CHAPTER SEVEN
The Sky - Fiona
He came up the last of the stairs fast, one hand at my back, not quite pushing. “Up. Now. The postern.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Later.” Then, quieter, like it cost him: “Please.”
I’d known this man a day, and I’d never heard him say that word. I climbed.
The postern let us out onto the headland in the last dark before dawn, wind off the sea hard enough to lean on, the castle a black tooth of rock behind us. He backed up, putting distance between us on the wet grass. Then he stood there a moment like a man making a weighty decision.
“You saw this happen once,” he said. “Badly. From the wrong angle.” He breathed in preparation. “Watch it happen right —”
And he changed.
Not the way I’d seen it on the rocks—that awful unmaking, bone against its own will.
This unfolded. He opened out of himself, dark on dark, and the heat came off him first, a wall of it that dried the spray on my face, cinnamon and hot metal rolling over the cold grass.
Then the size, the impossible unspooling size, a wing sweeping out and out until it blotted a third of the sky, the long muscle of him settling against the dark with a weight I felt through the ground, through my boots, in the water of my own body.
He wasn't a nightmare that had come up out of the sea.
But an invitation.
He lowered one shoulder to the grass. The meaning was plain.
Here is what I do for a living: I assess risk. I stand at the edge of things and I count the ways they can kill me and I write the number down and I go home. I have built an entire life on the number.
And somewhere behind the number, quiet as she’d been for over thirty years, the four-year-old who used to draw these magnificent beasts on the backs of church bulletins stood up in the dark of my head and put her small hand flat against the inside of my ribs and said: Go on, then.
What did we keep believing for, if not this?
I didn’t count anything. I climbed on.
We went up, and the ground fell away, and the number never came.
I’d like to tell you I cataloged it — altitude, wingspan, airspeed, the professional distance I keep between myself and everything.
I reached for it out of habit, a tongue going to a missing tooth.
It wasn’t there. The whole apparatus I use to keep the world at arm’s length had simply gone, and what was left was a woman on the back of a dragon over the North Sea, and nothing between her and any of it.
The cold tore past. The heat of him came up through my hands where I gripped, furnace-steady, cinnamon and hot metal in the wind, and under my palms I could feel the vast machinery of the wingbeat—the gather, the downsweep, the long glide where the whole world went silent and tilting.
Somewhere over the silver the four-year-old in me was screaming—not in terror—but in the pure animal joy of a child who has been right her entire life and finally, finally has the proof under her hands, and I let her scream, and I think some of it came out of my own mouth and got taken by the wind.
Dawn came up while we flew.
The sea went from black to gray to a hammered silver too bright to hold.
Dunnottar shrank to what it was—a chip of rock, brave and small.
Stonehaven’s harbor lights strung along the water, still burning, everyone in them asleep.
Hills folded back into hills, green going gold at their eastern edges, the whole coast I’d come to measure laid out under me like the most beautiful map ever drawn.
And I couldn’t read it.
For fifteen years a coastline was data to me—erosion rates, strata, permit boundaries, dead men’s stonework.
I watched that country going gold in the dawn, and it wasn’t data.
It was beautiful, and it was full of things that were alive, and some traitor part of me that I’d kept in a box for a decade sat up and said, plainly, in my own voice:
You could live here.
That was what undid me. It wasn't the dragon. Or the height of two thousand feet over open water. The thing that finally frightened me was a future.
We came down as the sun cleared the sea.
He set me on the grass and folded back into a man, and we stood there wrecked by the wind, both of us laughing—actually laughing, breathless and stupid with it, the way you laugh when something’s cracked you open and it didn’t hurt. I hadn’t made that sound in longer than I could remember.
For one whole minute neither of us was anything but two creatures who had shared the sky and lived, and the salt dried white on my cheeks, and I could not for the life of me have told you where the dragon ended and the man began, and did not want to.
The laugh ran out. What was left was quiet, and him, close.
He lifted his hand to my face. Slow. Cold knuckles against a colder cheek, a question in the motion, everything in him held still and waiting to see if I’d pull away.
I have pulled away my whole life. It’s the one thing I’m good at.
I didn’t pull away.
I stood on that headland with the dawn coming up and a dragon’s warmth still on my skin and I let myself, for one second, want the thing I wanted—and then, down the single track that climbs up to the castle, an engine.
Then a second engine.
Headlights raked across the gatehouse, white and wrong in all that new gold, two sets of them grinding up the road that had no reason to hold anyone at this hour but us.
Craig went still. The kind of stillness that goes all the way to the bone, the way a thing goes when the predator turns out to be something even it should fear.
“Locke,” he said.