24. Kailin
KAILIN
"Whether being one of a kind is a blessing or a curse is a decision, not a fact. I made mine long ago. There is no one like me on Aurorys, and no one like Moki, and we are both perfectly content."
—Shaman Saphir Fatewever, to Kailin Strom
Morgateth caught a thermal drift off the southern ridge, letting it carry us upward in a slow, widening spiral, and for the length of the climb, I almost forgot to be sad.
That was his gift to me.
When we flew, the part of me that ached for Alar went quiet, not because it had healed but because there was no room for it.
The wind took everything that wasn't the next gust and the next current, and Morgateth's strength poured through the bond and filled me, crowding out grief.
But then we leveled off above the peaks, and the ache crept back in.
"Stop poking at it," Morgateth said. "It will not heal any faster for your attention."
"I wasn't aware I was doing anything."
"You were thinking and feeling loudly." He banked into a long, easy turn, his scales catching the light and reflecting it into my eyes.
I squinted. "You're one to talk. You are consumed by grief."
"My riders are dead. Your Alar is alive. Besides, I do not poke. I let them lie where they lie."
"It's been a while, and you are still not healed, and you shouldn't give me advice on something you are not handling well yourself."
"As I said, our situations are not the same. I can't heal my wounds, but you can." Beneath his words, I felt the old grief move, banked, enormous, and never gone. "Your prince is not dead. He is merely far away, and yet you mourn him as if you buried him."
"Elu forbid, but you are right. Sometimes it feels like I did."
He was quiet for a few minutes, and I thought he was done lecturing me, but I should have known better.
"Thankfully, feelings are not facts. You taught me that when you told me to stop blaming myself for the dead." He chuffed. "I'm merely returning your wisdom to you."
"And as you said, it's not the same. I'm not blaming myself."
"Yes, you are. You keep thinking that you sent him away by dreaming those death dreams about him, but the truth is that he had to go regardless of your dreams. His family demanded his return."
Morgateth was right, and surprisingly his reasoning helped. Letting go of the guilt eased some of the pain.
I felt his satisfaction ripple through the bond, pleased, as if he'd been aiming for exactly that.
It was the closest thing to comfort Morgateth knew how to give, and I appreciated it.
He would never tell me platitudes because he knew they were useless.
Regrettably, he also didn't say much about anything else because he wasn't much of a talker, and most of our flights were silent.
I wished he could be more communicative.
"How is your shamanic training going?" he asked even though he'd asked the same thing yesterday.
He'd probably heard my thoughts about the silence and decided to fill it with this question because he couldn't come up with anything else.
"It's not as exciting as I thought it would be," I said.
Saphir's lessons were not what I'd imagined a shaman's training would be.
I had pictured fire and vision and the weight of prophecy. Instead, I sat for hours in his office reading manuscripts so old the ink had gone the color of weak tea, while Moki dozed on the warm spot of sunshine on Saphir's desk.
The reaching into the minds of dragons was the only exciting part of my shamanic training.
I could do that with ease when they were close by, but my ability faded with distance.
Saphir believed that I could train myself to stretch it farther, and he had me practice with Nyxath, reaching for the queen of dragons across ever-growing distances, and learning to make my voice clear in her mind.
I was the first human in living memory who could speak to all dragons and not just my own.
The trouble was that living memory did not reach very far.
The old dragons, the ones who might have remembered others like me, were all dead, lost in the Second Extinction War.
The Elucians who survived had been scattered across the Elurian Federation for generations before trickling back home, and whatever they'd once known about shamans and their abilities had faded and been lost.
Then again Saphir, who had been the head shaman before the extinction, didn't know about anyone like me either.
According to him, even Elu hadn't possessed the ability to communicate with all dragons.
He could only communicate with the one he'd been bonded to.
But Saphir himself had admitted that most of Elucia's sacred texts had been destroyed, and that he might be mistaken about our God's ability.
Regrettably, Saphir remained adamant that Elu was flesh and blood.
"It's not a bad thing to be the only one of your kind," Morgateth said, reading the thought before I'd finished thinking it. "I would know because I'm one of a kind as well."
"Is that meant to cheer me up?"
"I'm not an entertainer. I'm just stating facts. I am the most powerful dragon alive save for Nyxath. There is no other like me. I have made my peace with the burden of it."
I smiled into the wind. "Your sense of humor is coming back."
"There is nothing humorous in that statement. I am one of a kind, and that is a fact."
I wasn't sure whether he was serious or just teasing, but I let him have the last word because it cost me nothing, and in a way it was true that there was no other dragon like him.
I had a feeling that each dragon and dragonia felt like they were one of a kind. Alar had told me how vain Veynathei was, and how she thought of herself as the most beautiful dragonia in the aviary.
Which reminded me that I had a promise to keep.
I hadn't reached out to Veynathei yet, and I was ashamed that I hadn't.
It had just been too difficult, and I was too riddled with guilt, but now that Morgateth had managed to alter my perspective on Alar's departure, I felt more confident about meeting the dragonia.
I looked around for a place I could invite her to and spotted the cliff Ravel used to take me to when we were still flying together.
Morgateth didn't need to be told. He shifted his great body, a tilt that sent us sliding down the air toward the eastern face of the mountain.
I reached out to Veynathei, isolating her particular signature, that prickly presence of hers that was easy to identify, and addressed her directly.
"Will you meet me on the eastern shoulder? Do you know the peak that looks like its top was shaved off?"
"I do." Her answer came back instantly. "Why do you want to see me?"
"Because I made Alar a promise that I would check on you. Besides, we both miss him. We can do that together."
"I am coming."
Morgateth set me down on the broad shelf that was the shaved-off top of a peak. "I will go hunting while you talk to Veynathei. If you need me, you know what to do." He launched off the cliff before I could answer, and the downdraft of his wings nearly knocked me flat.
I was glad that he left because I knew that Alar's dragonia wouldn't be comfortable with Morgateth crowding us on that shelf.
She arrived almost twenty minutes later, which was much longer than the flight from the aviary should have taken.
She was indeed beautiful. Her scales shifted colors as she moved, silver to pale gold to a hint of turquoise and a blush of pink, like light thrown through cut crystal, and she landed with a precise, showy grace that no other dragonia I'd seen could match.
She was larger than the others too, larger than any female but Nyxath herself, and I wondered if that was considered an advantage in dragon society.
I had a feeling that it was.
She folded her wings and regarded me with smart amber eyes.
"Hello, Kailin. How are you holding up?"
I smiled. "As terribly as could be expected. I miss him."
She tilted her enormous head. "Why did he tell you to look after me?"
"Because he cares about you. You were newly bonded, and he had to leave. That must be difficult."
"Of course, it is. But it's difficult for you too, and he didn't ask me to look after you."
I stifled a smile. "Maybe he thought that since I'm older, I should be taking care of you."
"You are not older than me in years. Dragons just take longer to mature than humans."
"Ah, I didn't know that. Thank you for telling me."
I wondered why there had been nothing about that in all the lessons we'd had about dragons or the books we had read about them.
"I don't require looking after," she said.
"I know. Neither do I, apparently, but people keep insisting." I drew my knees up. "Maybe looking after is not the right way to regard this. We can just keep each other company and commiserate because we both miss Alar and we are both lonely."
Something flickered behind the amber, there and gone. "I am not lonely. Dragons are patient. I'm waiting for him to return."
"You sound very certain that he will."
She lifted her head. "He has no choice. Distance doesn't break the bond. It stretches and thins but does not break. He will come back to me, and he will come back to you." She shook her great head. "I do not enjoy waiting. But I am a dragonia. I have infinite time to spare."
I felt the sting of tears and blinked them down. "I hope you're right."
"I usually am," she said. "Alar told me so himself."
I laughed, surprising us both, and for a moment, her prickliness eased into something that was almost comfortable, companionable.
"Little Warrior," Onyx's voice sounded in my head, filling me with warmth. "What are you doing roosting on a peak with Veynathei? And where is that ill-tempered beast you bonded with? He does not strike me as one to let his rider wander the cliffs alone."
"He went hunting," I answered. "And I'm not wandering. I'm meeting a friend."
"Hunting." There was a note of vast disapproval in Onyx's mental voice. "He leaves the most strategic asset of Elucia on a ledge and goes to fill his belly. Typical."
I felt them getting closer, Onyx and Ravel, and then Onyx came down out of the light, his obsidian scales drinking the colors rather than throwing them back. He settled onto the shelf beside Veynathei with a heaviness that shook the stone.
Ravel sat in the saddle, goggles pushed up, his dark hair windblown, watching me with critical dark eyes. Evidently he shared Onyx's opinion about me being out here alone with Veynathei.
"Are you following me, Commander?" I asked.
"Keeping an eye on you." He dismounted. "Your paramour asked me to look after you before he left."
I didn't like him using the term paramour in regard to Alar. It wasn't an insult, but it had a negative connotation. It implied temporary status, not an everlasting love.
Then it dawned on me what he'd actually said. "Alar asked you to look after me?"
"He did."
I didn't know what to do with that. Alar had been fighting his jealousy over Ravel for months, sensing that thing between us that had never been romantic but was nevertheless real.
Of all the people he might have asked to watch over me, Ravel was the last I would have guessed, and the fact that he'd chosen him anyway told me something about how frightened my prince had been to leave me, and how much he loved me.
He could have asked Codric, but he didn't believe that Codric had what it took to protect me. He believed that Ravel did, and he was willing to see past his jealousy to keep me safe.
Tears prickled the back of my eyes, but I refused to let them make an appearance.
Ravel came to stand a few paces off, near enough to talk, but far enough so it wasn't intimate, and the morning light caught his eyes, highlighting the gold flecks swimming in their dark depths.
These were the same flecks that had looked down at me from Onyx's back five and a half years ago, the night my village burned and Ravel had arrived with a flight to chase off the Shedun monsters.
Onyx had landed in front of the watch tower and reached into a terrified sixteen-year-old's mind to let her know that he and his rider had seen her, and that she had done well.
That old thread neither of us cared to pull connected us, and it was why Alar had never quite trusted the space I shared with this man.
"You don't need to spy on me," I said. "I'm all right."
Ravel studied me a moment longer, then nodded. "Then I'll leave you to your meeting." He inclined his head toward Veynathei, who had been watching the exchange with what amounted to dragon curiosity.
Ravel got back onto Onyx, and the dragon lowered his massive head until our eyes were nearly level.
"Take care, Little Warrior," Onyx said. "And tell your beast that a rider is not luggage to be set down and collected later."
Then they were gone, climbing into the auroras, and a few minutes later Morgateth dropped back onto the shelf with the unmistakable smugness of a predator who had eaten well.
"Are you girls done?"
"We are." Veynathei stretched out her wings. "Until the next time, Kailin."
"Until next time," I said as she launched into the air.
"Commander Ravel was here," Morgateth observed.
"He was." I climbed up to my place between his wings and buckled in. "Checking on me because Alar asked him to."
Morgateth launched, and the mountain fell away beneath us. For a while, he said nothing, banking lazily through the high currents while I leaned into the wind and let it scour me clean.
"He wants you," Morgateth said. "The want comes off him like heat off a stone."
I knew he was right, but I chose to deny it because to acknowledge it was to admit a thing I wasn't ready to even turn over in my head.
"He's just keeping a promise to Alar," I said instead.
Morgateth huffed, and a plume of fire and smoke rolled back past my shoulder, warm against the cold air.
"You humans love to complicate things that are not complicated."