Chapter 27 Tamsyn
TAMSYN
HE WAS LOST. AND YET NOT LOST.
Not lost like before, with hope a dead, rotting thing inside me.
Fell was alive and loose in the Crags, as wild as any untamed creature that roamed this wilderness. Except he wasn’t just any untamed creature. He was Fell. Mine. Even though he’d rejected me. Flown away without a backward glance, as though I was nothing.
The sting of this went deep, a shard of ice through the molten core of me. Except …
He didn’t kill me.
That was no small thing. If I was nothing, he could have killed me in that moment when we stood face-to-face.
He’d killed everyone else in sight in a feral rage.
And yet he’d let me live. I took that as a positive sign.
Some part of him must know me, remember me still. It was enough to give me hope.
I watched him fly away, his pearl-silver wings flapping on the air.
Lost but not dead. Not unreachable. An important distinction and one I clung to desperately.
“Well.” Kerstin sighed beside me, pulling her hood back down into place over her head and covering her wild mane of hair.
“That did not go the way I thought at all.” She sliced a hand through the air for dramatic effect.
She angled her head thoughtfully. “Do you think the witch knew he was going to come out of that hole fierce as a battle boar?” She yanked her thumb in the direction Sylvi had departed. “Because she made a quick exit.”
“I don’t know. Maybe,” I said, even as I shook my head, still looking to the sky, the air tremoring past my lips. What did it matter?
“Damned witches,” she grumbled. “Didn’t even think to give us a warning that your mate was going to come out a bloodthirsty killer.”
I bristled, feeling defensive over Fell and his actions. “He didn’t do anything to those soldiers we weren’t planning to do ourselves.”
Her gaze swept around us. “Uh, yes, except he did it really well and in under a minute. And he hasn’t even had any training from the pride.” Her eyes went wide in part horror, part wonder.
“He’s been training his whole life,” I returned.
“Not as a dragon.”
“No,” I agreed. “But he was still trained to be a fighter, a killer, a tool for war.” His father, Balor the Butcher, the infamous dragon slayer (slayer of Fell and Vetr’s mother), had seen to that—bringing him up to be just as skilled and vicious as he was.
“Oh.” She considered that. “So not so different from us,” she admitted slowly, her eyes taking on a gleam. “Just think what he could bring to the pride.”
I winced and looked out at the carnage again, saying with conviction, “When his brother gave him to the skelm, any chance of Fell joining the pride was lost.”
I would not even think to ask it of him. I no longer even wanted it for myself. No, I wanted a different life than what the pride offered me. The kind of life that saved Penterra from Stig and still protected dragons at the same time. The two things needed not be exclusive.
Such a path had first occurred to me during my rekon. It meant leaving the Crags and going back to Penterra. I was willing to do that.
There comes a time when one must make a stand … even if no one else stands with you.
I sucked in a breath. If I was lucky, I might not be alone. I might have Fell with me.
“It’s not as though Vetr did it on purpose,” Kerstin said.
My lips twisted and I shot her a look. “You are so certain of that?”
Kerstin looked affronted. “He didn’t! Vetr is many things. Hard, ruthless, stubborn … but he wouldn’t do that.”
I wasn’t about to get into an argument with her over Vetr’s integrity (or lack thereof). Besides, he’d told me with his own words what he had done, and I could never trust him again.
Gazing into the sky, I marked where Fell was etched against the bright blueness. Soon he would be out of sight, eaten up by the drifting clouds or simply too far away to see. Urgency built in me, drumming in my veins.
“He’ll come back to himself. He’ll remember,” I said—not that she had asked—and I didn’t know if the words were for her or me.
She followed my gaze. I felt the motion of her shaking head beside me—I still would not look away from Fell. The motion felt sad, woeful. As though she believed him lost. As though she pitied me. “How do you know Fell is still inside him at all?”
He was alive. I would not give up on him a second time.
“Because,” I snapped with bone-deep conviction, “he didn’t kill me.”
He didn’t destroy me like everything else in his path when he exploded from his tomb. It felt very deliberate to me that he had left me alive and able to go after him.
Perhaps a part of him knew that I would follow him. I needed to believe that. Kerstin made a sound, a grunt that seemed to convey that she was not swayed by my conviction.
“I’m going after him,” I said, shrugging off my fur mantle and then my cloak, letting them drop to the snow.
“What? Why?” Her features creased with perplexity. “Clearly, he does not want—”
“He doesn’t know what he wants. He doesn’t know himself.” I yanked off my gloves and tossed them down, feeling my core heat and spark in preparation.
She eyed me incredulously as I pulled off my tunic and let it fall. “This is a bad idea. He let us go, but if you chase after him, he will see you as a threat. He will kill you.”
I exhaled heavily. He could do that.
“He won’t,” I stated, glad for the steadiness of my voice that revealed none of my misgivings, none of my internal doubts.
“Oh, he will.”
“He can try, but I’m not like them.” I waved at the piles of dead around us. “I can handle myself against him. He needs me now more than ever.”
Somehow, some way, I would figure out how to bring him back to himself. I would remind him who he was—and who I was.
I would remind him that I was someone to him, someone he should care about because he once did.
That could not have been lost. Not even after all this time. He had to remember me. Us.
Hope breathed to life inside me. Purpose formed within me.
It was an irresistible thing, a warm tide that soothed and eased and took away that sense of wrongness and awkwardness, that sense of being trapped inside ill-fitting clothes while trying to pretend they felt right, that sense of straddling two worlds—being two things and not wanting to choose one over the other.
The desire to belong to both, to help save both worlds swelled inside me, even if that meant—especially if it meant—saving them from each other.
Only he could understand that because he was like me. Because I was like him.
He was a speck now, heading directly for the clouds. “This is a bad plan,” Kerstin pronounced flatly.
“It’s my plan, though.” I continued shrugging out of my remaining clothes hurriedly, determinedly. “Take what you want of my things—”
“You’re leaving me out here all alone?” Accusation layered the words.
I held her gaze. “You’ll be fine. You’ve proven yourself capable, but you need to go back to the pride now, Kerstin. The adventure ends here. It’s time to go home.”
“Without you,” she said almost bitterly.
“The pride was never my home.”
She snatched up one of my fur boots. “When you change back, you’ll be naked. Then what will you do?”
“Find clothes,” I responded with a shrug.
“Where? Growing in the ground?” she snapped.
“I will figure it out.”
Her lips f lattened into a mutinous line. “He’ll kill you.” Her voice shook a little, and she looked at me with such sorrow and regret—like I was already dead and gone from her.
Naked now, I straightened in the biting air, trying not to feel vulnerable as my breasts tightened against the fog’s icy hand. I looked anxiously to the sky, seeking Fell. He was barely visible now.
“I have to trust that he won’t.” I pulled her in for a quick hug. “Go home, Kerstin,” I said urgently into her hair.
Releasing her, I did not spare her another glance. Standing back, I tilted my face to the sky, willing it to happen, urging the change to come over me with a long, steamy exhale.
The familiar pull started in my chest, my flesh tingling. Now it barely even stung when I ripped open and apart, the dragon in me roaring to the surface, erupting, my body bursting in a blinding flash of light.
I was off. Up. Winging through the sky, my body winding and twisting on the rushing wind, working fast through the damp air after him, my wings slapping furiously to catch up.
He’d saved me on more than one occasion.
When I was a whipping girl and didn’t even realize I needed saving.
He’d taken my broken spirit and mended it simply by wanting me when he shouldn’t have—when I was the wrong bride forced on him; in the Borg, when Stig had betrayed me.
Fell had turned his back on all he’d been taught to believe. For me. He chose me.
Now it was my turn to choose him. To save him—even if the enemy here was himself.
There!
Through a break in the clouds, I spotted him, his pearlescent wings glinting on the vaporous air.
He must have heard me—or sensed me behind him.
He turned his head to look back, his dragon eyes locking on me, those vertical pupils shuddering dangerously for just a fraction of a second before facing forward again.
With an extra hard push of his wings, he surged ahead, diving into the cloud cover.
He definitely saw me, but just like that, he was out of sight again.
The clouds suddenly thickened, billowing, intensifying around him, around me, in a way that was not the product of nature.
He was doing it. Using his talent. Shading.
He might have been stuck in a hole, unable to train as I had been, unable to hone his skills, but he was doing this thing he’d been born to do—even if he’d spent a lifetime ignorant of that fact.
He might have forgotten himself. He might have forgotten me, but apparently not his dragon self.
This was innate. Stronger than everything else.
His dragon was fully cognizant, aware, alert, and in control.