Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Things change after the night of the Sun Harvest Feast.
My standing within the royal palace, and the city around it, is the most jarring shift. I go from someone most are suspicious of, someone who's tolerated, at best, to someone almost…respected.
Some were won over merely after seeing their king holding my hand so tightly.
Others are still telling stories of how Briar and I protected the partygoers from the Dralsk intruders.
Those who saw me fight—who caught a glimpse of my dragon eye, or the way I moved with power and speed beyond my own—are whispering the loudest, their stories becoming increasingly embellished with each telling.
Sesca is allowed to remain unchained, and she rarely ventures far from me. Our trainings become less structured, but no less demanding, as I try to experiment and grow our bond in every way I can think of.
There are parts of me that still want to deny her.
To deny us.
How can I, though, when our bond is so obviously real that it's kindling war?
The other dragons that populate Mouren's skies are becoming more erratic, too, which is further proof of what's happening with me and Sesca.
Two days after the feast, one of these rogue dragons collides with the Grand Pavilion, attacking its stone wings as if they were real, breaking them off and reducing them to piles of dust and rubble on the ground.
Reave jokes that it at least had the decency to wait until after their party.
Kestrel is not amused.
I'm secretly terrified that it's an omen of worse things to come, even though weeks ago I would have been ecstatic at the thought of dragons destroying any part of the Mouren Palace.
We suspect their behavior is due to Sesca's growing power and influence—that it's as Reave told me when we stood together on the rooftop: Divine dragons affect lesser ones.
Even without trying to, her power is drawing them in, disturbing them in ways they can't understand.
She isn't strong enough to properly control them yet, so in the meantime, it's just causing chaos.
And yet, the king insists it's important for me to continue working on unlocking her power and fortifying our bond, regardless of the side-effects. He's quick to reprimand anyone who suggests otherwise, or who tries to blame me or my dragon for the troubles his city is being forced to endure.
I'm still not entirely sure about his motives for protecting me.
I only know it's safer, and more strategic, to pretend I'm happy to be protected. That I’m thrilled to be seen at his side, as if I really could be his potential Flamebound Queen.
But no matter how good I am at pretending, I'm still haunted by the things Lord Faron said.
Traitor, he called me.
I wonder if everyone back home thinks the same thing.
If they've received the supplies Reave sent as part of the deal I struck—supplies I know they won't toss aside, because they simply can't afford to—and now they're all gathering at the tavern and gossiping endlessly about how tainted those supplies are.
About how tainted I am.
About how much worse I'm becoming with every moment of connection I allow between myself and the king. Every stolen glance between us. Every shared meal. Every bit of laughter that feels treacherous yet inevitable whenever we're together as of late.
The ever-increasing tensions between Dralsk and Mouren demand most of his focus, so at least I don't have to endure him very often.
Though, when I'm not with him, I'm usually thinking about him.
Trying to make sense of his feelings, and of that last deep, vulnerable conversation we had on the rooftop.
One thing he said that night has made me lose more sleep than any other: We stole it.
He hasn't bothered to elaborate on what he meant by that, and I'm not sure I would trust any answer he gave me at this point, so I haven't pressed him during our brief moments together.
Besides, I’m determined to find my own answers.
Just as I'm determined to work out the bond between Sesca and me for myself.
There's power in charting your own path, and I am hanging on to every ounce of power I can so that no kingdom—Mouren or Dralsk or otherwise—can make an ignorant, unwilling weapon out of me.
Four days after the feast, I walk to the large grassy field where Sesca and I have regularly been meeting, carrying her usual bucket of bones.
She's high above, perched atop one of the palace towers, her wings outstretched. Basking and shimmering in the hazy sunlight, enjoying the sensation of the wind rustling her feathers and the silky hairs along her tail and neck; I can feel her contentment roll through me, warm and unhurried, like I’m sinking into a pleasant bath.
Catching sight of me, she glides down and hovers expectantly, waiting for me to toss the treats up one by one.
She likes to catch the bones in the air, diving and somersaulting and otherwise putting on a show; she even sends a surge of strength through my muscles so I can throw those bones higher, making it more of a challenge for her to snag them.
Only once we've completed this ritual does she land, allowing me to ask her questions or practice magic or whatever else I've put on the day's agenda.
Today, I find myself transfixed on her wings, watching her tuck them closer to her body as she settles down on the grass.
They're so big at this point that their weight nearly makes her topple over if she doesn't align the rest of her body just right, yet she seems to have tiny, precise control over every single muscle and feather in them—enough to angle them and provide me with a shaded spot to sit in at her side.
I settle down in her shadow, my gaze lifting toward the sky that’s becoming increasingly cloudy, wondering what it would be like to soar through it with her. “There's something I've been meaning to ask you.”
She continues to gnaw on the last of the bones she caught even as her head tilts toward me.
“I haven't seen many records suggesting it's commonplace, but is it possible for a bonded one to…” I hesitate.
Is it rude to even suggest riding such an intelligent, divine creature?
She tosses the splintered bone up and catches it with a loud crunch, followed by an even louder swallow; divine dragons have terrible table manners, I'm learning. She makes a noise that sounds a bit like a belch before giving her head a shake and fixing her eyes completely, expectantly, on me.
“Do…do your kind ever allow humans to…ride you?”
Her nostrils flare. I think she might be holding in an amused snort at the question.
Yes, she replies after a pause. Though the most powerful humans often preferred to fly alongside us instead.
“Alongside you?”
She curves her tail toward me, trailing its feathered tip along my shoulder blades. Right where wings would most logically protrude from, if I had them.
“Oh…” I say, reaching and tracing the same spots, trying to imagine what it would feel like to have such a gift. If it's anything like the rush I feel when she shares her vision with me, I'm not sure I'd ever be able to talk myself into coming back down from the sky.
A gift not all of my kind have shared, she continues, sniffing at the ground for any lingering bits of scattered bone. And that few of your kind have mastered. So, yes—riding is more practical at times.
“A gift…” I pick up a bone shard at my boot and toss it to her. “That's what all true magic in our world is, right? A gift from your kind, on behalf of the gods who sent you.”
Yes.
Not something a human is meant to take, in other words.
The conversation Reave and I had circles my mind once more. I've been reading every book I could find regarding dragon magic and how it manifests, and I haven't discovered anything that suggests taking would even be possible; I don't know why it hasn't yet occurred to me to just ask Sesca.
I meet her gaze. “Is there a way a person could…steal magic, or other powers, from dragons?”
She goes oddly still, as if I've startled her by jarring a long-buried memory loose.
This isn't the first time it's happened after I've asked her a question, either.
I get the impression her memories are like a precarious, towering stack of books and notes.
Like there's an endless wealth of knowledge in her head, but it's messy and disorganized after multiple lifetimes with different bodies, different brains, and moving the wrong piece could send the whole tower tumbling down into an even more confusing muddle.
So I'm patient, even as her silence stretches on for at least a full minute.
There were once divine flames we sparked with our birth, she finally replies. Four flames we kept burning with our bonds. All humans could be blessed by them in some small way, if deemed worthy enough.
“Only four? What about the flame that once burned here in Lucindris?”
Her frill flattens hard against her neck, and she shifts her head awkwardly, as if to imitate a human shaking it to say no. Her next words come out flat and measured, almost like she's reciting a lesson: The Mouren Flame shines only when the other four burn.
Her words echo and reinforce the final history lesson Gareth gave me, but they still leave me with more questions than answers.
“Could the Mouren Flame—when it was burning—bless humans the way the others did?” I ask.
She doesn't reply. The agitated way her tail flicks back and forth makes me think she doesn't know—which isn't all that surprising. She has her divine purpose. Her instincts, or orders, or whatever it is the gods instilled in her…
And this bloody, human-forged kingdom has clearly veered very far from the gods' original design.
“It's okay,” I tell her, frowning. “There's just a lot we need to figure out, isn’t there?”
Her tail continues to whisk back and forth, slicing a wide arc through the grass.