Chapter 28 Aderyn
ADERYN
Tea.
Roland was alive and the Destovian was bleeding to death in the chicken pen and we were sitting down to tea.
I stared at my forearm, where only a few minutes earlier there had been a scabbed wound. It had barely been a few days since I’d cut it open with a jagged claw.
Healed.
Roland had healed me.
It had to have been him, right?
He’d been terrified for me because the Destovian had cut me, and honestly, I’d been more than a little frightened myself.
The man put a knife to my neck. He’d had no reason to want me alive and every reason to kill me, since I’d already saved Roland from his monstrous people once.
It would have been most sensible of him to kill me right there, even if I couldn’t currently fly, if only because why would he believe that I couldn’t fly?
The sensible thing for him to do was to make sure I couldn’t protect Roland from his people, and the only way he could stop me from protecting Roland was to kill me.
It was good that he knew that.
Everyone should know it.
Even sitting there at the table staring at the steaming cup of tea that had been laid before me, part of me wanted to go back out there and kick him.
He’d kidnapped Roland. My Roland. Thinking to force him to marry some princess and make children with her, so his people could take over all Llangard.
Why did so many people think that land and money were more important than people?
Nothing should be more important than people.
Carys and her sons knew that, quite clearly.
The one who had been injured at Windy Pass and saved me from the Destovian, Dylan, treated me like we were fellow survivors of the same war.
We were, it was true, but most people treated me like I had been some pitiful victim back then.
Not as though it had taken any strength from me to get through it, but as though I’d been some pathetic broken creature who had only been saved by the grace of others.
It was true, without Roland coming for me that day, I wouldn’t have survived. But Roland had no more belonged on that battlefield than I had.
Or, as Roland had pointed out, no more than anyone at all.
War was always a shame.
A thing to avoid as much as possible.
Trying to avoid a fight didn’t always work, though.
Sometimes you tried to avoid a fight and Jarl Vidar dragged you to it as he forced his people to try to take over a country he had been thrown out of centuries earlier. Sometimes your people were fighting, so you had to go with them and try to keep them safe.
Sometimes people stole your Roland, and you had to retrieve him.
And finally, sometimes, the Destovians wanted to steal your king in a strange long-term attempt to take over your kingdom by making heirs you didn’t want.
It was a stark reminder, really, that humans and dragons would never be the same, however much we had in common.
Stealing Maddox and forcing him to sire a new clutch of dragons would never make those dragons the leaders of the Summer Clan. That humans thought such a thing would work was bizarre.
Even more bizarre, the notion that for some countries run by humans, it would.
But Llangard was not so easily conquered, something they had proven again and again. Llangard would not be taken, not even by its founder, against its own will.
Llangard, at its best, always gave.
Like Roland.
I looked back down at my newly healed arm, and suddenly, a strange haziness in my brain lifted, and I realized—“You healed me,” I told Roland.
He ducked his head, his perfect freckled cheeks flushing pale pink. He didn’t even open his mouth, just nodded, then took a sip of tea, like he was embarrassed and didn’t want to look us in the eye.
“Cavendishes have always had magic,” Carys pointed out, simple and matter-of-fact, as she always seemed to be. “Don’t know that I’ve heard of them being healers before, but the way I’ve heard that his aunt moves the earth, I can’t say I’m surprised that he’s got impressive magic himself.”
Roland bit his lip, clearly wanting to deny the observation, but also uncertain of how to do so without bringing up the dragon blood issue.
It was strange, though, wasn’t it? That he’d stopped drinking blood days ago at least, and this was the first time I’d seen him perform anything resembling magic? We had known each other for years. Surely if he had magic before, I’d have seen it.
He’d told me everything, shared everything . . .
Except about the blood, a snide voice in my head that sounded like Vidar reminded me.
But of course he hadn’t told me about the blood. Maybe at first because he didn’t understand, but then at some point because he knew me. He knew that the very idea of it would hurt me, and Roland had never once deliberately hurt me. He hated to hurt anyone, even people who were awful to him.
Still, he couldn’t want to discuss the blood issue with his people, and frankly, they wouldn’t want to know about it. They only wanted Roland to be perfect and healthy, because that meant they were safer, having a king who hadn’t nearly died of poisoning or battled his own demons.
“You never got your chance to go to the monastery, not really,” I told him. “And then after what happened with your father and the war and Athelstan being a monster, it makes sense you were blocked.”
He winced at that, hunching his shoulders a bit, like he wanted to be smaller than he was. “The most powerful mage ever in our family.”
“But then I was injured and I couldn’t get us home, and there was nothing else you could do. You hadn’t even tried to do magic the entire time I’ve known you. You did it because you had to.”
He blinked, staring at me for a moment, then down at my unblemished arm once more. “The dragon blood—”
I slashed a hand through the air, cutting him off. “Was only ever an obstacle. Yes, it was a cheap, easy answer for people who had no innate magic, but no Cavendish has ever needed dragon blood to be a mage. You certainly wouldn’t.”
He reached over and took my hand, squeezing it, then running a finger along the skin he’d healed. “Cousin Nicolas had no magic.”
“Nicolas and his whole line were awful. I don’t count them.”
That made him giggle, almost like when we’d been children together, and there, like that, was when I realized something even more important.
My back didn’t hurt anymore.
I sat up straight, flexing the muscles there. Strictly speaking, they had never been the problem. They had never been injured. But since a two-legged form had no wings, there had been an ache, a sort of referred pain from flesh that was hidden away. And now? Now there was nothing.
Lifting my free hand from where I’d had it resting in my lap, I stared at it a moment, reaching out to touch the dragon and thinking of my claws. As easily as ever, they came to me.
“Healed,” I whispered. “You healed me.”
His smile was the brightest I’d ever seen on his face. No holiday or celebration or anything at all had ever made him happier than me being healed. But he didn’t say the obvious; that now I could return us to Atheldinas immediately.
But then, I knew he wouldn’t.
I had known since before we were even in this situation; for as long as I had known Roland Cavendish, what would happen in a situation like this. His next words, much though I loved and hated them at once, weren’t any kind of surprise.
“Well then, as soon as we take care of the situation with the Destovians, we can fly home.”
Because of course.
Roland could love me more than anything, even Llangard, but he would never, not in a thousand thousand years, or in twice as many awful situations as that, leave his land or people alone to face any threat he was there to help them with.
The Destovians wouldn’t leave, especially now that we’d been forced to kill the one who had come for us and seen me. So we would have to find a way to deal with them before we could go home.