Chapter 49 #2
We go still together, hands clasped, breathing the same air for a few stolen moments. His eyes move over me, careful and thorough even as the battle continues to grind on around us.
“You're bleeding,” he says.
I give him a crooked little smile. “Really? That's what you notice first? Not the fact that I've suddenly gained wings?”
He mirrors my smile, though his is fainter. Shorter-lived. “Those just seem like a natural extension of you. Much less alarming than the blood, somehow.” He starts to reach toward one of the scarlet stains on my shirt, but I catch his hand and gently guide it away.
“There's no time.” I keep my hand around his, squeezing tightly as I glance at the dragons holding their loose formation above us.
“I'm controlling them now, but I don't know how much longer I can manage it.
Malachi is still exerting pressure through the mark, and whatever divine power we share is preventing me from setting them on him directly.
I don't know what will happen to me if we do attack him, either—but I don't think there's a simple way of ending this.”
In that instant, the horrible truth of what we’re facing settles like a physical thing on my shoulders, heavy enough that it might have brought me to my knees if not for the steadying touch of Reave’s hand in mine.
“But without the dragons,” I continue, “your army far outnumbers his, and he knows it. He'll retreat if I lead them away. If there are other divine-blooded dragons lingering near your city, I'm going to do what I can to pull them away too, so he can't use them as weapons against you.”
“And you…”
I look at our intertwined fingers instead of his face.
“You're leaving.”
I force my gaze up again. “He can use me as a weapon too. He was able to siphon more power through the mark earlier, and even my proximity to him makes him more dangerous, I think. If I stay, I put you and everyone else at risk.”
He inhales deeply, seemingly searching for some argument—any argument at all—but not finding one.
“Go back to your city,” I say, trying very hard to keep my voice from breaking. “Protect your brother. Your sister. And Briar, if she’s…she’s…” My words stumble to a stop as the last, bloody image I have of my best friend flashes in my mind.
“She’s safe,” Reave assures me, knowing it’s what I need to hear, even if there’s no time to elaborate beyond those two words.
“Keep her that way. Please. She won't understand why I'm leaving. Or she won't want to understand, anyway. She's going to be furious with me, and I…I…”
He reaches out and tucks a strand of wind-wrecked hair back from my face, letting his hand linger against my cheek, soft and certain and comforting.
And suddenly I don't feel as if I have to explain myself anymore.
It's such a freeing realization that my wings instinctively begin to flutter and adjust in the breeze, as if I've already taken flight again.
I still want to know you, he once said to me.
And now he does. Even these complicated, half-formed, impossible parts of me. He looks at all of it without flinching, accepting what he sees, understanding the path that stretches ahead of me even before I've fully accepted it myself.
“I'm coming back, once I have more things figured out.” I’m no longer trying to keep my voice steady. Now I'm just fighting to get the words out however I can. “Once I'm safe, and more in control, I'm going to come back. I'm going to help you and Arlo. I swear it. And I swear I'm still…”
My breath catches at the look in his eyes—half agony, half hope.
“Mine,” he finishes, barely above a whisper.
“Yours,” I agree. “And you're mine. However long it takes. Whatever distance comes between us…” I trail off again, searching for some way to explain how I actually feel, how much it hurts to have to walk away from him.
Everything I come up with feels woefully inadequate.
Then he leans in and kisses me in the same soft, certain way he touched me—an achingly beautiful act of defiance in the face of all the hard, brutal things around us—and I give up trying to speak.
“There is no length of time I wouldn't endure,” he says against my lips, his hands cradling my face. “No choice you could make, and no distance that could possibly matter, so long as you come home to me whenever you're ready to.”
Something moves through me with the words—a low, resonant humming, like a song I once knew slowly coming back to me, note by quiet note.
My entire body tingles with the growing awareness of it, and then Sesca's words from earlier are suddenly whispering through my thoughts: Something burns brighter, more deeply, and more true underneath that mark, and though he can try to stifle it, he cannot put it out.
A possibility surfaces at the edge of my mind. A faint recollection of something I might have read in the palace library, or maybe something I dreamed up during one of the long, sleepless nights I spent poring over all the books and notes I collected.
Before I can voice any of it, a shadow overtakes us both.
It's the large black dragon that led the charge against Mouren’s army earlier. It looms closer, its forked tail lashing in agitation; Malachi's hold on this particular dragon is tightening again, reasserting itself now that I’ve been distracted.
Quickly, says Sesca, her fear echoing my own.
Reave pulls me into one final, fierce kiss before he takes a step back and nods toward the sky.
“Go,” he urges, and I don't hesitate another second, because I'm afraid I won't be able to make myself leave if I do.
I back away, keeping my gaze on him for as long as I can. His eyes are turbulent seas full of unspoken things, but he quickly blinks all of his emotion away, shifting back into the stoic king he was on the first night we met.
He makes himself turn away first, marching in the direction of the Dralsk retreat and beckoning the closest of his soldiers to follow, drawing Malachi’s attention toward them and away from the sky—away from me.
Distracting them, so that I don't have to fight as hard to wrest control of any wayward dragons.
I don't waste the opportunity.
I run, stretching my wings out and letting them catch the wind before I leap from the hilltop and fight my way upward.
Sesca swoops underneath me and helps me gain more height, patience and steadiness radiating through the bond, calming my ravaged nerves.
Even with her help, I’m floundering badly by the time we reach the outskirts of Lucindris, barely lucid and aching in every way that it’s possible to ache.
But I press on, refusing to let up until we've followed through with our plan.
We circle around the city, reaching outward to draw any divine-blooded dragons who might be lingering over its skies into our formation.
Most of the beasts we find are the mindless, cursed creatures of Mouren's making, possessing nothing that will make them yield to me—but that also means they won’t be of any use to Malachi.
Once we’re finished, we linger only for a moment on the outskirts of the city. It takes all the resolve I possess to turn my back on this place and keep flying, knowing it means turning away from the palace, too. Away from Briar. Arlo. Kestrel.
Away from Reave.
I don’t know how I manage to keep going.
I just do.
Only once we're well outside Lucindris—and I've counted every dragon in our formation over and over to make certain none have slipped away—do I finally allow the storm of feelings in my chest to truly unleash itself.
As soon as I do, what little is left of my strength seems to leave me all at once. My wings falter, twitching and tensing painfully before going slack, and the sky begins to tilt sideways in a way that suggests I'm about to become intimately reacquainted with the ground.
Sesca catches me upon her back before I tumble too far, rising beneath me with unhurried certainty, as if she anticipated my fall long before it happened.
She probably did.
It would have annoyed me, once; now it’s comforting, this familiarity we share. And the warmth of her scales and the steady rhythm of her breathing are equally soothing, so I fold my wings around myself and don’t think of anything else before letting sleep take me.
When I wake, we’re on the ground again.
I don’t remember landing, but I’m curled up against Sesca’s side, resting in the shadows of a mountain range I don't immediately recognize.
Dragons circle overhead. My wings are gone, but the evidence of them remains—my torn, blood-stained clothing; scattered feathers on the ground; a deep ache between my shoulder blades.
The sun is setting, washing the unfamiliar landscape in shades of dark gold and amber.
Sesca lifts her head, watching me closely as I fight my way to my feet. Once I’m upright, I move with surprising steadiness, making my way to a better vantage point at the top of a nearby hill in order to study my surroundings.
The dry, dusty road in the distance looks enough like the Gallows Run that I'm transported briefly back to one of the last jobs Briar and I took together before all of this—to that fateful route to and from Lastlight that brought me to Sesca.
I look down at the Ashwalker mark on my wrist. It's tempting to pretend I'm still the same person who branded it there so many years ago. Easier, in some ways. Lighter.
But I know better.
It's an unfamiliar path stretching before me now—no maps or markers or certainties to be found.
The ache between my shoulder blades flares.
I instinctively reach for Sesca and she rises from her resting spot in answer, her steps heavy but certain, carrying the weight of her ancientness as she comes to stand beside me on the hilltop.
We watch the sun setting together. She doesn’t speak, but warmth occasionally seeps into all my aching parts, and I know it’s her sending it.
Once the stars begin to emerge, she takes flight as if to greet them, soaring so high I nearly lose sight of her. The other dragons follow, one by one, like she’s called them by name.
Sesca eventually returns to me, hovering just above the hilltop, close enough that the wind from her wings moves through my hair.
Waiting.
I inhale deeply as my own wings emerge and unfold again.
The pain beneath them crests, then lessens, then goes away completely.
My mind clears. I keep still for another minute, studying the shape and splendor of my wings in the last glow of twilight, thinking of how there is a certain kind of beauty that grows from pain you thought would destroy you.
A strength that only comes from falling and being forced to catch yourself on the way down.
“Still here,” I whisper, my gaze trailing up to the waiting dragon. Words that have followed me for so many years. The mantra of a burned and broken girl who did what she had to survive—and I am grateful to that girl for carrying me this far.
But I am destined for more than embers.
Now we fly, Sesca reminds me.
And so I spread my wings and move beyond survival, rising to meet her as the night descends and more of the stars come out to light our way.