’s scales, in her awareness of an uncomfortable, gut-wrenching truth. Once again, she’d told herself that she hated something, but only to discover that what she really hated was how it wasn’t hers.
Was she so different from a dragon? Were they simply more honest about their obsessions?
It took Anahrod a moment, blinking, to realize that the two dragons-in-human-skin had been talking.
“—panicked. I know it’s no excuse, but she’s closed the ports, the docks, everything,” Tiendremos-in-Jaemeh complained. “They’re checking papers for everyone who comes through. Humans need a work visa if they want to enter the city. She knows something.” And now the dragon sounded scared.
So that was the real problem: Tiendremos’s worry that his boss had discovered his plan to betray her. Naturally, the dragon had lashed out—at someone who had nothing to do with it.
[Look behind you.] It was Ris’s voice.
Ris’s voice? How could it be Ris’s voice? That meant the ability to speak to each other like this was tied to the physical body, not the soul. Anahrod had no idea what that realization truly meant, only that it felt significant.
Shoving back her unease, she looked behind herself just in time to see a yellow sphere of crystal, roughly the size of a child’s head, roll to a stop at her feet.
Peralon and Tiendremos were too busy talking to pay attention, and Jaemeh gave no sign of any awareness of his surroundings. Ris, though, watched Anahrod with a gleaming emerald eye as she kept her teeth fastened around Tiendremos’s throat.
Anahrod’s breath froze inside her for a second. The yellow sphere was a dragonstone.
[Is this… is this what Peralon left to bring back?] The tool he claimed would help Anahrod overcome her fear of heights.
[Yes,] Ris said. [Don’t let Tiendremos see it.]
She could see the wisdom there. Not that Anahrod thought Tiendremos would turn her in (she was “important,” after all) but because Tiendremos had, only minutes earlier, showed that he sometimes reacted in irrational ways.
And to think: he wasn’t even rampant.
Anahrod quickly slid her mantle off her shoulders, tied off the ends to make a knapsack, and scooped the yellow crystal inside.
“Neveranimas does not know what we’re doing,” Peralon-in-Ris said with unshakable authority. “If she did, she wouldn’t heighten security. She’d destroy us.”
Tiendremos inhaled deeply and nodded. “You’re right. Of course you’re right.”
It was almost funny how much Tiendremos reminded her of Jaemeh just then. She felt turbulent about it, her feelings conflicted on this reminder that Tiendremos and Jaemeh might share similar qualities.
“So go,” Peralon said. “Take a flight. Clear your head. Go hunt something. You’ll feel better. We’ll handle entering the city.” He paused. “And I don’t recommend it, but if you insist, we’ll include Jaemeh in the planning and execution. If anything strikes him as suspicious, he’ll tell you, and if anything goes wrong, you have an eye at the scene.”
Anahrod felt a moment’s annoyance at rewarding the dragon’s tantrum with exactly what he wanted, but she remembered the anger in Peralon’s eyes, how furious he’d been. Too furious for her to believe that he’d so easily roll over for Tiendremos now.
So why had he?
It took her a second, but she saw it. They’d been concerned about Tiendremos betraying them to Neveranimas, but now Jaemeh would be deeply involved—or would think he was. Tiendremos wouldn’t dare “catch them in the act” when his own rider would be one of the crew. If Peralon and Ris had insisted on this from the start, Tiendremos might have fought it, might have found a workaround.
But now Tiendremos thought this was the workaround.
His eye color shifted, returned to Ris’s green, and behind them, Anahrod heard the shifting of scales as Tiendremos was released.
Tiendremos didn’t say a word to Ris or acknowledge her. He returned to his dragon body, letting Jaemeh take over his own human body again. The dragonrider immediately slumped, limbs shaking and expression fighting between shame and resentment.
He looked awful. He was bruised, shivering, and needed a bath. Anahrod wondered when Jaemeh had last eaten—or slept.
Tiendremos left quickly. He had nothing to say to his rider.
Anahrod did, though, the moment Tiendremos was gone.
“Are you all right?” She offered him a hand.
Jaemeh knocked it away. “I’m fine!” He paused and shuddered. “Sorry. It’s just—I’m sorry you had to see him when he gets like this. It’s fine.” He pointed to the tunnels. “Help yourself to anything you like. I’m going to—” He gestured vaguely. “I’m going to go.”
Ris counted off her fingers. “Go eat some food first, and drink some water. Tea counts, booze doesn’t. Then go to sleep. Take a bath in the morning when you’re less likely to pass out and accidentally drown.”
Jaemeh blinked at her, incredulous. “Who made you my keeper?”
“You might’ve missed it, but your dragon did. Welcome to the team. Now go.”
When he, too, was gone, Anahrod remained, along with Ris, Peralon, and a small mountain of twisted metal.
Ris brushed herself off. “That was exciting.”
“That’s one way of describing it,” Anahrod agreed. “Is he really part of the team?”
“No,” Ris admitted, “but it’ll be easier if they think he is.”
“Understood.” She shifted the knapsack on her shoulder. “So, what am I supposed to do with this thing?”
Peralon made a rumbling noise. [Let me show you.]