Chapter 14
Valen
The last stretch into Ash Hollow’s clearing runs uphill through cut grass. The light goes gold over the ridge behind the barn most evenings this time of year. I still stop and look at it every time. The horses are already in.
Nyxiana keeps pace beside me, spine straight, chin level as if she hadn’t just pulled me off a portal platform that was about to put us wherever Faelan wanted us.
She phased us both out blind rather than ride it, and now she’s walking exactly the way she did as she got onto the platform in the first place.
Nothing in her stride says what it actually took to get us here.
A piece of her hair has come loose and hangs against her jaw. My hand is halfway to her face. I’m not sure when it got there. I put it back down. I’ve spent years learning not to reach for things I want. It hasn’t made this any easier.
Dane is already coming out of the Lodge before we clear the treeline at the edge of the yard. Nova a step behind him.
“We found something,” I say, before he can ask. “It’s secured.”
He looks at Nyxiana, then back at me. “Inside. All of it, once.”
Dane calls the leadership in before the last of the light goes off the ridge.
Nova takes the chair beside him. Callum stands at the window with his arms crossed.
Ben and Harper sit close, her knee against his.
Rafe and Kari take the bench across from them.
Evren stays on his feet, leaning against the chimney stone, already braced for whatever this is.
Lyanna comes in last, her healer’s bag still over one shoulder, and takes the chair nearest the door out of habit.
Chairs scrape into place. Somebody flips the lights on against the coming dark. The room smells like cedar.
“Did you see them?” Evren says, before anyone’s settled. “My family?”
“We saw them,” Nyxiana says. “Everyone was well when we left.”
He nods once. His arms stay crossed.
I give it to them in order.
“Niko opened the family vaults to us,” I say. “Nyxiana went through them by hand, case by case. What came out of it was a broken piece of gray stone at the back of the last one. It carries the account of the dragon line. Every generation of it, all the way down to Niko and to Auriella.”
“She read it back as far as it goes,” I say. “It runs and runs, then it quits. When the account picks up again, the first dragons of Drakoria are already alive and already ruling. Where they came from isn’t in it.”
“Not in it because it never was, or not in it because something’s gone?” Kari asks.
“Gone,” I say. “There’s a hole where the beginning should sit. Something used to be there. Someone took it out and set a later name in its place, a dragon born generations after the fact, and left him standing there looking like the first.”
The gold in Evren’s eyes stops moving.
“So, nobody smashed anything,” Rafe says. “Somebody who knew exactly what a founding record is supposed to read like sat down and built a better one.”
Nyxiana takes a half step in from the wall.
“I kept my hand on that missing place well past when I needed to. The work sitting over the hole is as old as the founding itself. It went in that way from the start. Whoever kept that account kept it around the missing part and never wrote down that anything was gone.”
Kari turns her head. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning we’ve spent every generation tracing ourselves back to a beginning that was never ours.” Evren’s voice comes out rough at the edges. “Meaning nobody in my family has ever known where dragons come from. My father doesn’t know. His father didn’t.”
“There’s one more piece,” I say. “The line that account follows is the royal line. It runs through Auriella. It runs to Nyxiana.”
Every face in the room turns toward her before I finish her name.
She lets the quiet sit instead of filling it.
Her hair is pushed back over one shoulder, silver-white against the dark green of her sleeve.
She keeps her eyes up. She meets every face that’s looking at her.
The violet in them has gone gold, and she doesn’t do anything to hide it. Her hands stay open at her sides.
I’m standing close enough beside her that I’m the only one who catches her fingers close once against her thigh.
Dane’s the one who finally breaks the quiet. “Are you okay?”
“There’s more,” she says.
Everyone goes still, waiting on it.
“Faelan’s magic is already inside Briarstone’s foundations,” she says. “Faint. Old. It’s been there long enough that nothing about the stone flags it as wrong.”
Evren’s head comes up fast. The heat coming off him reaches me from three feet away, sharper than it was a moment ago.
“How long?” he says.
“No way to date it exactly,” Nyxiana says. “Long enough that nobody there ever caught it.”
“I grew up on that floor.”
“I know,” she says.
His hands open and close once at his sides. “Does my father know?”
“Niko was told before we left,” I say.
“If he got that deep into Briarstone,” Callum says, “what stops him getting into ours?”
“So far the trail runs through that family’s blood,” I say. “And through Kari’s.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“That’s what I’ve got right now.”
Callum holds my look a moment, then nods once, his eyes still on me.
She moves straight into the next part of it. “When we started back,” she says, “the portal turned wrong the second we stepped onto the platform. The current answered to Faelan. I didn’t wait to find out why.”
Callum says the name under his breath. Ben swears low at the floor.
“The exit was closing,” Nyxiana says. “Every other time I’ve stood on that platform, the current has run one direction, straight toward home.
This time it changed under our feet, going cold and turning somewhere else entirely.
I recognized what was underneath it: Faelan’s signature.
Wherever it was taking us, it wasn’t taking us home.
I pulled Valen off the platform and phased us both out blind instead of finding out where. ”
“That’s what happened to Rhonan,” Evren interjects. “His portal got sabotaged the same way. That’s how he ended up stranded on Earth.”
“Yes,” Nyxiana says.
Kari looks at her, then at Dane. “We crossed those same portals into the North Range and back, tracking the ward stones,” she says. “Once each way. Nobody told us the current could turn like that.”
“We thought it was already fixed,” Nyxiana says.
“That’s worse.”
She sets the shard on the table where everyone can reach it. It sits in her palm, dull gray. One edge is broken, but the break is smooth, not jagged.
Lyanna leans in first. Her hands glow green as she holds them above it, then the light fades. “The resonance is clean,” she says. “Nothing riding it. I’d still rather we kept it somewhere warded.”
Dane picks it up. Turns it over once. Sets it back down without a word.
Nova’s been watching the whole exchange without a word. She picks her moment. “How did you actually find it?”
“Hours in the old holdings,” I say. “I ended up in one corner with no reason for it. Last case I opened, I put my hand right on it.”
“How?” Nova asks.
“Instinct. Same answer I’ve always given for the things I get right with no way to explain how. It’s always been true. It’s never explained anything.”
Ben’s been quiet through all of it. Then he asks the question sitting under everyone else’s.
“Rhonan and Serena are still there,” he says. “If the portals can’t be trusted, how do they get home?”
Harper looks at him. Kari looks at the table. Evren straightens off the chimney stone.
“I don’t know yet,” Nyxiana says. “I’m working on it. Rhonan stays where he is until I do.”
“He’ll love hearing that,” Evren says.
Callum huffs something close to a laugh. “He’s going to be furious.”
“Then we get word to him right after this meeting,” Dane says. He leans on the back of a chair. “Does any of this change anything with the marks?”
“Let me check,” Nyxiana says.
Kari’s right hand comes up and closes over her own palm. Harper’s fingers go to the inside of her wrist, to the knotwork sitting there.
Nyxiana turns to Kari. “May I see it?”
Kari holds her hand out, palm up. Nyxiana’s fingers hover just above the skin. Everyone waits on her.
“It’s moving,” she says. “And this time it answers clean. The North Range.”
She looks to Rafe when she says it. “Further north than your territory,” she adds. “The most northern part of it.”
I look down at the shard on the table instead of at her.
I know that ground. Ridge country, harsh and high, the far end of it, past where Rafe’s people ever ran. I spent generations there, long enough to watch everyone I grew up with grow old and die while I didn’t.
Dane straightens up. He’s talking to Nyxiana, looking at me. “The North Range. You phase the two of you there and back, carrying him the whole way. Is that safe for you?”
“I can handle it,” she says.
The questions run down.
“Take it somewhere warded and hold onto it,” Dane says. “Nobody else touches it.”
Lyanna wraps the shard in cloth from her bag and puts it away.
The hardest part of the meeting is over.
Everyone eases up now that the worst of it has already landed.
Chairs go back. Callum says something to Rafe about the east ridge run in the morning.
Rafe answers him low. Ben’s arm goes around Harper.
Neither of them looks like they planned it.
Rafe’s hand finds the back of Kari’s chair.
She leans into it while she talks to Nova.
Nyxiana stays near me. The overhead light catches in the silver of her hair. It shines. I don’t belong to anyone the way everyone else in this room belongs to someone. Wanting to shows up anyway.
“You two leave for the North Range at first light,” Dane says. “Get what rest you can before then.”
Chairs finish emptying. Full dark has come down outside while we talked. I pick my moment. “I need some air,” I say.
Dane nods once.
I step outside. The door closes behind me, cutting off the warmth. I stand out there until the cool actually reaches me, through my shirt and into the skin underneath it.
Kari’s mark already told us where we’re headed. The North Range. The pack that raised me on that ground and never once called it mine.