Chapter 45
Chapter Forty-Five
No clear flames. Only embers.
The words have haunted me since the moment Sesca first spoke them. For weeks now, I've carried their weight. In the cold and the dark of this cave, they've taken on a particular cruelty—because a clear flame is exactly what I need right now, in more ways than one.
Another hour passes in darkness.
I close my eyes, nearly delirious with exhaustion, but sleep won't come. I don't try chasing it for long; it's better to stay alert if I can, anyway.
With eyes wide open, I try to imagine that I'm simply in the middle of a job that's gone wrong, and all I need to do is recalculate. Reassess. Focus on the things I can control, and catalog the answers I have, rather than losing myself in an endless mire of questions.
One revelation in particular keeps circling in my mind.
I've gotten skilled at using our bond to control the dragons in Mouren's skies, Malachi said. Which means the erratic dragon behavior Lucindris has been enduring these past weeks…he’s the one to blame for it.
He's been drawing closer to the capital, closer to me, using whatever power the Flamebound mark gives him to exercise control over the beasts.
A bitter laugh escapes me when I think back to the beginning of all this—how I wanted to become the greatest threat the Mouren King had ever faced. I wanted to destroy Reave from the inside out. To get at the heart of him and his kingdom and its dragons and bring all of it crashing down.
Now that goal is dangerously close to being realized.
I gave Malachi the power to do these things, unwittingly, and if I don't cooperate now, I risk him using that power to finish the job I blindly, foolishly started.
Miserable grief presses in from all sides once more.
The only thing that keeps it from overtaking me is thinking of Reave's face.
Of his voice. Of his touch, and how devastating it would be to never feel his hand in mine again.
Of how much those hands have been holding up for so long, and how I swore I was going to help him carry it all.
I don't know how I'm going to fix everything that's gone wrong.
But I have to.
Not for myself—for him, for Kestrel and Arlo, and for Briar and all that's left in this world that I want to protect.
Little by little, my stubbornness gives way until finally I close my eyes, reaching for Sesca, and I begin again.
I say nothing of real importance at first. I just stop guarding my thoughts so she can find her way back in, if she wants to.
After a few minutes, I direct more specific things her way. Small things. The memory of our first meeting. Of how it felt to triumph in the arena with her sight and her strength pushing me. Of the way my heart soared as I flew with her, clinging to her back while stormy skies raged all around us.
Then heavier things. Things I'm afraid of. Things I'm ashamed of. Things I don't think I've ever told anyone, but that seem pointless to keep to myself now that everything is on the verge of collapse.
Hours go by without any answer. Yet I'm certain she hears me; I once asked her how far our bond could stretch, and she told me she could reach me from the other side of the stars, if only I called out to her.
My voice may be weak, heavy with fear and regret, but it gets louder as the night goes on.
She doesn't answer directly. But at some point, she begins to pass images into my mind—glimpses of what she sees and hears. When I settle myself and open up to these flashes, it's as though I'm outside, leaning against her warm body, breathing in sync and watching the night pass alongside her.
I see the soldiers rotating their guard, tense and watchful. I see smoke rising from what I assume are other encampments in the distance. I hear hushed conversations with occasional bits of useful, orienting information, and snippets of orders being given.
Malachi pays me another visit just as the first pale swaths of daylight begin to bleed into the overcast sky. He strides in with an easy casualness that feels like an insult to my cramping, aching muscles, and crouches before me, offering a dented canteen.
I don't take it.
“Stubborn as ever,” he chides.
“I can't be certain you haven't poisoned it.”
“I have you under control; why would I bother with poison? I have greater plans than that for us.”
“Plans I have no intentions of cooperating with.”
He considers me for a moment, adjusting the sleeves of his coat with slow, exaggerated care. “Would it make you more cooperative to know that the Mouren King appears to be planning something very foolish as we speak? Something you'll likely want to put a stop to, if you value his life at all.”
I fight to keep my expression impassive.
“It seems he intends to send most of his army after you.”
My body goes very still.
“He doesn't realize he's already lost,” says Malachi.
“That Mouren's control over dragons is merely the stuff of history books now—and when I make those dragons turn their fire back toward him, it won't matter how many soldiers he sends my way.
Of course, he'll find this out the hard way, if you insist on forcing me to meet him on the battlefield.”
Breathe, I command myself.
“You could end this right now. All you have to do is willingly agree to pick up where you and I left off, and then we can return to Dralsk in peace. We don't have to fight.”
It sounds tempting, but we both know that such a peace wouldn't last. It would only be a matter of time before he continued to scheme his revenge against Mouren.
So I turn away, fixing my gaze on a bit of water trickling down the cave wall.
“Suit yourself.” He starts toward the exit but leaves the canteen on the ground, within my reach, as if to tell me his offer is still on the table.
As I glance at it, a sudden, bold rush of defiance shoots through me. “It doesn't matter if I go with you.”
Malachi pauses.
“He would come for me, either way. With or without dragons, he would still go to war for me.”
There is nothing left of the man I once loved when he turns back to look at me. I see only dark appraisal in his eyes and cold calculation in his smile. Or maybe that’s how he always looked at me; he hasn’t changed, but I have—enough that I can finally see things clearly.
“You said you heard the rumors about us, didn't you?” My voice is quiet but steady. “A love story for the ages.”
“And?”
“And it's true.”
He chuckles. “Is it now?”
I’m honestly still unsure. I still feel like a fool, like there’s a chance I’ve misread Reave as disastrously as I misread Malachi.
But I don’t take my words back.
“It’s more true than anything you ever gave me,” I tell him, lifting my chin.
A rigid uncertainty settles into his posture—barely visible, there and gone in an instant—even as his smile holds and his voice stays chillingly even. “Well. I can't wait to see how this love story ends. Luckily, that ending is swiftly approaching, and I won't be kept in suspense for long.”
With that, he turns and walks away again.
I exhale slowly once he’s out of sight, trying to ease my pulse back into something manageable.
Every nerve in my body is humming, wound tight. My heart takes longer to settle than I'd like. My hands are trembling, so I press them flat against the cold stone until they stop.
Outside, the wind is picking up, dragging sparks from the nearest campfire across what little I can see of the dark grey canvas of morning.
“Still here,” I whisper to myself, watching one floating, burning fragment after another until something loosens in my chest—another lie I believed, unraveling. And then another realization, more powerful than any before it, rises slowly in its place.
Only embers.
I'd taken those words as a verdict. Proof of what I'd believed for so, so long: that I was a shell of something that had burned, someone who survived Emberfall, but only just. Still standing, but hollowed out, not worth the effort of salvaging.
Alive but fading, flickering down to something too small and scattered to matter.
Somehow, I forgot that embers still hold heat. Light. Possibility. And as I watch the sunrise fighting its way through the overcast sky, I begin to think…maybe that's what Sesca saw in me. Not the wreckage or the ruin. Not the loss.
The part that hadn't gone out—the sparks that burned on in spite of everything.
And given the right conditions, embers can reignite.
So that’s what I’m going to do.
I bow my head, letting out one long breath and drawing in another, and I begin to make a plan. With more determination than I've felt in hours, I again focus my thoughts toward Sesca.
Malachi told me you understand the magic of a Flamebound mark.
No reply, but I feel a shift in the bond—a sudden weight settling in my chest, as if her ancient, heavy gaze is turning straight toward my heart.
I keep going.
Is there any way to rid myself of it? I ask.
Her silence stretches for a few more beats, until finally: Something burns brighter, more deeply, and more true underneath that mark, and though he can try to stifle it, he cannot put it out.
Not exactly a clear response, in true dragon fashion.
But at least she’s talking to me.
I move on to my next question: What sort of power can he truly exert through this binding?
He can share your control of magic and lesser dragons, she says after a thoughtful pause. He can sense you, read you in ways beyond the norm. Draw strength from you, perhaps. But he cannot control you.
Those last words are the ones I needed most—a tiny bit of hope to clasp in my hands, small and fragile but still bright enough to see by.
I felt pain in this mark earlier, but pain is not control.
I can push through pain and not let it reign over me; I've been doing that all my life.
The only question is whether I can step into my true power while he's interfering.
Whether I can burn brightly enough to overcome his parasitic hold on things.
It will mean fully embracing whatever the embers of me might be destined to flare into. The fear of that is still there, rooted deep in my chest, but fear is not going to change my mind. It never has.
Something almost like calm settles over me as I picture Sesca's face and say, Do you remember when you told me you could break your chains, if only I could break my own?
A prickling attentiveness—eagerness, almost—moves through the bond, urging me to continue.
Is that true this time, too?
Warmth floods through me, vivid and immediate. Yes.
Good. I let out a slow breath. Because I’m going to need your help for this.
Her reply comes as a surge of emotions, most of which I can’t name, but one word, one thought, eventually floats above every tangled thing I still can’t make sense of: Together.
Whatever mess we’re about to dive into, at least we’ll be facing it together.
I spend another hour sitting with my plans, turning them over, trying not to think about all the ways they could go wrong.
Malachi isn’t alone when he returns the second time.
Soldiers flank him on either side, but they wait at the mouth of the cave while he makes his way in, stopping directly in front of me.
He doesn’t bother to bend down to my level, this time.
He only watches me in silence for a moment, as if waiting for me to speak. To bow my head in surrender.
I do neither.
“This ends with you in my kingdom, either way,” he says.
“You will have to bring me there in chains.”
“I was afraid you'd say that.”
A dragon roars in the distance—close enough that I can’t help my sharp intake of breath.
Malachi doesn't flinch at the sound, only lowers his voice to something cruelly intimate, just between us, as he says, “I hope you had a chance to tell him goodbye.”
I hold his gaze and say nothing at all.
He returns to his soldiers without any more negotiation. “Bind her more tightly,” he orders. “She stays here, out of my way for the time being.”
The soldiers move in as he moves away. They waste no time following his command, their movements brisk and impersonal, like men who have learned not to think too hard about their orders.
I let them work. I keep my gaze fixed on a brightening strip of sky, not resisting. Not yet. I can tell my stillness makes them uneasy; they’re uncertain what to make of a prisoner who doesn't fight back.
They should be uneasy.
Their king believes tighter chains will be enough to hold me.
He's wrong.
I may have burned all the way down to the last embers of myself, but I am not extinguished.
And very soon, he will regret not finding a way to put my fire out completely.