Chapter 27
Roiven’s emotions fade and dull as I go back to my room, then sharpen as I walk by his side to reach Sava.
He changed when I did, tying his hair back and donning a long-sleeved, dark overcoat on top of his leather armor, and thin leather gloves.
I can’t help but wonder if he’s covering his arms because of what I was thinking when we forged the bond.
He’s also got a large bag over his shoulders, nearly as big as a person, and a second coat slung over one arm.
He offers it to me when I leave the room.
I shake my head no to the coat, but I accept the gloves he offers me next, taking just the one for my left hand.
I remember how cold holding onto her spikes felt last time, so high up in the air.
Roiven stuffs the unneeded garments into his bag.
Then he unlocks one of the doors in my courtyard and leads me out onto rugged, uncarved terrain.
When he closes the door, you can’t tell it’s there at all. It’s disguised by a rough stone surface that doesn’t reveal its hinges or rectangular frame.
We’re in the open now, not hidden behind a ridge. And down the side of the mountain, only visible from above, I can see into a dozen green areas that must be gardens for all the food.
Sava waits for us at the top of the mountain.
The massive black dragon’s wings are folded back.
The wind is strong up here. I feel a spike of something through the bond—stubbornness, faint annoyance?
—and then worry crashes through it. The worry has a different timbre to it, and Roiven’s annoyance sharpens in response.
I freeze, my brow furrowed as the emotions overwhelm me.
Roiven, walking ahead of me, stops and turns over his shoulder.
“What?” he asks.
“Is that Sava? Why is she worried?” Surely not because of the bond I just agreed to form, not when Roiven was pushing so hard for it. No, it must be about the Hellions heading to the Tower.
“You mean through the bond?” he asks, eyebrows raised. I nod and he frowns back at me. “You can feel that?”
“I don’t know what I’m feeling,” I mutter.
It’s overwhelming, like having too many people shoved into my head.
Even without their thoughts, it’s hard to keep straight which emotions are mine and which belong to them.
I knew I was agreeing to let Roiven in. I didn’t know I would have anything to do with a dragon.
“My bond with Savasaeirn lets her into my head. Your bond with me must be picking up everything in my head, including her. She can’t communicate with you directly.”
“You hear her thoughts. Are you sure you don’t hear mine?” I ask suspiciously. Roiven sighs.
“Yes, I’m sure. The familiar bond is different. Not… stronger, but different. Our familiars choose us. But a kin bond, we both—”
“Kin bond?” I don’t like the sound of that.
Roiven’s emotions flare into discomfort as he shrugs.
“It’s just what it’s called. If we wanted to speak, mind-to-mind, we’d have to work at it, and even then we couldn’t read a thought the other wasn’t trying to share.”
Well. That’s obviously never going to happen, then.
“Alright,” I say, and rub my head, still feeling overwhelmed.
“Try pushing it away,” Roiven suggests. He starts walking again.
“Pushing?” I don’t mean to snap, but the words come out sharp. I’m completely overwhelmed by trying to balance all the emotions crashing through my head, and listen to Roiven’s words at the same time, and accept the strange reality where I’m kin-bonded to the King of Witches.
“However you want to picture it. Pushing the emotions away, or closing a door with Savasaeirn and me on the other side. Whatever feels natural to you. It will dull the sound, so to speak. But I should warn you it won’t keep me out if I’m trying to get in.”
“That doesn’t feel fair.”
“It goes both ways,” he says with a shrug. We reach Sava’s foreleg.
The witch swings up, scaling her with athletic ease. I spend a moment staring at the bond marks on my left hand before I follow more slowly.
I follow. Roiven is already sitting between two rows of spikes near the base of her neck; the pack is secured between another set of spikes with a veritable web of ropes. He lounges casually, leaning back against the spikes with one knee up in front of him as he tugs his glove on tighter.
“Can you move back?”
I feel a moment of surprise from him, though I can’t think why. He looks up at me, lips slightly parted, then snaps his mouth shut. Roiven scoots back until he’s pressed hard against the back row of the spikes, and waits for me to sit.
I slide down, grabbing tight to the spikes and feeling oddly nervous.
My heart shouldn’t be beating as hard as it is.
Roiven is attractive, and I no longer hate him the way I did the first time we did this, but I have to remind myself riding together doesn’t mean anything.
It’s just to keep from falling. My body grinds against his as I wriggle into a comfortable position.
Sitting so close, I breathe the scent of him in: leather and storm and smoke.
He’s wearing thicker clothes this time; we both are. The leather armor presses against my shoulders. When his hands slowly reach around to grab the spikes right above mine, it’s the gloves that brush my fingers, not his skin.
Despite all that, my heart pounds and I find myself sitting straighter, taking shallow breaths.
“Ready, knight?” he whispers into my ear.
I don’t feel anything from him at all. It’s like his emotions have shut off. He must have done the ‘pushing away’ that he’d talked about.
“When you are.”
Sava launches up and away from the mountain, immediately banking hard to the side as her wings snap out. Roiven’s hand is around my waist the moment she begins to tilt. His arm fits right beneath my breasts, pushing up against them as his fingers splay over my ribcage.
Wait. I stiffen, hands locked on the spikes.
When we rode to the Bluff, didn’t he say something about his magic? How, without his magic, he couldn’t keep us grounded, so we’d need to sit together?
He has his magic now. My mind replays the surprised look on his face when I walked up to him and asked him to make space for me, and the way he was sitting comfortably between the spikes instead of wedged back against them to leave me room.
By all the gods, I was meant to take a different seat, wasn’t I? He could have said something. Now it feels too late to. I could die of embarrassment.
Sava straightens. Roiven’s hand slowly loosens from around my waist and grips the spikes again.
I wonder if I should say something now. But if I admit I know this wasn’t necessary, it might make it sound like I wanted to sit like this, with his hips grinding against my ass and his arms reaching around me to grab the spikes.
Better to pretend it never occurred to me, about his magic.
If he’s uncomfortable, he can tell me to move.
Soon I’m not even thinking about it. Roiven is comfortable and warm. The wind rushes through my hair, so loud my ears ache.
It’s bright out, not nighttime, and despite all the hours I’ve spent looking at maps, seeing the actual world from above is different from an ink drawing.
The waves are white-capped, and achingly beautiful from all the way up here.
I spot a terror of reapers frothing by a set of sea-spines, devouring some unlucky beast. A sea-titan flying our way screeches, as if demanding Sava get out of its way.
She doesn’t change course. At the last second the titan drops below us with another squawk, realizing it stands no chance against a dragon.
We fly over a set of small, low rock isles, and past larger ones.
There are mountains in the hazy distance.
I’m sure I’ve seen maps of this place; I must have.
Over the decades the imperial navy has mapped all of the Wild Seas.
But I can’t recognize any of it from the view on Sava’s back.
The kraken is somewhere down there.
We stop for the first time around noon, on a massive island with flowing freshwater and the ruins of old stone houses.
When I ask if the Tower is here, Roiven only shakes his head and tells me nobody’s lived here for a long time.
He looks freezing, rubbing his gloved hands together for warmth.
We drink the water and Roiven unpacks the bag to offer me a meal.
By the time we mount up the sun seems to have warmed him.
“Are you feeling sick?” I ask. I don't feel cold at all.
“No. Why?” He frowns.
“You looked cold. Like you…,” I start, but Sava launches up into the air, and I abandon words in favor of trying not to scream.
“Flying is cold. I’m surprised you aren’t freezing,” he says as she levels out.
“I’ve always run warm.” I shrug. “If your hands get too cold on the spikes, feel free.”
“Feel free to what?” he asks, his lips right by my ear so I can hear over the wind.
“Warm yourself,” I say, my throat tight enough I’m not sure he can hear me.
But Roiven’s hands slip away from the spikes. He wraps his arms around me, hands tight against me.
“Better?” My voice is thin and too high.
He doesn’t answer. A few minutes later he lets go and tightly grips the spikes again.
When the world darkens in dusk, my stomach drops.
A barren gray stone mountain stands in the far distance between us and the horizon.
And to the left, at the edge of the visible world, there’s a blue glow so wide it must be the entire imperial fleet.
I gulp. At once Roiven’s emotions, gone all day, flood back into my head.
Roiven is fiercely protective and grim. Sava is nothing but fury.
The dragon spirals down toward a rugged, barren spit of rock.
We land near the middle, perhaps a quarter mile between us and the ocean.
The isle is so flat I doubt there are any houses hidden here.
But my visibility is low, now that it’s evening.
I squint as Roiven scales down her side, his large pack slung over his back and thumping against his legs as he climbs.
“This can’t be the Tower.”
“No. We’re not there yet.”
Sava grunts and turns her neck to look at me, as if telling me it’s time to get the fuck off.
I nod to myself, and follow him down. After a whole day of riding, my thighs are so sore every movement of my legs makes me ache.
“We’ll get there by afternoon if we leave early tomorrow. She needs rest,” Roiven tells me. He drops the bag onto the ground beside him with a thump, then rubs his hands for warmth again with a shiver.
“We can’t be very heavy.” The massive dragon launches up into the sky, and the wind knocks into me so hard I lose my footing and stumble a few steps back, nearly falling. I feel Sava laugh at me again through him.
“We aren’t. But most adult dragons spend all their time sleeping or hunting. She won’t fly all day and all night without a real break unless she has to.”
I guess that means the blue glow of the Hellions is still far enough away that Roiven isn’t worried about it. I nod and start stretching with a wince. Sava tilts away from the isle we’re on to skim low over the ocean, hunting for her dinner.
“Should I work on the enchantment?” I ask, as Roiven crouches down and pulls a bottle from his bag. I widen my legs and reach down toward my feet in a stretch.
“I want to wash and eat right now. Later tonight, before we sleep, you can do that.” He takes a gulp of fresh water before offering it to me. I straighten and take it.
“There’s a place to wash?” I ask as I hand it back. His hand grazes against mine for a moment too long as he takes it. “Or—you didn’t mean the ocean?”
Roiven can go in there if he wants. It won’t make him any cleaner. I’ll gladly keep my distance. I clasp my hands behind my back and push my chest forward, drawing in a deep breath. It feels nice to move after spending all day on a dragon. My shirt strains as I feel my muscles lightly ache.
Roiven’s staring. He quickly looks away and starts removing his armor.
“No. A hot spring.”
“Is it far?”
“Fifteen feet behind you.” His voice is clipped and I can’t feel anything from him at all, even when I try, following the connection between us in my brain.
If being connected to a Hellion was like having a knife dragged through your skin, being connected to Roiven is like a thread tied around both our waists.
But right now, a thread vanishing behind the other side of a shut door.
“I’m going in. Look away if you don’t want to see,” he says.
I turn over my shoulder to hunt for a sign of the spring.
Roiven walks past, stripping his shirt over his head as he goes.
In the dim evening light I can make out his broad shoulders and the way his waist tapers in, all lithe grace traced by the cruel lines of enchantment and the pale scars of the ones I’ve removed.
There’s a small pool of water, ten feet across at best. The side nearest to us is jagged with stone, but across the way the rock slopes gently down to the pool.
It doesn’t smell sulfurous. But Roiven pauses at the edge and drops his shirt beside him.
With his back to me, I can tell he’s unlacing his trousers.
Just watching him makes me feel flushed and warm.
The muscles in his shoulders shift as his arms move.
A single lock of hair traces down his back to the middle of the spine, where it overlays the white scars that once commanded him to obey me.
The rest of his hair is pulled forward over his shoulders.
We aren’t friends. We’re barely allies. But gods be damned if the sight of Roiven doesn’t make my mouth water. I roll my neck without taking my eyes off him.
I shouldn’t watch. But he didn’t tell me I had to look away.
It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve seen him naked over the past few days.
I gulp as Roiven eases the trousers down and kicks them off to land on top of the shirt.
I feel a throb between my legs. My mind may know better than to want a witch, but my body disagrees.
It’s been disagreeing a little more loudly every time he strips in front of me.
Roiven freezes, and turns over his shoulder. His eyes lock with mine before I can look away, and he raises an eyebrow in a slow, deliberate move. In the span of an instant, I remember about the gods-damned fucking bond.
He can feel what I’m feeling. The simmering heat beneath my skin and the way my whole body aches.
I’m an idiot. My entire body goes so still I don’t draw a breath. As if Roiven’s some kind of predator that won’t notice me if I don’t move.