Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
Cara
Ipulled away from Fear as soon as I could. “Thank you.”
My legs felt unsteady underneath me—from the fall, from the terror, and perhaps from his proximity—as I walked toward the stairs. He went with me, and I gritted my teeth. I needed distance. I needed to escape him.
We walked through the empty barracks. The shadows did not move, but we knew they were full of Nightwalkers.
Back into Bismyth.
It smelled like breakfast, like fried apples and cinnamon, bacon, and fresh buttery biscuits, and the room was full of friends.
I needed to be alone, and the sight of all these people I’d come to love felt exhausting, like a gauntlet. Their greeting felt almost like a cheer rising.
Fear smiled as he came into the room beside me, his hand brushing over my lower back. I stiffened before I remembered to act. To be his wife.
Anayla’s gaze caught on the motion, then rose to my face. She might be glad to see us, too, but there was something careful underneath her smile.
She patted the seat beside her, and my resolve stiffened. She’d just looked at me as if she’d seen too much. She might know I’d thrown myself to Lightbringer’s mercy…and fallen.
“There she is.” Dairen gestured with a bread roll to the seat. “We saved you the seat with the wobbly leg.”
“Generous.” I sat because I had to.
Anayla passed me a cup and filled it with tea without being asked.
Fear took the seat beside me. Of course he did. His arm settled along the back of my chair, closing the distance I’d been trying to hold around myself, and he said something to Dairen that made the table laugh, and the performance was so immediate and so seamless that the ground shifted.
He’d said I’ve got you and looked at me so unguardedly, and in that moment, it had felt real. But was anything with Fear real?
Anayla leaned in. “Are you all right?”
“Of course,” I said brightly. Then I realized it was too much, too bright a response, when the barracks were empty and Bismyth was the only ones left here.
Because of me.
They all knew they were trapped here because of me.
I felt like an actress who had forgotten her lines. I was supposed to pretend everything was fine with Fear, but no one would expect me to be fine with Lightbringer’s rejection.
She leaned her face into my hair, her hand resting lightly on my shoulder, and I closed my eyes against the intimacy. I’d been jealous of how easily physical Bismyth was with each other, how it showed their friendship, and usually, I would have appreciated Anayla’s friendship.
But today I felt overwhelmed and jittery, and I wanted to be alone. Untouched.
“You don’t have to be fine,” she whispered. “Do you want to get out of here?”
Gods, yes. But alone.
She was so gentle.
“I’m fine,” I promised her, my voice level and warm as I could manage. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by being cold. I didn’t dare, anyway. I couldn’t lose Anayla.
She looked as if she were deciding whether to press or not, and I hoped she would not, and then she murmured, “You jumped off the overlook.”
“Lightbringer and I are still working out who’s in charge. I was pressing the issue.”
Anayla covered my hand with hers. Her eyes were warm and steady and impossible to meet. “I’m here. You didn’t need to go up there alone.”
“I was hoping she’d object more to me flinging myself to my doom.” I let out a little laugh that didn’t sound very much like a laugh, then realized how loud it seemed, because the room had gone awfully quiet.
Anayla had the briefest flash of hurt across her face, as if I had rejected her. I realized a beat too late that she had offered to be with me at the overlook if I went again, and I regretted glossing over the offer.
“I was watching.” Fear leaned toward us, and his smoke and his spicy, clean scent and his warmth washed over me. His presence felt overwhelming as his attention turned toward Anayla, and he offered us both an easy grin, but now it was clear he had always been listening.
It felt overwhelming and dark, Fear’s admission that he was watching. Always watching. But the rest of the table seemed to find it a comfort.
Of course he was watching.
“Lightbringer must have known you were there,” Anayla said. To me, gently, “You can’t force a dragon. Can’t command a dragon. Can’t trick a dragon.”
Then how the hell did Fear keep Shadowbane under control when tricks were all Fear knew?
“So what’s the problem?” Dair demanded cheerfully. “You’ve won us all over. Why is your dragon being difficult?”
I felt cut to the quick, even though Dair had wrapped the all-too-relevant question in tenderness.
“Have I won you all over? Did you feel you were missing out before when you didn’t have a fragile mortal of your very own to protect from monsters?” I said it lightly, laughing. And it didn’t land. I felt the faint unamused shift in the room.
That was too much truth of another type, too. I was a hazard in the field if I couldn’t shift, just as I had been that very first day when I met Fieran. Bismyth had fought around me as I bled from the wyrm bite.
“Dair did feel he was missing out.” Fear’s forearm, on the back of my chair, brushed my shoulder as he shifted toward me. “He told me, ‘I need someone newer than I am on the team. Someone who will let me rescue them for a change instead of you rescuing me!’”
Dair protested, laughing, and the room laughed with him. “Well, if I had known we would get Cara, I might have said that! But it’s unfair. I’ve only been claimed since the last Trial!”
Fear had shifted things so seamlessly, making it seem as if it were typical for new shifters to be fragile. There was nothing about me that was uniquely weak. My cheeks felt pink, and I did not dare look at him.
And I did not look at Dair, either, who had suggested that they had needed me.
No matter how much it was just silly banter.
When had I ever been wanted like that before?
Not in all of Stonehaven, and yet here, with the most incredible group I’d ever met, they claimed me as one of their own. I could not endure it.
When I started to push back from the table, too many gazes swiveled my way.
The Nightwalkers swept in.
They did not knock. They entered, dark-cloaked and unhurried. Their attention was on Fear, as attention always was. Everything else that happened was just the queen angling her pieces toward him. He was the one she wanted to destroy.
I was on my feet before I realized I had moved. My shoulder in front of Fear, my hand on my dagger. As if I would fight them to protect him.
He had moved in the same instant, one arm rising to put me behind him, his other hand going to his shoulder. A golden glow limned him in light as his sword-and-sheath glowed into existence across his back.
The same instinct, mirrored between the two of us. Shadowbane and Lightbringer through us, surely.
I wasn’t entirely sure I believed it.
Fear’s hand found the small of my back, settling on it with his usual control, and the usual charm touched his lips. “Good morning. If you would knock properly, we could greet you properly.”
“Clan Bismyth.” The lead Nightwalker carried the flat courtesy of someone delivering a message, not initiating a negotiation. “Her Majesty requests the presence of the clan leader and his wife.”
The hand at my back was steady. “Delightful. We would be happy to meet with my mother.”
The ground felt as if it rocked beneath my feet, though this must have been inevitable.
This was my fault, too. He had rescued Tay and Lidi and Mam, and the queen would know, and now she would take us.
Could she torture us? Not by her own hand or by her order.
What were its limits? Would she torture Bismyth?
“Cara.” Fear’s voice was soft, and my gaze snapped up to his. His gaze moved over my face in the quick way of someone checking on a weapon, or a shield, or…I was neither. I was a weakness.
Something shifted in his jaw. He offered me his arm.
Formal and old-fashioned and as if I were a royal and not the messy mortal girl to which he was bound.
In another moment, I might have mocked him.
Instead, I looped my arm over his forearm.
He was so steady and warm; at least my legs wouldn’t fail me when I could lean on him.
He looked over his shoulder as the two of us moved toward the door. “No one follows.”
“We’ll be here,” Asrael said. “Waiting.”
There was a promise in it. Two promises, really.
One for us, and one for the Nightwalkers.
Fear
The Nightwalkers set a pace that didn’t invite conversation.
I fell into step beside Cara, close enough that our arms brushed on the narrow turns, the corridor swallowing the sound of our footsteps into its old stone. I watched the backs of our escorts and said, very quietly, without looking at her: “She’ll know you tried to stab me.”
Her breath hitched slightly. She had heard and was deciding what to do with that.
“Don’t deny it. We’re still standing together; that’s the only thing that needs to be true in that room.”
She nodded, but it was the nod that meant she had heard me, not the nod that meant she would play my game. I saw that nod rarely.
“Can you do that?”
She said nothing for three steps. “Yes.”
The Nightwalkers turned left ahead of us, and we followed.
The distance to the castle did not seem long enough at all.
Not when I needed to map out what the queen would want: information, control, and, incidentally but also pleasant to her, the chance to punish me.
She must be delighted that I had fallen in love and she had maneuvered my bride to murder me.
All the recent tally marks in this endless game of ours were on her side.
But none of that mattered as long as Bismyth and Cara and I walked free in the end. My pride was nothing.