Chapter 42
KAELERON
The dragon returned sometime after the sun reached its highest, huffing as she stomped around the clearing where I had set up my temporary home, including a shelter made from my cloak that would provide some cover should it rain.
I did not look up from the latest letter that was disappointing me. “Where did you go?”
“I needed to fly for a time,” Arianell said and tossed more sticks onto her firepit, new ones that she had brought with her, making a veritable trove of them, as if she could not curb her compulsion to collect.
“As much as I enjoy the hungers of the flesh, I prefer to be an active part of them rather than a voyeur, and your little… interlude… with the wolf put an idea in my mind. Now that I have my eyes again, I thought I might fly north to find a male of my own to entertain myself with for a time.”
“You were without your eyes?” I did look at her now, lifting my head from my work and settling my back against the tree I sat beneath.
She lifted her hand and gently swept her fingers beneath them. “They are beautiful, are they not? My finest treasure. Your finest treasure returned them to me. A most gracious act on her part and one that leaves me indebted to her.”
“I know a dragon who covets things as deeply as you do.” I watched her closely, sure she was the one Neve had spoken of even though I had not seen her dragon form.
Her silver hair and pale blue eyes left me feeling her scales would be silver, like a mirror.
Neve was gold, and her hair was golden and her eyes amber, and the dresses she conjured for herself were always fiery shades, from burgundy to dull orange. This dragon wore silver-grey.
She stopped compulsively arranging the sticks into neat piles and looked at me. “You have a dragon in your court?”
I dipped my head and tested her. “I recently had two, but one was a temporary visitor and he moved on in search of something he is missing, and the other now wears my brand to protect her. That female spoke of you. Mirror silver scales. The twin to her gold.”
She had been walking towards me as I spoke, and as I finished, she fell to her knees beside me and whispered, “Neve. But Neve is gone. I felt it.” She tapped her chest over her ragged dark grey dress. “I felt it here. She is gone. He killed her.”
“Not gone. Just well hidden. Until recently.” I canted my head, wondering how much to reveal to her, and decided to test her further and perhaps gain some answers at the same time.
“She exposed herself when I found An’sidwain for her, a ruby dragon stone she named for its resemblance to a heart, and the male recently came hunting for her—hunting for the missing piece of his heart. ”
She paled and cast a panicked look around her, at her sticks, as if they were in danger of being stolen from her as her eyes had apparently been. “What if he comes here? What if he comes? I should not stay. He might find me. My barrier magic… it might not be enough. What if he comes here?”
Her frosty blue eyes landed on me as she asked that final question.
I asked one of my own. “How is it you came to have barrier magic and Neve did not?”
Her silvery eyebrows rose, widening her eyes as her panic disappeared in a blink. “How else? Neve and I are two halves of a whole, the magic split between us. I cannot subjugate—I can ward against it.”
I sat a little straighter. “Subjugate. Neve mentioned it is a talent of hers, and that the male wanted it.”
She nodded and glanced at her sticks again, wringing her hands.
Feeling I was going to lose her to her need to protect a hoard as paltry as a pile of sticks, I summoned my shadows and subtly shifted them to her, hoping not to anger her by touching them.
I had learned how vicious dragons could be if their trove was touched without permission.
She flashed fangs at me as silver scales rippled over her arms and up her neck, but she did not attack. She merely bundled the sticks into the torn skirt of her dress and hugged them to her, shielding them from me.
“So can Neve really subjugate?” I asked again now that she was more focused, hoping to get her to tell me more about that power when Neve had been hesitant to speak of it.
“Of course, silly king. It is the reason he wants her. That power to control others en masse… little Neve has always feared it.” Her expression grew grave as she shook her head, a pitiful edge to it, as if Neve was wrong to fear that someone wanted to manipulate her so she would control others for him.
“An’sidwain holds power over her. She is often lost to its sway.” I shifted to face her, setting down the letter, focusing entirely on her and the answers, or the solutions, she could give me. “She cannot seem to take her eyes off it, and when she is looking at it, she is… not herself.”
Arianell worried her lower lip and began adjusting her sticks, sorting them into piles on her lap in order of length. “Taran always fascinated her, and the mate pull a dragon feels towards their fated one is powerful, especially in females. We become dangerously territorial.”
I felt Neve was certainly that when it came to An’sidwain.
“You said you believed Neve was gone. Dead. Neve believed you were gone. She believed the male, this Taran, killed you, but when she sought a vision of Saphira to help me, she saw you.” I watched as her fingers slowed their work with every word I spoke.
“Little Neve was not wrong to think that. Taran was unhappy that I had tried to stop him, that I had stood between him and what he wanted—my sister’s power to control—and so we fought.
I was not strong enough to defeat him, I knew that.
I only hoped to give Neve time to escape.
When I was too weak to continue fighting him, when he struck me with a blow that tore open my scales…
” She pulled the right side of her dress down slightly, enough to reveal a thick line of scar tissue that ran over her shoulder and down her chest, and then let her dress fall back into place.
“He dropped me. I plummeted towards the mountains, sure I was done for, but when I struck them, it did not kill me. I was weak, vulnerable, but I still had some magic. I cast what I could as he roared in victory above me, weaving it around my heart to hide it from him.”
She traced her fingers through the air and silvery threads of magic followed them, weaving with frost blue to form a pattern in the air that vibrated with power I could feel in my bones.
“You made him think he had killed you.” A clever ploy, one that had undoubtedly saved her life.
She nodded and put the finishing touches to a circular pattern I now recognised as a ward, a protective one.
I knew how to weave it in my mind, with my magic, but I had never seen it drawn, not even in a book.
My mother had described it to me, and I had simply followed her instructions, feeling the ward rather than seeing it.
It was beautiful.
“Why did you come to this court?” she said as the ward that hovered in the air between us faded.
“For Saphira.” My answer was immediate, unwavering.
“And why did she come?” She wove another ward, this one I recognised too.
“To uncover the truth at the rotten core of this court.”
“Are you sure she did not come so she could decide what to be?” She blinked at me and added another thread to the pattern, deftly weaving the ribbon of light around the others. “The goddess brought her here.”
“The goddess?” I tilted my head as I watched her more closely, her words unsettling me for some reason. “You believe Lucia is guiding Saphira?”
She looked right at me. “You believe she is not?”
I thought about the vision Neve had seen, about Saphira staying in the light, and about becoming all she ever could be.
All she was destined to be. A vision of transformation.
A prophecy, almost. Saphira had spoken to me once of seeing the Shadow Court before she ever laid eyes on it, before she left the dungeon in Falkyr and saw it for herself, and how it had made her want to stay.
We had both blamed Neve for that dream, believing the dragon had been meddling to make her stay so she would help me fulfil my vengeance.
But what if it had not been Neve?
What if the connection she felt to nature here, that call towards it she experienced at times, was not simply her fae blood?
I ran my thumb over my lower lip as I considered both of those things.
“She dreams of the land. She told me of a meeting with an elkyn, mirrored in a mountain lake. Marked as seelie and unseelie. The land calls her name,” Arianell murmured.
“It calls to her. I saw the roots of this land spread beneath her, reaching outwards with her at their centre. Shadow into light. Light into shadow.”
The ley lines.
That flow of magic that I could feel even now, despite being an unseelie in seelie lands. The goddess did not care about the division in the lands. She gave her power to her children regardless of where they had come from or where they walked.
“The goddess guides her.” She looked me right in the eye, her expression demanding and fierce.
“Perhaps she does,” I admitted, “and I intend to discover for what purpose she is guiding my little wolf.”
It was not unheard of for a fae to feel as if the Great Mother was guiding them, but most fae who heard of such a thing laughed at the one who believed the goddess of this land was showing them the way towards something. Few believed it to be real, and those who did viewed it as a blessing.
I would ask Saphira about these dreams when we next met.
The dragon tapped the ward and it winked out of existence, but I could still feel it all around me.
“Are you casting wards on me?” I frowned at her.
She nodded and smiled brightly. “Of course, silly king. How else can I keep them from finding you?”
“I would appreciate it if you did not do that—”