7. PROTECTORS VOW
Chapter seven
PROTECTOR'S VOW
LEON
Icome back to myself on the floor of the moonstone hall with the taste of her fire still in the air and no idea how long she has been gone.
Human again. Naked under someone's hastily thrown cloak, shaking with the strange new emptiness of a body that has finally been all the way itself and then been folded back down into a smaller shape.
Ferb's people are a careful distance away, the way you stand back from a fire that has only just stopped being one.
And the bond, the thing that locked into place around my soul under the open moon, is screaming.
Not at me. For her. She is somewhere in this enormous building and every yard of stone between us feels like a hand pressing on a fresh bruise.
"Where is she," I say, and my voice is wrecked, scraped raw from the inside.
"Resting," Ferb says, which I will learn is the word powerful people use when they mean being managed.
He is sitting now, the cane across his knees, watching me with those bright tired eyes.
"You frightened a great many important people tonight, Leon.
You also answered the only question that mattered.
" A thin smile. "You are real now. The moon says so.
No one in that hall can pretend otherwise, however much some of them would like to. "
I get up. The cloak and my dignity make a poor team but I manage it. "I need to see her."
"You need," Ferb says, gentle and immovable as weather, "to sleep, and to dress, and to understand what you walked into before you go charging back at it.
The lady is not a problem you can solve by standing closer to her.
She is the most complicated thing in this kingdom, and she just became more complicated, and you, my son, do not yet know the half of it. "
I want to argue. The bond wants to argue with my whole body. But I am also a man who has spent twenty years being handed truths in pieces, and I have learned to recognize the moment before someone hands you another one.
"Then tell me," I say.
He does not. Not all of it. But in the gray hour before dawn, in his private study with a fire going and a glass of something amber I do not drink, the old king gives me the shape of it, the way you describe a mountain to someone standing in its shadow.
"There are old laws," he says. "Older than my throne, older than the pact that lets dragon and wolf share a continent without burning it down.
One of them governs what happened in that hall tonight.
A bond like yours, between a wolf heir and a dragon, cannot be forced early.
It must wait for the moon to make the wolf real.
She knew that. She has known it, I would guess, far longer than you have known her name.
And she waited. Tonight you did the waiting for her, all at once, and she had about half a second to decide whether to let it kill you or let it bind you.
" He turns the glass in the firelight. "She chose to let you live, Leon.
Remember that, whatever else you come to think of her.
The fire in her hand could have stopped your heart. She used it to stop your feet."
The bond aches. I think of the pale flame, the wrecked sound of her voice, don't, don't, and I understand for the first time that I have spent the night thinking she was afraid of me when she was afraid for me, which is a different country entirely.
"What is she," I ask. "Varrik said dragon blood."
"Varrik," Ferb says, with the particular distaste of a man naming a relative, "says many things, most of them barbed.
But yes. She is dragon. And she is more than that, and the more is hers to tell you, not mine.
I will give you only this." The fire pops.
He leans forward, and for a moment the cunning old monarch is just an old man who is running out of time.
"Whatever you have to decide about her, decide it as the man and not the wolf.
The wolf has already decided. The wolf decided in the garden.
But a king who only ever does what his wolf wants is a weapon other people aim.
Be more than that. For her sake and your own. "
I do not sleep much. But I dress, and I wait, and the next time I see her it is on Ferb's terms, in a long sunlit room with too many witnesses, which I understand is also deliberate.
She is composed again. Ice all the way down, the gray gown traded for deep green, the mark at her throat hidden under a high collar that fools no one who was in that hall.
But the bond hums the moment she enters, and her eyes find mine first thing, before protocol, before the king, a flick of contact she cannot help and immediately disciplines, and the small slip of it tells me more than her perfect face does.
"Lord Leon," she says, with a curtsy pitched to the exact millimeter of correctness.
"You can keep doing that," I say, "but I felt you reach for me across forty feet of marble yesterday, so I think we're past it."
Something almost smiles in her, deep down, and is gone.
Ferb spares us, in his way. He makes a decree, in front of the witnesses, with the smooth finality of a man closing a transaction he arranged days ago.
"Given the events of last night, and the unrest at our borders, the Princess Portia of Dragonia will remain in the protection of this house.
And as my heir has demonstrated a certain," the pause is a small cruelty, and he enjoys it, "personal investment in her safety, he will stand as her protector under my seal.
Where she goes, he goes. The court will treat this as settled. "
It is a cage built for two. I can see Portia recognize it as one, see her weigh it, see her decide it is the better of the cages on offer.
She inclines her head. So do I. And under the table, where no witness can see, her hand finds the edge of mine, just the side of one finger against the side of another, the smallest possible contact, and the bond goes quiet for the first time since the moon, like a held breath finally let out, and I understand that she needed that as much as I did and would die before saying so in this room.
It is almost peace. It lasts about a minute.
The bond spikes a half second before my eyes catch the movement, a wrongness above us, a weight where there should be only painted ceiling and gilt.
I am moving before I have a thought, every newborn instinct from last night answering at once and I get my body between her and the high gallery as the figure drops out of the shadows with something thin and bright already falling, fast, aimed, a line drawn straight at the place where her heart sits behind that high green collar.
"Down," I get out, and pull her with me, and the bright thin thing parts the air where she stood.
The room comes apart into screaming and steel. And the wolf, the one I only met last night, rises in me clean and cold and entirely without panic, and for the first time it does not feel like a thing happening to me.
It feels like mine.
Dearest Readers,
"Decide it as the man and not the wolf." That is the whole book in a sentence, and a dying king handed it to a boy in a firelit study at four o'clock in the morning, and I want you to write it down somewhere, because Leon is going to need it and so, I suspect, will you.
And did you notice? He spent the whole night believing she was afraid of him.
She was afraid for him. A different country entirely.
But somebody in that sunlit room was not admiring the view, loves. Somebody was in the rafters with a blade, and they were not aiming at the prince.
They were aiming at her heart.
Turn the page. Quickly.
Your author.