23. Wind, Leather, and Loam
Wind, Leather, and Loam
They eat well.
I don’t know what I expected—for them to toss a goat’s carcass on the ground, pounce upon it, and call it supper?
Instead, we sit at the trestle table in a perfectly civilized fashion, enjoying roasted boar mixed with wild greens and some kind of berries I’ve never tasted.
I console myself with the knowledge that they don’t intend to starve me. There’s that at least.
They’re wearing clothes now, and it’s deceptive. They look and behave as humans. It’s hard to reconcile this sight of them with the dragons I know them to be beneath the surface, at their cores. Even if they’re not the ones who butchered my village, they’re still dragons. Still killers.
I’m seated at the end of the table on a stool that was dragged in from another chamber. I feel small and ridiculous on the seat that’s so much smaller than the bulky chairs holding everyone else. They’re already so much bigger than I am that I feel like a child in their midst.
Tage never looks at me. He eats and interacts with the others like I’m not present. I can almost pretend I’m not here as I study him without acknowledgment, no recognition at all.
He sits at the head of the table, the four others flanking him. Danhy and Arvos have no difficulty ignoring me. Viggo, with his bright green gaze, glances in my direction from time to time.
A new dragon arrived just before we sat down to eat, a bountiful line of fish in one of his big hands, revealing how he had spent his day whilst the others flew to Penterra. I wonder if more will make an appearance, or if this is it. Five in total.
Viggo greeted Cyphus with a clap on the shoulder, taking the fish from him with an exclamation of approval. “These will make a fine stew!”
Cyphus is nearly as large as Tage, and his eyes are similarly dark, but unlike Tage, his eyes gleam with hints of blue rather than purple. Also unlike Tage was his reaction to me.
His blockish face flashed hot with anger at the first sight of me and Danhy’s hurried explanation of my presence.
“She has to go!” he insisted, the wide planes of his face flickering with shimmery hints of his scaled dragon hide . . . the beast roused, instantly wanting out, hungry to get to me.
The threat from him is so immediate and visceral that I shift on my feet, stepping back, prepared to bolt for what little good that would do me.
I bumped into Tage’s solid body. He had come up behind me. His firm hand closed on my shoulder. “She stays,” Tage informed him in a hard voice that felt loud for all its softness.
Cyphus descended to sullen silence and joined everyone at the table, eating with angry movements, casting me murderous glances for all of his seeming acceptance of Tage’s decree.
He’s obviously not fine with me here. Maybe it’s his size, equal to Tage’s; maybe it’s the fury vibrating from Cyphus’s body; but throughout the meal I wonder how obedient he is to his alpha, how safe I will be in this pride full of dragons .
. . whether I will ever be able to close my eyes knowing he is nearby.
At the end of the meal, everyone goes about their tasks, clearly comfortable in their roles.
For once, the food I ate did not automatically reappear on my plate. I stare down at it, dotted with only a few crumbs. It seems here, I leave a footprint, both metaphorically and literally. Magic isn’t hiding me anymore. At least not here.
I’m directed to help clear the table, bringing food and dishes through a tunnel that opens into another chamber that clearly serves as a kitchen and laundry.
Ten years may have passed, but I recall how to work in a kitchen and set about cleaning with only little direction from Viggo.
These duties clearly fall under his purview, and I’m not sad about that as he seems like the dragon least compelled to kill me.
Well, aside from Tage. He’s the one who decided I would live back in Isstad, after all.
Not that he sticks around after dinner. The alpha disappears, walking in long strides down a tunnel without a backward glance.
“Come. We’ve finished,” Viggo pronounces later, putting out the lantern and casting the chamber to darkness. “Let’s go to bed.”
Bed?
Would I have a bed? Where did they sleep? Where did they expect me to sleep?
I follow him out into the large open space of the cavern, my hands clasped tightly before me as these questions race through my mind like wildfire.
Everyone else is gone. Presumably the many tunnels lead to other chambers, private spaces for each of them. I swallow nervously, wondering if I will be given a room of my own. That feels much too generous for them. Maybe I will sleep on the floor like a dog.
The central fire within the ring of gemstones still burns. Viggo motions to one of the plank benches surrounding it. “You can sleep there.”
I nod as I look at a bench. The wood won’t be very comfortable, but at least I can use a pillow for my head.
At least you’re still alive.
Without another word, he leaves me, done with his tasks, done with me.
I rotate in a small circle, surveying the large empty space, the crackling flames the only sound beyond the scrape of my boots. Slowly, I sink down onto the unyielding bench.
My gaze drifts to the mouth of the largest tunnel. I know it to be the entrance—and exit, for that matter. The way out of their lair.
I study the dark maw, hearing the faint whistle of the wind beyond, contemplating the world outside. Freedom.
If I’m to sleep alone out here, no one would stop me if I just slipped away. They’re all asleep. They would not even notice me gone until tomorrow.
Of course, out there waited the Crags, ready to devour all that was too soft, too weak . . . too human. Me.
If I managed to avoid the various beasts prowling the Crags, there is still the brutal, endless winter. Even with my uncommon tolerance to the cold, another level of cold stirred out there. I could not survive those mountains without the proper clothing and gear.
I glance back to the tunnel leading to the chamber where I’d helped Viggo after dinner. There is plenty of supplies in there. Dried meats and fruits that would last me weeks. I consider the fur rug beneath my feet. It would be bulky but warm enough if I wrapped myself in it.
“Don’t even think about it.”
The voice snags my attention. Looking up, I face Tage. He tosses a blanket at my chest. I catch the fabric, holding it close like it’s a protective shield.
“I don’t know what you mean.” My fingers clench tightly around the wool fabric.
His mouth gives the barest kick at the corners. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“Am I?” I wrap both arms around the blanket, hugging it against me. I suppose I should be grateful he thought to bring me one. “Then you should be able to tell that I’m not lying when I say I won’t spread tales of you or your kind. I will keep the secret of your existence from the world . . .”
He considers me with a hard, unreadable expression. “What you say now can differ from what you do later.”
“Isn’t that true for everyone? There comes a point when you simply have to trust,” I challenge. “Like I trust you when you say I’m your guest and you won’t harm me—”
His voice comes at me, quick as a whip. “You have no choice but to accept my word on that.”
I can’t help it. I shoot a glance back to the tunnel I was contemplating escaping through moments before. Risky or not, it feels like a choice.
“You don’t want to take your chances out there. You won’t make it,” he says, following my gaze. “I’m bred to survive the Crags, and it’s nearly done me in a time or two.”
I look at him with interest. “You nearly died out there?”
He nods once. “I was young. Without a pride. Weak. Starving. Before I found this cavern. Before the others joined me and we formed our own pride.”
My gaze skims him. His powerful body fills out his black tunic and pushes against the seams of his leather trousers. The idea of him ever being weak seems impossible, and I want to know more about him, about the time when he was lost and alone and near death.
He continues. “Even if the Crags don’t kill you . . . my wrath will not be something you wish to face when I catch you. And I will catch you.”
I bristle. He’s as cruel and merciless as I first suspected. He might not have slaughtered everyone in Isstad, but that doesn’t mean he’s harmless and good. “And I’m to trust myself safe with you now? I should just roll over and accept my fate here among you?”
“Do as you’re told. Don’t run away and you will be fine.” He motions to a bench. “I don’t even tie you up at night.”
“Should I have expected that?” I demand indignantly. “You said I was a guest, not a captive.”
He looks at me in such a way . . . as though I’m some poor, deluded soul and I realize there is no distinction for him between the two.
“You don’t understand, do you?” He lowers his head with a shake, loose strands of dark hair brushing his jaw. “After all you’ve seen this day, you fail to grasp what we are . . . and where you are.”
I swallow against the sudden tightening in my throat, instantly seeing a flash of those dragons in the sky, cutting through the air faster than wind, breathing fire .
. . destroying my home, obliterating the only life I’ve ever known and hurling me into this: a new life that scares me so much I have difficulty pulling air into my lungs.
It’s an image that will forever be there, waiting for me every time I close my eyes.
Had it only been a day ago?
It felt like years since I first spotted dragons in the sky . . . since they brought me to ground. Since he swept me into the sky and brought me here.
“The others,” he continues, “think you should be tied up, at the very least.”
At the very least.
“Of course they do,” I murmur. The others voted for my death. That is not such a leap from tying me up like a dog to keep me from running away.
He steps forward suddenly, the motion full of menace. Firelight casts his face into stark lines and hollows. My wary gaze searches, seeking something in him but finding nothing.
Because there is nothing.
Nothing he is willing to reveal to me. He is wholly unknowable, and this only adds to my fear. Not being able to know, to guess, to predict . . .
“You’re alive,” he rasps. “Fed. Warm. You have a place to sleep.”
Self-preservation warns me to stay silent and nod—to bury my defiance the way they bury their dragons, only coming out when summoned.
Still, I hear myself whisper, “Is there not more to living than that? That’s just . . . existing. Not living.”
Is that not why I’ve been searching for a way to break my curse all these years? Because I want more from life than what he described?
Liquid-dark eyes pore over my face, surveying me like I’m an image on canvas to be studied and dissected.
Something cracks in his armor, and I’m given a peek inside him.
His focus lands on my mouth and stays there, fixed, like he’s never seen a woman’s lips before.
With a slow blink, as though emerging from some faraway place, he steps back, evidently requiring distance from me.
“It’s enough,” he declares, his voice low and deep—absolute, a decree not to be disputed.
“It’s not enough.” My voice shakes out of me. “It’s not enough and don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re doing me a favor.”
His gaze sharpens and narrows, his eyes glittering black, and I sense his frustration with me, his anger, because I feel it rising inside me, too, eclipsing the fear. But it’s better.
Better to burn with anger than tremble with fear.
I inhale, and the unique, heady scent of him—wind and leather and loam—fills my nose. For some reason it just makes me more annoyed. It would be easier if he was always the dragon. Always a monster. Never a man who smells so good I want to bury my nose in his chest.
Then I would never forget what he was.
Then the hate could come easily.
Instead, he has to look this way: young, virile, and handsome . . . aware of me in a way no one has been for such an unbearably long time. It’s a tricky matter, drawn to the thing that also repels you.
It’s wrong and confusing, and it has to stop.
Lowering my head, I feign submission, but my attention strays, sliding back to the shadowy tunnel that leads outside to the promise of freedom.
“Get some rest,” I hear him say before he leaves me.
I listen to the receding fall of his steps before I stretch out on the bench, a pillow tucked beneath my head and the blanket pulled up to my chin. I’ll sleep. Rest.
For now.