21. Chapter 21
Kalli
The cold wakes me. That’s the first wrong thing, and I know it’s wrong before I’m fully awake.
The stove has gone down to embers, and the blanket has slipped off my shoulder.
I shouldn’t feel cold. I haven’t felt cold since I was a child.
I slept on the stone floor of that cell through a winter and it never once woke me.
It’s waking me now.
What the hell happened?
I lie still and take stock of it.
I’m in a bed, and I’m naked, and I’m lying against a cool, motionless body.
My thighs hurt when I shift my legs. There’s a deep, low soreness in my core, and I know what put it there before I let myself use the word.
Two tender spots ache in my hip bones. My mouth hurts on the inside of the lower lip. My hair is a tangled mess.
I put my hand on my throat. There are punctures there. Two of them, closed over with a rough crust, sore when I press. The skin around the bite is a little bruised.
I hold my fingers over the bite and don’t move for a while.
He fed on me.
My body didn’t go anywhere last night. Whatever it did, it stayed here. And all I remember is my hand on the door, and then waking up here like this.
I close my eyes and try to get the rest of the night back. All I get back are pieces. His skin under my palms, colder than skin should be. His mouth. My fingers in his hair.
It happened. I’m sore in every place that proves it.
And I missed all of it.
Goddammit!
Inside my chest, my dragon shifts, settles, and goes on being pleased with herself.
You took my body.
I wait for an explanation. An apology.
Yes.
That’s all she gives me. One word, nothing that sounds like sorry.
I sit up, careful not to disturb him.
I already know her side of it. She’ll say I wanted him—and I did. I’ve wanted him since the beginning and gave myself a string of reasons why I couldn’t have him. She ignored all of them, and took the decision off me.
I’m on my feet without deciding to be. I get halfway to the stove before I turn around and come back. My hands are shaking. I grip the iron frame at the end of the bed and hold it until the metal warms under my palms.
You had no right.
All I get back is a sense of smug satisfaction. Like a cat who just got all the cream.
You had no right, and you did it anyway.
She still doesn’t answer. She isn’t going to. She hasn’t defended herself once, and she isn’t about to start.
I let go of the bed frame and press both hands over my face.
The worst part of all is that I missed it.
Damn you!
I want to stomp my foot. She got my hands on him. She got the sounds he made and the shape of his shoulders and all of it, start to finish. What I have is a bite, stiff thighs, and a soreness deep inside that tells me it had to be freaking amazing.
I say it out loud, into the dark, because I’m tired of circling it. “I just wanted to be there, dammit!”
I know.
“That isn’t good enough.”
This has never happened before. She’s had the sky. She’s had every scale and every foot of wingspan on the days I gave her, and she has never once fought me for the rest of who I am. Not while I was standing on my own two feet with my own mouth working.
I held her down in that cell for over a year. Teeth together, breathing even, everything clamped. It worked every single day. Last night it stopped working. She decided she’d had enough, and stopped listening to me.
This could be a problem.
We’re going to have to sort this out, you and me.
She doesn’t think there’s anything to sort. She’s lying under my ribs, warm and unbothered, and she has already gone back to sleep on the matter.
“You’re cold.” Gideon’s voice comes from behind me, low and unhurried. “Come back under the blanket.”
I spin around, a hand at my throat.
He’s up on one elbow. The last of the stove light touches one side of his face and leaves the rest of him dark. The blanket has come down to his waist. There are four short marks across the top of his chest, already faded to thin pink lines, nearly gone. I must have done that to him.
By tomorrow there’ll be no sign I was ever on him. And I don’t even have a memory of it to keep.
“Have you slept at all?” I ask.
“No.”
“You’ve been lying there listening to me stand here talking to myself.”
“For about a quarter of an hour.” He says it without a flicker. “It seemed like a conversation that didn’t need me in it.”
He heard me speak out loud. Half a conversation, one voice. I wait for him to ask about the other half. He doesn’t.
I get back in, because the floor is freezing and there’s no dignified way to keep standing on it. I pull the blanket up over both of us.
He doesn’t reach for me. I notice that I want him to.
“Ask it,” I say. “Whatever it is. I can tell you have something brewing.”
He takes his time. He always does.
“What happened today?” he asks.
“I… I…” I can’t think of what to say. “You tell me.”
“You went out that door, and when you came back, you were different,” he says. “What changed?” He says it flat and even. That makes it harder to answer, not easier. An accusation I could have argued with.
I open my mouth to tell him, and it doesn’t come out. How the hell do I say this?
I couldn’t decide if I should sleep with you or not. So my dragon decided for me, came back in here, screwed your brains out, and clearly loved every minute of it.
Yeah, that’s not going to work. I’ve known this man a matter of weeks. There’s a lot I’d tell him before I’d tell him that.
“I made up my mind,” I say. “That’s all. I went out there to think, and I got tired of asking myself the same question, so I stopped asking it.”
Every word of that is true. It’s also about a tenth of the truth.
He looks at me for a moment. “All right,” he says, and lies back down. That’s it. He doesn’t push. He doesn’t come back at it from a different angle, which I know he could.
I should feel like I’ve been let off. Instead, it’s just another grievance I add to the list I have against my own beast.
After a minute of silence, he gets up and leaves the bed, retrieving his pants and pulling them on. I watch every lean line of him moving in the silvery light.
God. I had my hands all over that just hours ago, and I don’t even know what it feels like.
I hate you so much right now! I tell my dragon as I get out of bed.
He gets the stove going properly while I go around the room collecting my scattered clothes—my shirt hooked over the end of the bed frame, my jeans inside out on the floor in the middle of the room. His shirt is at the door, completely ruined. Buttons are missing and the sleeve is torn.
What the hell did she do to him?
“I think we can toss this,” I say.
“It’s a good shirt.”
“It has no cuff.”
“It’s a good shirt with no cuff.” He says it so seriously that I laugh, and he looks up at me while I do, then turns away as I start to dress. It’s oddly polite, and it makes my chest tighten.
I think this is a good man. A really good one.
My dragon agrees, though she’s too busy basking in afterglow to do much right now.
He crosses the room while I’m lacing my boots and takes a piece of hair off my face and puts it behind my ear.
There’s no reason for it. Nothing needed doing.
His fingers are cold at my temple for half a second.
I look up at him and feel my throat work as our eyes lock.
Then he’s past me and picking up his pack as if he’s already forgotten doing it.
I sit there with one boot half-laced and try to imagine what his fingers would feel like everywhere else.
“We’d better get going,” he says as I stand. “This will be the last stretch, and I think we can fit it in before sunrise.”
“Sure,” I say, not letting myself look back at the bed as we leave the cabin.
We climb for hours. Switchback after switchback, the trees get shorter and sparser until they stop. The ground goes from green to gray rock, and after that there are long fields of old snow that have never had a chance to melt.
We’re silent as we travel now. What happened between us has put an end to the light banter we’ve shared for the past couple of days. I miss it.
Somewhere in it, the air changes. I feel it in my chest first—thinner, so each breath brings back a little less—and I sit up straighter without deciding to.
I know this country. The peaks stack up here instead of spreading out, one behind the other, and I crack the window and pull the air in through my nose.
Ice. Wet rock. Juniper from some ledge below the road, the last of it before the trees quit for good.
And under all of that, faint, high up, carried down off the cloud, woodsmoke and sulfur and warm stone.
Hearth-smell. Dragon-smell. My clan is up there burning last summer’s wood.
I can smell them from a truck cab on a border road, and my eyes are stinging before I’ve finished the breath.
I want to be home. I have wanted it for over a year.
It’s not far now, and I can smell it. But there’s something waiting for me up there that I haven’t told him about.
I’ve had all night to say it, and I haven’t.
It can wait. Set against a clan with a killer in it, it’s nothing. I almost believe that.
I should believe that.
Somewhere up in there is whoever put me in that terrible place.
We climb for another hour, and then the road tops a rise, and he slows without me asking him to.
Mountains, one behind the other, further back than I can see the end of them. Gray rock, white snow. Above all of it sits the cloud that has never lifted in my lifetime, and somewhere inside it, higher than anything in front of us, is the Aldrake Eyrie.
“That’s Ondrathe,” I say. “All of it. From that shoulder across to the water.”
“How far does your mother’s territory go?”
“To the far side of the cloud and about a hundred miles past it.”
I put both hands flat on the dash and lean forward.
Soon, I’ll be standing in that hall. I’ll say the words I was taught before I could fly. I’ll take the hands that are offered to me, and I’ll be gracious to every last one of them—the council, the household, my mother’s people, my grandmother’s.
One of them sold me. I don’t know which face it is, so I’m going to have to smile at all of them.
Under my ribs, my dragon comes awake and turns her head toward the cloud, and for the first time since the snow, she wants something that isn’t him.
Revenge.