Chapter 19 Roland
ROLAND
Ispent the night sleeplessly.
The rolling of the boat had my stomach doing somersaults, and when someone brought me a plate for dinner, I didn’t manage to keep down a single bite of it.
Worse, that buzzing at the base of my skull spoke to a hunger of an entirely different kind. I gritted my teeth, tried to think of anything else, and failed.
Forov visited again, and I attempted to convince him this was all pointless. If all went according to his plan, my niece or nephew would be monarch of Llangard by the time they returned me to it.
Unfortunately, the man truly wasn’t interested in my crown, only my Cavendish blood, and there was no real way to convince someone you didn’t have magic when they were sure that you did. If I failed to perform a cantrip, well, that was simply playacting.
Between the nausea and my hunger, I quickly lost all interest in talking sense.
They weren’t listening, and there was rarely anyone to talk to anyway.
Forov might visit, but mostly, the world listed back and forth and my attention drifted as I laid back in a passably comfortable bed, trying not to vomit.
I was watching the reflection that the water’s surface threw against the ceiling of my lavish cell when I heard the peal of a bell. It was frantic and fast, ringing out up on deck.
I didn’t care. That bell didn’t require a single thing of me.
Even the thundering of footsteps didn’t matter.
The only thing that did—
“Dragon!” someone shouted.
“Fire the bolt!”
I jumped up at once, rushing to the glass windows that made up one wall of the ship.
I expected a glimmer of gold, but there, on the horizon, was a green spot.
Aderyn.
A dry sob escaped me and I threw the window open wide. The sea spray tickled my face as Aderyn swooped toward the ship.
A long harpoon flew through the air, arching toward him.
My breath caught, a cry stifled by the terror of that sharp point.
But clever Aderyn just tilted to the side and the thing missed him.
“Reload!” a sailor screamed, but it took too long compared to a dragon’s flight.
Aderyn opened his mouth and a spout of flame crackled the wooden deck.
Leaning out the window, I couldn’t see what he’d lit aflame, but I smelled the smoke and ash, heard cries and then the creak of varnished wood beneath a dragon’s claws.
He roared, and in the rough sound, I heard my name.
“Where is Roland?”
His voice was guttural and deep, and no human voice carried in quite the same way a dragon’s did. There was shuffling around on deck, and moments later, the door unlatched.
Forov’s manservant came rushing in and grabbed me by the shoulder of my coat.
Unceremoniously, he tugged me across the room.
I hardly needed his encouragement, but as unsteady on my feet as I was, I did appreciate the bracing hand.
I staggered out into the light of day, squinting against the sun’s rays.
The warmth on my face wasn’t sunlight, though.
Above us, a sail burnt, the middle sagging in crisped black edges while men rushed to put the fires out.
It was a warning—recoverable, perhaps, but Aderyn had—
It’d never occurred to me that he would fight for me. I never would’ve asked him to, but there he was.
I stared up at him, even the stinging light I’d been denied for days was unable to keep me from taking him in. He was large but svelte, like a serpent rather than the boulder Bowen made or the solid, muscled sturdiness of Tris when he transformed.
Aderyn was as graceful as a silk flag on the breeze, bright green and shining before me, and my heart squeezed at the sight of him. The whole ship listed slightly with his weight, and my stomach twisted.
But sun and moons both, he was beautiful.
“Aderyn—”
I staggered toward him, held firm by the servant’s grip on my shoulder.
“You see?” Forov spat, voice laced with fury at the inconvenience he’d brought down on himself. “He is fine. Completely unharmed. And you might’ve killed him, you great bloody—”
There was a shout behind us as a burnt rope gave way and a wooden beam groaned.
Didn’t matter. Only Aderyn mattered.
“I’m fine,” I croaked, staring up at him. My eyes stung, and I couldn’t place the feeling.
It wasn’t just that I’d been taken and he was there. I’d have been so overcome just to see him at all, as sure as I’d been that what I’d broken was irreparable.
Aderyn had come.
However angry he was, however righteous his anger, he had still come.
“You did perfect,” I assured him. Forov was full of shit, railing against the damage done to his ship, but Aderyn had come to save me.
He’d been quick and smart and kept himself from being hurt.
I hadn’t ever been so proud of him—he’d grown from the scared, abused little dragon at Windy Pass to this. It was incredible.
With a low, threatening growl, Aderyn lowered his head toward the deck.
He took a step forward, and it was only then that I realized he’d perched himself atop the ballista.
All the sailors and soldiers had scurried back from it, and though some of them had grabbed the hilts of their swords and yanked them free, none dared threaten a dragon with a chest full of fire.
“Release him, now,” Aderyn snarled, his lips pulling back over teeth sharp as daggers.
The man holding my coat let me go. He held his hands up as he took a step back from me.
The only problem then was that I had to stand on my own feet. The boat swayed, shifting with the waves and with Aderyn’s weight.
I stumbled forward, reached out to brace myself on Aderyn’s scaled leg, and then I was tipping down—down toward the wooden deck.
And everything else? It came up in a rush of acid and a sharp cramp in my stomach.
I vomited right there on the deck, clinging to Aderyn’s arm, gasping with spit-slick lips.
Still, he was there, scales smooth beneath my palm, and if there were anywhere I was going to die, I’d have it with him, at his side, in his arms.
“Roland!” He snatched me with enormous clawed paws, held me steady as he could, and I grinned sloppily as I stared up at him.
“I’m so sorry,” I rasped, my throat still burning from the bile. “Aderyn, I’m so, so sorry.”