Chapter 8 #2
"Mathen observed that you had not returned. I was…" the sentence stalled again, the same way it had at breakfast, "I was coming this direction."
November had the sneaking suspicion that wasn't entirely true. He had come to find her. He had brought food. And he was now standing in front of her looking as though he'd rather face the slavers again than explain why.
"Thank you." She took the plate and balanced it on the book. "There's more here than I can eat. Will you sit?"
Something crossed behind his eyes. A rapid calculation of whether to approach or retreat, every muscle holding the question.
He sat. Not next to her. He lowered himself to the ground two feet to her right, his back against the wall rather than the tree, his long legs stretched in front of him. The distance was deliberate. She recognized it.
She tore the bread in half and held out the larger piece.
He took it. Their fingers did not touch. She noticed that he had been very precise about that, too.
They ate in silence for a minute. Then he nodded toward the book in her lap.
"You were reading that in the library last night."
So he had stopped. She'd been right about the shadow.
"Looking at it. The reading part hasn't been going well." She tapped the small silver dot behind her left ear. "My nanite translator can't parse most of the text. It keeps giving me fragments — half words, roots without conjugations. Like it recognizes the language family but not the language."
Rhaezon set down his bread. He held out his hand palm up and she placed the book in it.
He turned to the page she'd been studying, the one with the scaled mountain creature.
His brow dropped and the severe lines of his face shifted into something more focused, more present, and for a moment he looked like a different person — someone younger, someone who had once sat under trees with books.
"Your translator can't read it because it's Old Drakonian."
"Old Drakonian?"
"A dead language." He turned a page, his thumb running along the margin where faded text bracketed an illustration of something winged and serpentine.
"My people stopped speaking it long ago.
Before they lost the ability to shift, even.
Before the bloodlines thinned." His voice was quiet.
"The scholars who wrote these books were recording what they knew before it disappeared. The language went with it."
"Can you read it?"
"A few words. Fragments." The corner of his mouth shifted — not a smile, exactly, but the ghost of one. "More than your translator. Less than the scholars intended."
"That's still more than I've got." November leaned forward. "Tell me what you know. About these." She pointed to the illustration. "About all of it. The animals, the plants, whatever you can translate. I want to learn."
He looked at her. The amber star was behind her, warming the left side of her face, and his eyes tracked across her features. "There is a great deal I cannot translate."
"Then tell me what you can, and we'll make up the rest."
Something in his expression changed. A hairline fracture in the controlled stone of his face, barely visible, instantly repaired. But she'd seen it.
She shifted her weight, scooting across the grass until her shoulder pressed against his arm.
The book lay between them, open across both their laps, the spine resting on the place where her thigh met his.
He was warm. Not human-warm. Furnace-warm, the heat radiating through the sleeve of her tunic to her bare arm with an intensity that should have made her pull away and instead made her press closer.
Rhaezon went still.
November waited. His chest wasn't moving. Five seconds. Six.
"Shall we start at the beginning?" he finally asked. His voice was lower than usual. She could feel it where their arms touched — the specific vibration of the resonance he carried, humming through bone and skin into hers. She turned to the first page.
The stables in the afternoon light were warm and pungent and alive with the stamp of heavy feet, the scrape of bodies against stall walls, and the deep rhythmic breathing that November associated with contentment.
She was elbow-deep in muck.
The young stable hand working the next stall over was named Faelor.
She'd learned his name along with the fact that he was seventeen, had been working the estate stables for two years, and was quietly terrified of the wild kethral she'd been calling Shade.
He had a habit of glancing toward Shade's stall every few minutes with a specific wariness and wondered if he'd been kicked by the creature.
"You always check for Shade before you check for whatever's in front of you," November said, forking soiled bedding into the wheelbarrow. "That's good instinct. But you know what's better?"
Faelor looked at her. His Drakonkind — pointed, slightly longer than a human's — angled forward.
"Trusting that you'll hear the change before you see it. Shade'll tell you when the mood shifts. The ears go first, then the tail, then the weight distribution. You've got time between the warning and her action. More than you think."
Faelor blinked. "Lady Vaethari, she broke Toben's collarbone."
"And I bet Toben walked into that stall without listening first."
A pause. Then a nod so small it was almost invisible.
"There you go." She grinned at him, and his posture loosened by a fraction. "We'll work on it."
She moved to the next kethral — a placid grey named Orin, according to Faelor — and took up a stiff-bristled brush.
The animal's hide was thick, the scaling along its neck catching the light with that strange metallic quality she'd noticed the day before.
She worked in long strokes, following the grain, and the kethral leaned into her hand the way a horse leans into a good scratch: incrementally, then completely.
A shape appeared in the stable doorway.
November didn't look up. She didn't need to. The quality of light changed when Rhaezon stood in a doorway — he took up enough of it to cast a shadow that could change the very temperature of a room.
He watched. She could feel his eyes on her back. Orin's ears swiveled toward the door, registered the newcomer, and swiveled back to November.
Then came the sound of a second brush being lifted from the rack.
Rhaezon stepped into the stall beside her. He said nothing. He picked up the work where it was, starting on Orin's far shoulder with strokes that were practiced and sure. His hands moved with the thoughtful control she'd come to expect from him, always aware of their own force.
They worked in silence. The good kind. Brush and step and breath and the warm solid animal between them shifting its weight from foot to foot.
Faelor, in the adjacent stall, achieved a state of near-total invisibility that November suspected he'd been perfecting since childhood.
The light through the stable's high windows shifted from amber to amber-gold as the white star joined its companion above the ridge.
November finished Orin's neck and moved to the flank.
Rhaezon was working the hindquarters, and their circles drew closer as they followed the kethral's body, until they were working side by side, elbows almost touching.
She reached over to point at a spot behind Orin's ear where the scaling bunched differently. Her hand landed on Rhaezon's forearm.
She hadn't thought about it. Fifteen years of working alongside other handlers — you touched people to get their attention because your hands were full and your voice would spook the animal.
The movement had been automatic. Her fingers closed around his forearm, his skin furnace-hot, and she opened her mouth to say look at this scaling pattern —
Everything happened at once.
Rhaezon's scales surged under her fingertips.
Not a subtle surface but a rising — hard, dark, gold-edged plates pushing through skin along his forearm.
She saw them race up his arm, disappear under his sleeve, and she knew without seeing that they were climbing his neck, his jaw, because his face had changed.
The dark eyes blew to amber-gold, the pupil narrowing to a vertical slit, and the sound that came from his chest was below the range of hearing — she didn't hear it so much as feel it vibrate through her hand where she still gripped his arm.
His wings snapped.
The right one extended in a controlled sweep that cleared the stall wall by inches.
The left — the broken one — lurched, a spasm more than a movement, the damaged membrane dragging against the stone partition with a grinding shriek that set every nerve in November's spine alight.
The sound was wrong. Stone on stone, bone on rock.
Orin exploded.
The kethral reared straight up, all eighteen hands, its massive forelimbs extending from its chest and scrabbling at the air. Its hooves — heavy, plated, built for mountain rock — carved the space where November stood.