Chapter 1 #2
I ate the rest of the bread standing at the window, watching the lights of Thornhallow flicker through the mist. Warm yellow squares in the darkness. Families gathering for supper. Mothers tucking children into bed. Husbands and wives reaching for each other in the firelight.
The blacksmith was probably home by now, his son safe in the bed where he should have been all along. Dessa would be making something warm for them to eat. They'd stay up late, I imagined, just watching Bram breathe. Touching him to make sure he was real.
I wondered what it would feel like.
To be held like that. To have someone's hands gentle on my hair. To matter to someone not because of what I could do for them, but just because I existed.
The thought was dangerous. I knew that. Wanting things you couldn't have—that was how wound-walkers truly burned out. Not from the pain itself, but from the loneliness of carrying it alone.
I put the thought away in the same place I kept all the others. The drawer in my mind where impossible things went to be forgotten.
The fire crackled. The mist pressed against the window like something trying to get in.
I went to bed alone.
The winter roots came up reluctantly, like they'd rather stay buried than face whatever was coming.
I knew the feeling. Three days since Bram's healing, and my bones still ached with echoes of his fever, a lingering soreness that reminded me I wasn't as young as I used to be.
Twenty-seven wasn't old. But wound-walkers aged differently than other people.
The guest-house’s garden was small and practical—turnips, carrots, the hardy vegetables that survived Thornhallow's perpetual damp. I’d noticed the roots yesterday, and thought I’d test my strength by pulling them up.
I was elbow-deep in cold dirt, prying loose a particularly stubborn parsnip, when the shadow passed overhead.
I looked up.
The sun had broken through the mist for once, weak but present, and against that pale light something massive was descending. Wings like ship sails. Scales that caught the sunlight and threw it back as molten bronze, liquid gold, living flame.
A dragon.
For one impossible moment, I just stared. Dragons were real—everyone knew that—but they kept to their islands, their courts, their ancient politics. No dragon had come to the Eastern Reaches in my lifetime. In my grandmother's lifetime. They were stories. Legends.
This one was neither.
The screams started before it landed.
I dropped the parsnip and ran.
Not away. Toward. The instinct was so bone-deep I didn't even think about it—where there was chaos, there would be wounded. Where there was fear, someone would need me. It never occurred to me to hide.
The village square was in pandemonium when I arrived.
Chickens scattered everywhere. A cart had overturned in someone's panic, spilling apples across the cobblestones.
The villagers had pressed themselves against the buildings, some clutching children, some clutching weapons, all of them staring at the impossible creature that had landed in their midst.
The dragon was smaller than I'd expected—still massive, still terrifying, but not the mountain-sized beast of legend. Its scales rippled like hammered copper, and its eyes . . . its eyes held intelligence. Amusement, even.
A woman was climbing down from its back.
She moved with the ease of someone who'd done this a hundred times before, finding footholds in the dragon's scales, swinging down to land lightly on the cobblestones.
Dark hair tumbled past her shoulders, tangled from the wind.
Her clothes were fine—traveling leathers, embroidered with subtle flame patterns—but she wore them like someone who'd grown up in rougher circumstances. And her skin . . .
Golden marks traced her arms, her throat, her cheeks. They moved. Flickered. Like living flame dancing just beneath the surface.
She turned to face the crowd, and her eyes swept the terrified villagers with something that might have been sympathy.
"I'm looking for the wound-walker called Lena," she announced. Her voice carried without effort, clear and commanding. "We need her help."
Silence. The villagers exchanged glances, and I saw it—the calculation behind their eyes. The wound-walker. The strange woman at the edge of the village. The one who swallowed sickness and walked alone.
Someone would point. Someone always pointed, when it came to giving me away.
I saved them the trouble.
"That’s me. I'm Lena."
The woman's gaze found me immediately. Something flickered across her face—assessment, approval, maybe relief.
Up close, she looked younger than I'd first thought.
Younger than me, probably, though the marks on her skin and the weight in her eyes suggested she'd lived more than her years would indicate.
"I'm Kara," she said. "Bonded mate of Davoren, the Fire Master." She gestured to the dragon behind her, and the beast dipped its enormous head in what might have been acknowledgment. "We've been searching for you for weeks. You're not easy to find."
"I prefer it that way."
The corner of her mouth twitched. "I imagine you do.
Listen—" She stepped closer, lowering her voice, and I caught a scent like woodsmoke and something sweeter.
"I don't have time to explain everything here.
But the Dragon Lords face a threat unlike anything in recorded history.
Something that could unmake the world—not metaphorically, not eventually. Soon."
I held her gaze. "What does that have to do with me?"
"Everything." She pulled something from her belt—a small scroll, sealed with wax that shimmered in seven different colors.
"The Dragon Lords need a wound-walker for a ritual.
Something that's never been attempted before.
We've searched the entire continent. You're the strongest wound-walker anyone's found. "
The strongest.
I almost laughed. What a thing to be known for. The best at swallowing other people's pain.
"How do you know I'm the strongest?"
"Because you're still alive." Kara's eyes softened slightly.
"Most wound-walkers burn out by your age.
The ones who don't . . . they learn to stop caring.
They take less, do less, protect themselves.
You don't. Every village we visited on the way here had a story about you.
The woman who cured the uncurable. The healer who never turns anyone away.
" She paused. "The one who walks home alone, after. "
Something twisted in my chest. Was that what the stories said? The woman who walks home alone?
"Please." Kara's voice dropped further. "We're running out of time. Whatever's coming—it won't spare this village because you stayed. It won't spare anyone."
I looked back at the cottage I could see from here, just barely, through the mist. The cold hearth. The empty chair. The bed where I slept alone every night, wondering if this was all there would ever be.
I thought about Bram's father holding his son. About Dessa's hands pulling away from my skin.
I thought about twenty-seven years of being needed but never wanted.
"What happens if I say no?"
Kara didn't flinch. "Then we find someone else. Someone weaker. Someone who'll probably die in the attempt." She met my eyes. "But you won't say no. I can see it in you. Whatever else you are, Lena—you're not the kind of person who lets the world burn because it didn't love her back."
The words landed like a blade between my ribs. She was right. Damn her, she was right.
I looked at the dragon behind her—at those intelligent, ancient eyes watching me with an emotion I couldn't name. At the villagers pressed against their buildings, already shrinking back from me, already calculating how quickly they could forget I'd ever lived among them.
I looked at Kara, with her marks of golden flame and her eyes that knew what it was to be claimed by something larger than yourself.
"When do we leave?"
Her smile was like sunrise.
"Now."
Two days on dragonback taught me that flying was nothing like the stories made it sound.
The stories talked about freedom, about wind in your hair, about touching the clouds.
They didn't mention the cold that seeped into your bones, or the way your thighs cramped from gripping scales, or how small the world looked from so high up—small and fragile and breakable.
Kara rode in front of me, steady and sure against the bronze dragon's spine.
During the long stretches of flight, when conversation was impossible over the wind, I held onto her waist and wondered at the strangeness of my life.
Three days ago, I'd been pulling vegetables from my garden.
Now I was hurtling through the sky toward a fate I couldn't imagine.
We stopped twice—once at a waystation carved into a mountainside, once at the edge of a crystalline lake where the dragon—Davoren—caught fish and roasted them with his own breath. During those stops, Kara and I talked.
She told me about her father, the merchant who'd sold her into an arranged marriage for trade rights.
About the husband-to-be who'd made her skin crawl, whose eyes had followed her with something cold and possessive.
About her flight from that fate and the dragon who'd found her on the road, half-starved and desperate.
"He didn't have to help me," she said, watching Davoren's massive form wade into the lake. "A Dragon Lord doesn't owe anything to a runaway merchant's daughter. But he did. He looked at me like I mattered."
I knew the feeling. The wanting it, anyway. The wondering what it would be like.
"And now?" I asked.
Kara smiled—soft, private, the kind of smile that wasn't really meant for anyone else to see. "Now he's everything. Now I can't imagine being anywhere else."
I filed that away. Tucked it into the same drawer where I kept all the impossible things. It sat there, glowing faintly, like an ember that refused to die.