Chapter 22
ADERYN
Iwoke with a gasp, convinced someone was shooting at us.
Again.
Convinced that someone was shooting at us again.
I’d been so worried in the moment that they would somehow miss the giant target that was me, and hit tiny, vulnerable Roland on my back, that I hadn’t even registered the pain when they had, in fact, hit me.
It hadn’t been the worst injury I’d ever gotten to a wing, by a long shot. I had once been flying too low, and broken a wingtip hitting it against the forest canopy beneath me. It had swelled up and I hadn’t been able to fly for weeks.
This had been a single arrow in the fleshy, thin part of my wing. It made sense—when I had them open, it was one of the biggest targets available to archers. It would have been almost nothing, except . . . I hadn’t been able to land immediately, and get help with it.
There was no Bowen there to dress my wound and smile paternally and tell me to be more careful next time, but sometimes injury was simply how we learned.
None of that. I’d had to fly for hours with the arrow hole in my wing. Bleeding a little at first, then more. Eventually, it had slowed, even with the extra blood flowing through the appendage as I flew, the wound scabbing over slightly because of the constant push of air over it.
It had been good timing, because I’d been starting to worry I was going to pass out from blood loss, and we’d been far from the sight of any shore. Maybe Roland could have used my body to float back to land, but that would have been rather more traumatic an escape than I’d planned for him.
Still, when I stumbled my way onto the beach, I’d torn it right back open, the darn thing gushing blood like a fountain, and I simply hadn’t had the strength in me to do anything about it.
Fortunately, I had been able to shift back, to stop the continuing blood loss. Wings couldn’t bleed if they didn’t exist, could they?
Still, I thought to myself, if it couldn’t bleed, my back sure felt oddly sticky and hot.
And then I’d known no more, only dreams of finding Roland.
Now, waking up, was . . . well, we were alive, so that was good.
My back felt like it was on fire, and I was lying on my stomach, something wonderfully, blissfully cool laid across my shoulder blades.
When I gasped and pushed up off my belly, it almost fell off, and the muscles of my back twisted in agony at the motion, making me want to curl up in a ball, even though some tiny part of me knew full well that would make it hurt even more.
Instead, a hand came down on my shoulder, squeezing firmly, pressing me back down, and covering me once more with the soothing, cool object.
“It’s okay, Aderyn. We’re safe.” Roland’s beautiful voice rolled over me, and my body went slack. Just his presence was safety to my overtaxed mind.
“Destovians,” I murmured.
“We’re back in Llangard,” he promised. “The Destovians aren’t here. I promise. You got us back.”
For a moment, that was reassuring. We got home. I, somehow, got us home. I didn’t remember getting us home. I remembered getting us just barely near the shore, my vision slowly going black and coming in flashes, stuttering pictures that shifted suddenly and frighteningly.
I remembered a spray of sand, and a tearing pain in my wing, and . . . nothing.
Sand.
I tensed again, as I realized the problem with Roland’s reassurance. There was sand beneath me.
We were not home. We had barely reached the shoreline before I had passed out.
So unless Roland had carried me . . . who knew how far, all the way to Atheldinas, and then taken me out to lay on the beach nearby, we were not actually home.
It seemed rather unlikely that he would do such a thing, rather than putting me in a bed.
That meant that no matter how much Roland wanted to think otherwise, we were not safe. We were not home, in the welcoming arms of Bet and Tris, and the palace guard, ready to repel foreign invaders who wanted to take Roland away from me.
From . . . Llangard.
Yes, that.
So I took a few deep breaths, steadying myself, preparing for the pain, and this time slowly, with control, pushed up.
Roland hovered, his hands out, like I would fall and he needed to catch me.
Like he always had. Even when I’d started learning how to fly, he’d been right there next to Bowen and Hafgan, holding his hands out as though he could catch me if I fell out of the sky.
Even though me as a dragon, even as a preteen, could have entirely crushed him.
“You probably shouldn’t move too much,” he said, and even though his voice was shot through with sharp pain of his own, he didn’t for a second fail to be concerned about me.
That was Roland.
Always concerned about other people before himself, me most of all.
Usually, though, he seemed so strong. Now?
He . . . well, it wasn’t that he wasn’t strong.
He was something to behold, shirtless and gorgeous, with muscles I could never seem to cultivate on my weak human body.
I was skinny as a dragon, and skinny as a human, and I couldn’t change it.
Rhys had once apologetically told me that it was probably because Vidar had starved me for so long, and I was simply no longer capable of changing it.
That was a little on the side of embarrassing, but I was still too grateful to be outside a cage to overthink it all that much.
But Roland? His shoulders were broad and muscled, his chest wide and full, each muscle defined and frankly, I imagined, a little intimidating for anyone who couldn’t turn into a dragon. He was turning into a very impressive man, even more than he’d been intellectually impressive already as a child.
Sometimes it made me feel small, how Roland seemed perfect in every way. But then he would put his arm around me and accept me as I was, without question, and . . . nothing seemed worth worrying about anymore.
How had I ever thought I could leave him behind?
No. Even if Roland needed my blood to live, I would have to give it. Far better that, than living without him.
Living without Roland . . . well, it simply wasn’t possible.
Right now, though, the muscles of his stomach were defined in a way they usually weren’t, and I seemed to recall Tris once saying to a knight that meant he wasn’t drinking enough water.
Admittedly, it mostly made me want to trail my fingers over it, to see how his skin felt against my fingers and—wait. “Why aren’t you wearing your shirt? You’re too pale, you’ll burn.”
He smiled sweetly at me, then reached up and gave a tug to . . . to the cool, wet object on my back. Roland’s shirt.
He’d been using his shirt to help my back. I winced. “How bad does it look?”
“Bad. I . . . you can’t change, can you?”
I considered for a moment. Since my first few times changing back and forth, it had been a relatively simple thing to do.
I had sort of just grabbed the form I wasn’t in, and .
. . tugged on it. So I reached for the dragon, and pain lanced through my entire body, making me arch backward, which made the pain in my back spike.
“Shh, shh, no, don’t try anymore,” Roland’s voice whispered, breaking through the pain. “Don’t hurt yourself. You’ve already done enough. More than enough. You saved me. It’s my turn now.”
Reluctantly, I let go of the dragon, collapsing into Roland’s arms.
They were tense. His whole body was tense.
When my back finally stopped hurting so much that I couldn’t move, I slowly eased myself back and really looked at him.
“What . . . what’s wrong?” He gave me a funny look, like I was being deliberately obtuse, so I shook my head, albeit gingerly, so that I didn’t re-anger my body.
“That’s not what I mean and you know it. What’s wrong with you?”
He winced, looking away, and before he even said a word, I knew.
It was the blood. He needed blood. He needed my blood, because there were no other dragons available.
Just the thought made me feel a little queasy, but it only took me a second to realize that it wasn’t because I was thinking of Roland as like Vidar.
It was because I’d lost so much blood during the flight back to land. Because I wasn’t sure I had any extra to give.
Still, this was Roland. If I had died and he’d had to ride my body back to Atheldinas like a macabre raft, I’d have accepted that without question. He’d have been the one horrified by the idea of using me. Just like now, he was the one who would be hesitant to use me.
And I wasn’t sure I had the strength to convince him it was fine.
Instead of talking, I pulled my wrist up, ready to make a cut . . . but with what? I couldn’t summon my dragon, and my weak, pitiful human body had no claws. For a moment, I just stared at it, blank as a fresh sheet of paper. Finally, I found my words, looking up to Roland for help. “I don’t . . .”
He pulled my wrist away from me, cradling it against his own chest and shaking his head. “No. Absolutely not. I would never ask that of you, Aderyn, even if you hadn’t already lost so much blood saving our lives yesterday. Not ever.”
I fell against him, my eyes wet, even though I didn’t remember wanting to cry. “I love you,” I whispered into his bare chest, the words falling out of me like a confession in the night.
He tugged me even tighter against himself, burying his face in my hair and whispering back, “I love you too, Aderyn. More than anything else in the world. More than Llangard.”
He said the words like they were something shameful, and I understood why. He was the king of Llangard. He was supposed to put the land first, before all things, and certainly before anything he wanted for himself.
I turned my face upward, looking him in the eye, before pressing my lips lightly against his. When I pulled back, I met his eye steadily. “I will never make you choose. Not ever. You can have us both.”
And then we collapsed together and stayed there, on the beach, right where the grasses met the sand, for a long time.