46. Lucy
Lucy
Trust a dragon’s word and never his patience. He will keep a promise made in anger for a hundred years and call it honor. The man remembers the slight. The beast remembers the man.
The ache of sadness blanketing my heart woke me long before I was ready.
Not the Ossira. Not the pull of something demanding obedience. Just the silence of a room, a city that felt emptier than it had any right to, and the understanding that I’d left something on the other side of the fog that I didn’t know how to stop wanting.
I lay still for a long time, staring at the ceiling.
Riot?
No answer.
His name settled in my chest like a stone dropped in still water, sending ripples through everything it touched.
I pressed my palm flat against the mattress, where the cold had claimed the space beside me, and thought about the way he’d looked at me in that single line of moonlight.
The way his voice had dropped into something that belonged only to the dark between us.
The way he’d said love like it was already true and had been for longer than either of us could fathom.
He was so far away.
And so completely untouchable.
I’d never understood heartache before. I’d watched other people have it, and thought it was something I could avoid. Now it sat in the center of my chest, blunt and persistent, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
Eventually I made myself move.
The mirror caught me as I passed, and I stopped without meaning to.
The bite mark on my shoulder blade had darkened overnight, a perfect crescent against my skin.
I looked at it for a long moment, this small proof that last night had been real, that his mouth had been there, that he had claimed me and I had let him.
I pressed two fingers against it and felt the ghost of his hands everywhere else.
The bath didn’t help. Nothing as practical as hot water and soap was going to touch what he’d left behind. I dressed anyway, slowly, and moved to the window.
Luneth Hollow sat below me in a heavy gray morning, the kind that swallowed the mountain peaks entirely and turned the city into something half dreamt.
But the lanterns were everywhere, dozens of them floating through the hazy streets.
They made the city look like something from a story.
Beautiful. Even if you wanted to hate them, you couldn’t.
I pressed my forehead to the cold glass and let myself miss Riot completely, without apology, without trying to be sensible about it.
He was my home. Somewhere between the cliff and the train and every night he’d waited for me in the dark, he’d become the place I wanted to return to, and I was standing on the wrong side of the fog with no way to reach him until sunset.
Perhaps the sorrow was the payment for the pleasure he’d given me.
A door slammed somewhere down the hall. Then voices filled the space, urgent and overlapping.
I lifted my head from the glass. Whatever it was, it was pulling me back into the world whether I was ready or not.
I pushed off the window and went to find out.
The hallway outside my room was anything but empty.
Emrys’s shoulder was braced under the arm of a man who wasn’t walking so much as being carried, his feet dragging uselessly across the stone.
Shavia had his other side, her jaw set, her eyes already moving ahead to calculate the path to Tavian’s workroom.
“What happened?” I fell into step beside them.
Emrys’s voice was tight. “Found him in the mountains near the arena. We were at morning practice. Someone was sweeping the tunnels and there he was.”
I looked at the man between them. Large, even unconscious, broad through the shoulders with dark hair matted against his forehead. His head lolled forward but as Emrys shifted his grip I caught the mark of a dragon on his neck.
“How long was he down there?”
“He’s been missing for a few days,” Emrys answered.
Tavian met us in the corridor outside his workroom, already rolling his sleeves. He took one look at the man and stepped aside to let them through, his hands finding the patient’s wrist before they’d even set him down.
We waited.
Tavian checked everything. Twice. His hands moved with quiet precision. He was methodical and unhurried, turning the man’s head gently, checking his eyes, pressing careful fingers along his ribs, his throat, and the back of his skull.
Finally he straightened. “I can’t find a single thing wrong with him.”
The room went very still.
“Nothing?” Emrys asked.
“Nothing.” Tavian looked down at his patient, genuinely troubled. “No injury. No fever. No sign of exposure or starvation.” He pressed two fingers to the man’s wrist again, as if checking would change the answer. “He’s perfectly healthy.”
The healer moved to his shelves without a word, scanning the rows until he found what he was looking for, a small dark bottle tucked behind two larger ones. He uncorked it, poured a measure onto a cloth and swept it under the man’s nose.
Nothing.
Not even a flicker.
He set the cloth aside and turned back to the shelves, this time reaching for a clay jar sealed with wax.
He broke the seal and tipped it, a handful of runes rolling out onto his palm.
Mostly hard clay, the runes were clearly produced by scorched hands with limited power.
He sorted through them with one finger until he found the one sitting at the bottom.
It was bone. Smooth and pale with the rune woven deep.
He held it out to Emrys without explanation, who took it, turned it once in his fingers and pressed it to the inside of the man’s wrist.
“Evigilum,” Emrys said quietly.
The man gasped like he’d been pulled from deep water, his whole body lurching upward, one hand flying out and gripping the edge of the bed. His eyes opened, glassy and confused, moving across each of our faces without recognition.
“Easy,” Tavian said, a hand on his shoulder. “You’re safe. You’re in the Keep.”
The man blinked then swallowed. His hand slowly released its hold on the bed frame.
I stepped forward. “What happened to you? Do you remember?”
The man’s brow furrowed like the memory was something he had to dig for. “The runes. On the walls. In the mountain tunnels.” He looked up at us. “They all lit up at once.”
Shavia made a sharp sound. “That’s not possible.” She crossed her arms, her voice clipped and certain. “Those markings are decorative. They’ve been on those walls since before anyone alive was born. They don’t activate. They don’t do anything.”
The man just looked at her.
I studied Shavia.
Her jaw was set. Her eyes were fixed on the man in the bed with an intensity that I was certain had nothing to do with concern for his health, and everything to do with making sure he stopped talking.
She’d used that exact word in her shop, standing over my wave sketch, talking about her own rune work.
I flashed a pointed look at the healer before I spoke again. “Tavian keeps records of anyone involved in an incident. Anyone who found them, anyone present. It’s just for the Keep’s log. We’ll need your full name before you head out.”
Tavian didn’t miss a beat, already moving toward his shelf where a ledger sat, likely coated in dust. “Full name?”
Shavia looked between us. Nothing in the question worth arguing. “Shavia Aldric.”
He wrote it down without looking up. “Thank you. Our friend here will need some rest now.”
She hesitated only for a moment before nodding and walking out, her boots echoing all the way down the hall as we waited until the door closed.
I turned back to the room where Tavian was already pulling a blanket over the man. “You need rest. Whatever happened down there, your body needs time.”
The man pushed himself upright. “What day is it?”
Tavian glanced at Emrys.
“Noctiria,” Emrys said.
The man threw the blanket off immediately. “I can’t be in bed on Noctiria. I need to get down to the city.”
“You were unconscious for probably three days,” Tavian said, rubbing his temple.
“I need to see the thirteen Moonborn come down.” He was already swinging his legs over the side of the bed.
“I own most of the farmland north of the city. Without the river running freely we can’t continue irrigation.
We’re already behind. I couldn’t send food down last week. First time in my life.”
Tavian opened his mouth.
“First time in my life,” the man repeated, quieter now. “If thirteen don’t come down tonight, I don’t know how we feed everyone through to summer. Next winter will be worse, if we survive that long.”
The room went still.
I thought about the honey cakes. About Maren’s bakery full of warmth and the vendor selling roasted meats from his half empty cart.
Had the city known how close to the edge they were getting?
Would thirteen mysterious people walking out of the mountains truly bring some kind of magical reckoning they were all hoping for?
Glancing between the serious faces of the men in the room, with absolutely no other options, I sure hoped so.
“At least give yourself an hour of rest,” Tavian insisted.
“I feel fine.”
“You feel fine because Emrys used a bone rune on your wrist,” the healer said flatly. “That’s not the same thing as being fine.”
“You’ve still got a couple of hours before the festival starts,” Emrys offered. “Rest until then. We’ll come and get you.”
The man looked between them, decided Emrys was the more reasonable of the two, and lay back with obvious reluctance.
We filed out into the corridor. Tavian pulled the door closed and turned to me.
Something in his expression had shifted, softer now, the healer set aside for a moment.
“I have something for you. For Noctiria.”
I stared at him. “You didn’t—”
“Come with me.”
He led me down the corridor to a storage closet I’d never had reason to open, reached past folded linens and a collection of things that had clearly been accumulating for years, and produced a box tied with deep green ribbon.