Chapter 11 #2
“So while finding a true mate is a joyous thing, in the end, it’s only brought my family ruin.
” Attalus’s smile was sad and still directed at the landscape before them.
“I never really expected to find my own true mate. I never went looking for them. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d live long enough anyway. ”
Leita didn’t like that sentiment at all, and neither did she care for his try at levity, saying it all with a false grin. What he said wasn’t meant to be lessened or sweetened. Some truths were meant to be hard.
“But now that you have?” she asked.
Finally, Attalus turned enough to meet her gaze. It seemed he couldn’t help the grinning; whether it was subconscious or practiced or involuntary, she couldn’t decide.
“I know it’s a blessing. My instinct is to fly headlong into this bond.”
“But the rest of you disagrees,” she assumed from his tone.
“No, I just think the rest of me is catching up.” Turning a bit more on the rock, enough that their knees touched, Attalus gently picked up Leita’s hand to twine their fingers together.
“I know this is strange, and sudden, and we can be forgiven for not knowing what to do. Were I a common dragon and you a normal fae, we’d still be an unorthodox pairing. ”
He certainly had the right of that. Just as none of the elders knew what to tell her on how to bond with the faelands, there was no one to advise her on how to bond with a dragon, either.
“I have a…friend,” she said, unsure if she still considered Ravenna a friend after all this, “a half-fae mated to the new orc king of Balmirra.”
Attalus’s brows lifted. “I thought I’d heard something about Far-Sight’s new queen. Well, I suppose we aren’t totally alone, then.”
No, they weren’t. But then again, their circumstances were still so different.
Before Leita could fall into another bout of melancholy, Attalus squeezed her hand. “Will you tell me what you hoped for in a mate?”
Her throat tightened, not wanting to let the words out. It felt too intimate to admit the truth, too vulnerable to confess that many of Attalus’s qualities—confidence, charm, humor—were traits she’d hoped for in her azai.
As though he could sense her wavering, Attalus whispered, “Truth for truth.”
Right. She wasn’t sure she liked the reminder of yesterday or their game, but she did at least believe in fairness.
“I’ve spent much of my life alone,” she said, unable to look up from their joined hands.
“I was only a youth when my mother and sister were slain. Thalia found me, took me into her herd.” In careful words, she told him how, as she grew, Thalia became concerned that life in the wilderness wouldn’t be enough for Leita.
So, the mare had found her a human family to join.
They had been kind, all of them. They were patient with Leita, never scolding her for eating hastily and with her hands, never teasing her for not speaking those first years.
Her new mother had so gently untangled her hair and cleaned her skin.
Her new father had taught her to read and speak the human tongue.
Her new brother and sisters had played with her and laughed with her and given her a place to belong.
For ten years, Leita had tried to be human. She’d eaten with them, sang with them, loved them dearly. When her sisters grew up and took spouses, so too did Leita. A gentle, soft-spoken farmer named Jonathan who never asked her to be anything she wasn’t.
But Leita wasn’t human, and time passed differently for the fae. Although humans might feel a decade go by slowly, it was quick for a fae, and it’d been too quick for Leita.
Plague had come, and it took many lives. It took her family.
First had been her parents, old as they were by then. A sister went too, weakened already from a hard birth. Her brother and his family were next, one by one, even the baby.
Her gentle husband she’d kept alive with sheer will.
Clumsy with her unused magic, all she could do was force it down his throat, demand he stay alive.
For a while, he did. But just as it did to the fae who’d lived on it for centuries, her magic corroded him as surely as the sickness.
His blood turned black. In the end, she pumped his heart for him, forced air in and out of his lungs, but couldn’t cleave his soul to his body.
He left her after four weeks.
Only one sister remained, and Leita had been determined to do what she couldn’t before.
She practiced with her magic, used it to ensure her surviving sister lived a happy, safe life.
And she did—for years and years, she did.
She could’ve lived even longer, had she not begged Leita in the end to finally let her go.
Once again Leita was alone, her will not strong enough to bear her sister’s plea, her heart not strong enough to bear more grief. She’d returned to the wilderness and to Thalia after burying her human sister.
“So what is an azai for me?” she said, her voice sounding as though it came from far away. “A mate is supposed to be forever. Someone who won’t leave.” Although it pained her, she made herself look at Attalus when she said, “I can’t lose another family. I can’t bear it.”
His face was as serious as she’d ever seen it as he gazed back at her. With a gentle touch, he wiped away the tear she hadn’t realized fell down her cheek.
“If it’s any help, I’ve thus far proven difficult to kill.” If he’d said it with any amount of levity, she’d have smacked him clear across the border. Instead, his words rang resolute, as though grateful for it himself, too.
“That’s…heartening.”
“I must say, it does encourage me that you’re not a delicate human. They don’t seem to survive long with Savrakae.”
Had they…come to something of an agreement? Leita was startled and a little pleased to realize, yes, they indeed had.
“What is it for us, then, that you’re against? Have I truly been that horrid?” he asked without heat. From his open expression, he seemed to genuinely want to know.
“No, I…” Leita’s face dropped into her hands, and she scrubbed her palms across her cheeks, trying to make sentences out of scraps of feeling. “You do vex me, but I suppose…it’s the timing I dislike most.”
“Hmm. Well, there’s nothing I can do about the timing, but anything else, I’ll try. You have my word, agae. I can be whatever you want—an ally, a partner, a shield. Whatever you need, I’ll be.”
Rather than liking his promise, his words sat uneasily in her gut. She couldn’t say for certain he meant it the way she took it, but Leita didn’t want him to have to be whatever she desired.
“You should be whoever you want,” she found herself saying. Leita knew what it was to have a role thrust upon you, one you didn’t take to easily. She couldn’t bear to do that to someone else.
He didn’t immediately answer. She’d never seen him lost for words and couldn’t help peeking at him to see it for herself. An unfamiliar line had appeared between his brows, as though her statement troubled him. She bit back the urge to reach out and smooth the line away with her thumb.
“What if who I want to be is your mate?” he whispered.
She didn’t know if she could believe the question was an honest one, even if his tone and expression were grave. There was no play, no artifice, and yet…Leita couldn’t let herself truly believe.
“You’re saying that as someone looking for protection.”
“Yes. But I’m also saying it as your azai.” He nudged her shoulder with his, a rueful, genuine grin lifting his lips. “I do actually like you, Leita. Strange as you are.”
“You might be the first in a long while,” she murmured, not quite sure she truly wanted to say it.
His grin widened. “Well now, as twelfth born, that would be novel for me.”
She almost smiled despite herself and hid it behind her hand.
They lapsed into an introspective silence, one she found surprisingly comfortable.
The afternoon had lengthened, and they really should be getting back, but Leita found herself loath to get up just yet.
The breeze was pleasant, and so was his scent, a mixture of cinnamon and cedar, woodsmoke and musk.
Into the easiness between them, Attalus said quietly, “Queen or not, I would be honored to be your family, Leita. Had I found you in the southern wilds, in the streets of Bargarad, or anywhere else.”
Leita’s throat went dry and her sinuses ached, a sure sign she might cry. Instead, and she didn’t fully understand why, she leaned forward to kiss him.
It was quick, barely anything, and she pulled back before he could deepen it. Still, she took the brief touch for herself, if only to prove she could.
She came away from the touch with her blood positively sparkling, and she took to her feet. “We’d better go back,” she said, unfurling her wings.
Attalus looked as though he might say something, but then his attention snagged on the blue and purple iridescence of her wings. Sensitive to everything from emotion to air pressure, she preferred to keep her wings close to her back, but today, she felt like flying.
Whorls of ash and dirt swirled around her feet when her wings began to flutter. Leita lifted into the air, higher than his head from one breath to the next.
He cocked a brow, and Leita couldn’t help it, she laughed.
Then threw herself higher and sped off. She wasn’t about to surrender a headstart.
She knew he’d chase her, counted on it, and a little thrill zipped from ears to toes hearing the displacement of air his wings made beating against the ground. He took a running start, his footfalls quick and light, and then a mighty whooshing as his great wings pumped.
All the air whipped past her, none making it to her lungs, and so she breathlessly pushed herself to go faster. Although her heart pounded, she was lighter than air knowing Attalus followed behind.