Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
Kieran
Ican’t meet you right now, I reply eventually. Later. Right now, I’m hours past Harbi’s deadline. She’ll have my head for this.
And I won’t? His smile in my head is black gums and white fangs.
It’s better if I placate her now rather than force her to hunt me down. She’s had her claws out for me from the start.
I wait for the thought to mean something, to spark a reaction inside of me, but there’s nothing.
It should terrify me to be empty this way.
Instead, the world has flattened and lost its detail.
The clarity I’d always banked on is nowhere to be seen and my reality has reshaped itself around the loss.
Some strategist I turned out to be. The one thing I always counted on, my mind, isn’t accessible anymore.
And brilliant? My private tutors mentioned it often until I’d been thrust into DragonSpear. Things change in an instant.
I’m not brilliant. I’m broken.
No. Mozi is having none of it. See me now. There will be no time later. You better get stepping instead of moping and staring out a window like you’ve had your heart shattered.
I bristle. You’re giving me ultimatums?
A slight chill takes up residence along my veins and floods my system with ice.
Mozi has never been the type of dragon to demand groveling, or any kind of supplication from me.
I’ve heard that other dragons make no attempt to disguise their superiority and arrogance, but our relationship has been reciprocal.
We are bonded but we’re friends first. We respect each other. Both of us have always felt like we are in the same phase of life, growing and getting stronger, discovering our truth and our way forward together.
Now, Kieran.
I hate the way he uses my name and the way it lands. The way it feels like there’s a division between us where there’s never been one before.
I acted without thought, irrational and impetuous. Those are all good things if one’s focus is in the right direction. Mine clearly hadn’t been.
Or else.
My brows furrow together. You’re being bossy and irritating.
He goes silent but his presence lingers. He’s listening and waiting, impatiently, for me to fall in line. And because he rarely demands something of me this way, I push away from the window.
I am sick of my position, so sick of being pushed this way or that way when it suited the whims of someone stronger than me.
Instead of heading down, I take the hall toward the dragon aerie. Several roosting dragons stir from their perches and one of them cracks open an eye, fixing me with a steely gaze at being interrupted.
Shadows stir with their wings, and I’m almost tempted to stomp and wake them. I fight to hold myself back.
My cousin’s red dragon is conspicuously missing from among the ranks.
A brisk night breeze dives down the collar of my tunic as I march toward our spot on the edge of the cliff. I duck my head against it as the wind picks up to the force of a battering ram.
Mozi waits for me.
He flicks his wings around us to create a bubble of silence and protection from the wind, a black presence, darker than the night. His eyes glow like two amber orbs.
What were you thinking? He rips into me the moment I get close.
I hold my ground when his wings seal me inside, trapping me, making sure I don’t take off.
“I was thinking that I’d found a valuable asset and when presented with an opportunity, you take it,” I snap.
I’d lost too much control tonight to keep the words at bay.
“Spare me the lecture I know is coming. I’m supposed to be this perfect person all the time and have my life figured out when I’m in the middle of everything. My father is pushing me, you’re pushing me, and I’m one man.”
Mozi’s jaw clenches.
You’re impetuous, he says, craning his neck down to bring his face level with mine.
Why? Why did you do such a thing when we are already poised on a precipice?
A single wrong move will get us all executed by Omram and yet you want to throw it all away.
You know all this. It isn’t about being perfect, Kieran, it’s about tact.
“I slip up one time—” I start.
Slip up? Word of this will surely reach your father and when he realizes what you’re trying to do, then failure will be the least of your concerns.
There will be no more mediation, no more playing both sides.
Right now, we must execute damage control and do something about this.
Although your choices leave little to be desired.
He growls to make his point.
“Or maybe my father will actually kill me and put me out of my misery. Scorch it, why shouldn’t I throw myself off this cliff right now?”
His expression darkens. You’ve done this to yourself.
Rather than see the bigger picture, you’re hyper fixated on the current location of the pieces on the board.
You’re hoping to find the winning maneuver now instead of understanding that the odds are stacked against us.
This is a long game. There is no way to win without suffering.
Because he’s right and my guilt already flutters inside of me like a butterfly preparing to shift into another iteration, I glare at him. I’ll be eaten alive if I pay too much attention to the sensation.
His reprimand hits a note deep within me. Now isn’t the time to lose sight of our goals. I want to burn through this resistance and put an end to the suffering he mentioned before more people are hurt.
But the pieces have to matter. The pieces are people and I’m one of them.
It has to count for something, doesn’t it? Or maybe the hyper fixation, as Mozi puts it, is going to destroy us all. There’s no way for me to know.
“You expect me to ignore her? When she’s useful?
What if she is the one who makes a difference down the line?
I would never be able to forgive myself if I lost her to this place without at least trying to do something.
Do you blame me?” I demand. “She’s just a girl and if I didn’t step in, then she’d have disappeared outside of our reach. ”
Our reach? Mozi repeats. He grows taller, crowds closer. Do not rope me into this. I had nothing to do with your choices. You decided to cut me out of the entire situation, didn’t you? Or maybe my memory is lax, and we had a conversation I’ve forgotten?
Tension snaps between us and my stomach does a ragged flip. Mozi growls again and although flames swell in his throat, they go no further. And because the sight of it does something to me, because I’m already lightheaded, I force myself to step closer.
“There was no conversation, as you well know, because I felt like it was the right thing to do.”
Standing up to a dragon, even an adolescent like Mozi, is a terrible idea. I do it anyway.
Because curse him. Curse my father and his agenda. Curse Morgan and her bitter refusals.
Curse my desire to retaliate.
“We’re both young.” I shift tactics instead. “You and I. We make mistakes. We do things we think are correct in the moment that turn out to be disappointments.”
A puff of smoke winds out of his nostril and his slitted pupils contract until they’re nearly invisible. You’re blaming your actions on youth?
I widen my stance, stubborn. In part.
You need to stop proving the elders right by making poor life choices.
“That’s not what I was trying to do,” I insist out loud. “I saw something in her that spoke to me. She’d be useful to the cause. The spark that ignites the greatest weapon.”
We don’t have a weapon. We have you and your small band of humans who are attempting the impossible. Mozi crowds closer until my back presses against the thick leathery wing.
“You don’t need to remind me.”
Apparently, I do because you are out there doing Ether knows what in an attempt to prove you made the right choice by leaving this girl alive. I keep telling you to consider everything before you make a move and yet you constantly rush ahead as though you know better than anyone else.
“I’m doing the best I can.”
Your best is pathetic. Dragons think of things in terms of centuries. If you considered your life with the same care, then you might see how your paltry game with this girl is a drop in the bucket of time and space.
“And what if she’s the key to everything? Have you considered it? You don’t know her the way I do.”
You don’t know her! She’s a ghost to you. She is a pretty face and a distraction, and you’ve gambled with more than your own future, boy. You’ve gambled with mine.
Mozi is small for his age, but his jaws are capable of crushing me. He might not be able to devour me whole, but piece by piece is entirely possible and acceptable, based on the way he’s looking at me.
Then something he said finally clicks into place and I pull up short. Wait. The elders said something about me?
Mozi bristles and arches his head. With his wings enveloping us, the individual scales on his horns stand to attention.
His eyes provide the glow better than any candle.
If he gets to be even half the size of Omram, then those bony crests will be capable of skewering through livestock, if he chooses.
I’ve always felt blessed to be chosen by a dragon at a young age. What if it was nothing more than luck?
They warned against bonding with a man who hasn’t been tested yet. They marked it as a mistake of youth. He spits out the word. As you said. We’re both young. They had serious hesitations about a match between us and did not believe me when I said I saw greatness in you.
“The royal line is chosen by dragons much earlier than sixteen,” I remind him. “Or do the elders have something to say about that tradition, too?”
Mozi pauses, and then says, You are no royal, Kieran Ryson.
The chill in my blood disappears and this time it’s heat, penetrating and inescapable. He takes a step closer, but I refuse to back down as his steps shepherd me closer to the boundary of the cliff.
He won’t let me fall. His wing still blocks me from pacing, from doing anything except being forced to face him.