Chapter Nine #2
“You needn’t remind me of anything,” he says, passing it to me.
Our fingers touch and our gazes meet. He doesn’t let go of the glass.
“The power your transformation revealed was felt by all of us here. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zhoric and the strongest in Dyēus sensed it.
If the very gods themselves did.” He lets go of my glass and takes up his own.
“But no, the creatures you kill are something else. We don’t leave the Realm at night, and most of us don’t leave during the day, not unless we want to tussle with a dragon of Dyēus when we can’t even shift at will. ”
There’s more to know about the dragons I’ve killed, who they are, but my chief concern right now is him. “You left,” I remind him.
He smirks around the glass raised to his lips. “I’m special,” he says before taking a sip.
I give him a placating smile, and he must know it because he chuckles.
I twist my glass in my hands, watching a thin layer of liquid cling to the sides.
“What do you mean by the power my transformation revealed?” I recall all the long looks I got while walking here.
I assumed that all new faces were met with the same reaction, but perhaps not.
“You tell me.” He takes a long sip. “Why don’t you tell me your story to see if we can figure out how this all adds up?”
I take a drink, then wet my lips after swallowing down the burn.
“I don’t know if I want to help you figure out anything at all, at least until I see Ninon.
I don’t even know if she’s really here.” Aside from my own life and my sister’s, right now, she’s the only thing that matters to me.
Everything he’s saying could be a lie. Everything Atlanta said could be a lie.
I can’t deny what I’m feeling inside my body, though.
It’s as if that missing piece I’ve felt my whole life has finally been placed in the palm of my hand; I only need to twist it until it fits right.
Ozias snorts. “You were wrecked when we arrived, but not deafened. You didn’t hear her screaming for you? She’d been so quiet up until then. Certainly didn’t expect that level of profanity from her.”
She had told him to fuck off. I draw my lips into my mouth, stifling my smile, considering what I should do.
Our eyes meet, his golden gaze blazing with hunger.
Desire. And while I know that look all too well, he has good reasons for wanting to know about me, and I don’t pretend it’s anything otherwise.
Still, I’m here, for better or worse, and I can’t leave without risking my life, or someone else’s.
And there’s a large part of me that wants to know more about this, whether it’s a lie or not.
Even with the violence and loss of control last night, I’ve never felt more powerful, more myself. “Where should I begin?”
Ozias tilts his head, loose hair falling from the knot at his crown. “Let’s start at your selection ceremony, shall we?”
And I so tell him how the Sar Dyēus deemed Ninon and me undesirable, the heat I felt in my chest when he did. I tell him of the first time I saw Alixor, and how he wanted me immediately.
“The Sar Dyēus reminded him I was marked as undesirable. Alixor’s father, Selnor, even protested the selection at first.” I shrug. “Alixor was adamant though, and so he got to have me. By the time I went to Dyēus, Alixor’s father didn’t seem at all concerned.”
Ozias hums. “I know Selnor’s elahi,” he begins, but elaborates at my curious expression.
“Elahi is a unique power that only some have, which makes us stronger than others; or as Dyēus call themselves, elite—but Alixor was born only fifty years ago. I never found out what his was. He must have sensed your power with whatever elahi he had. My suspicion is Zhoric placed a concealment on you during your selection ceremony; otherwise others would have wanted to breed with you, too.”
My eyes widen as I remember Alixor’s words. “Last night, before Alixor attacked me, he said something in that vein. About my potential?”
Ozias smirks, his head shaking as a low chuckle rises from deep in his chest.
“What?” I place my empty glass down on the table next to us. When I lean in, he does, too.
“I think the Sar Dyēus is about shitting himself right now. The question is, will he try to get you back, or is he going to let this thing play out here?”
I straighten in my seat, pulse pounding in my ears. “He can’t do that. You said I’d be safe here.”
“Oh, you’re safe here,” he says, but then he shakes his head.
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways for him to get to you.
” Ozias taps his knuckles against his mouth, then stands and paces a little in front of me.
“The Sar Dyēus wants no other in the world to have more power than him, and I think you might end up being his match. Which is exactly what we need.”
My fingers curl around the arms of the chair as I watch him pace, figuring things out at breakneck speed while I rush to catch up. “Did you know this? Before you took me?”
He leans down close enough that if I surged upwards, our mouths would meet. “You mean before you begged me to take you?”
“If that’s how you remember it,” I say, not backing down.
His mouth is a pretty smile. “I think you should ask me what my elahi is.”
I tilt my head. “Why would I think you have one?”
“I told you I was special.”
My mouth twists into its own little smirk. “What’s your elahi, Ozias?”
He pins me with his amber eyes, glittering and alive. “I do believe that’s the first time you’ve said my name. It sounds lovely coming from your lips.”
I lift a brow and wait. He’s as smooth as one of the farmhands on delivery day.
His mouth twitches in and out of a smile. “Aside from replicating magic, I can see potential bonds between draconem pairs.”
I close my eyes and draw in a deep, slow breath, then open them again. “What, exactly, is a bond?”
Ozias grins. “I’m so glad you asked.” He draws away and pours himself another finger’s worth of liquor, then motions that I’m welcome to help myself to more. I don’t.
“Bonds are sacred, cherished among our kind.”
I tuck my hair behind my ears in an attempt to ignore the rippling under my skin at hearing his words. Ozias gives me a sidelong glance, pausing long enough that I take in a few controlled breaths to calm myself. He sets down the decanter and looks out to the open sky.
“Dyēus doesn’t allow bonding, but draconem here will—though we can’t make use of its true purpose.
The bond is what keeps us whole, for lack of a better word, when we collect souls.
For every soul a draconem collects, their partner is supposed to cleanse.
” He picks up a decanter of water and pours it into the glass of amber liquid until it runs clear, spilling over onto the table, down to the floor.
“But, if the second half of the pair isn’t there…
” He fills up the glass again, this time with the alcohol until the liquid turns the clean water brown, the smell overpowering, the cup running over the edge.
“And because Dyēus doesn’t allow bonding, the draconem out there collecting souls are turning savage and dying. Without a bonded partner to purge the impurity they take from a soul before it can be granted to the gods, they’re consumed by it.”
“Are all souls filled with such malaise?”
“Most have a little, some are teeming with it, and a very rare few have nearly none. Without cleansing from a bonded partner, it stays in our bodies. The dragons you’ve slain, the ones you thought were rogues, are those diseased dragons—the ravaged, we call them.
They, as much as you, didn’t have a choice in what happened to them.
They are the boys they’ve forced you to surrender.
The ones they’ve stolen from us. They are the draconem they’ve deemed less than.
” With every word he says, I wrap my arms tighter and tighter around my middle, my fingers digging into my ribs.
I don’t want to believe it, but how can I not?
I’ve witnessed them take and take and take and seen the meager rations we get in return and have been out in the Sere to cut down the creatures they supposedly protect us against. I don’t want to hear anymore, but Ozias doesn’t stop.
“And when one of them dies, another draconem, or someone who was meant to be, dies too. Someone they had potential to bond with.”
It takes a moment for me to register his meaning. If all of us in Nevoba are supposed to be draconem then…my mouth falls open. “The deaths in Nevoba.” Ninon’s mother. All the others.
He nods, his expression grim. “Here, too. And in Dyēus we imagine.”
I cannot undo what I’ve done. I know that, and yet I recall every dragon I’ve taken from the sky. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment. “Can they be saved?”
“We’ve never had access to one to find out.
What we do know is that the deaths are happening among our weakest shifters.
Among those who don’t have an elahi. You will be safe, as far as we can tell based on what we’e seen from your energy output, but…
I cannot say the same for your friend. She’s taken a long while to acclimate to the transition, and none of us feel an elahi within her. ”
I hang my head and press the heels of my hands against my eyes so tight that colors dance behind my closed lids. Ninon’s always worried that her fate would match her mother’s. And now…she might actually be right. My ears buzz and my head swims.
Ozias’s hand lands on my shoulder near my neck. “We can’t change what’s happened. We can, however, change what will be.”
I shake my head, and when he moves to pull his hand away, I grab his wrist, clutching him tight. I lift my head, heavy and reluctant until I meet his eye. “How? You’ve been stuck here for over a century. What change can happen now that hasn’t already been tried?”
Ozias kneels down so that we’re eye to eye. “I told you I can see potential bonds. And now, because you’re here, there’s something new we can try. Something that has never been done before. Something only you can do.”
My heartbeat thrums. “What I can do?” Is he telling me he saw a bond between us? That his elahi and whatever mine is can accomplish something together? Or perhaps my elahi on its own can help.
He keeps his gaze locked with mine, making sure I hear him, making sure I understand. “You can bond with the Sar Dyēus.”
My ears ring and I’m suddenly dizzy. I suck a deep breath through my nose. I couldn’t have heard him right. “What?”
“I saw it yesterday, Kaisa, clear as day, when the two of you were in the same space. I saw the line connecting you.”
I can’t fathom a reason he would lie about this. I curse Erenmaag, the god of fate and agency, to have laid this burden upon me. I press my lips into a thin line. “Is there no one else?”
“Not in all these years have I seen a bond going to or from the Sar Dyēus. Not until yesterday. Not until you.”
“What would bonding with him accomplish, exactly?” I snatch my hand from his wrist, and he sits back on his heels, giving me some space.
“When you bond, you share power. What’s yours is his, and what’s his, is yours. Once bonded, you’ll be able to remove the god power he stole. When it’s returned to the gods, the balance of our world should restore as well.”
“No more sudden deaths.”
He shakes his head slowly. “No more.”
I chew on the edge of my thumbnail. If it will save Ninon, there’s no question, none whatsoever, on whether I’d do it.
And yet, a thought churns in the back of my head.
This unshakable sense of self-preservation that my mother always called selfishness.
And perhaps it is. “Will I have to stay bonded to him? Once I’ve removed the god power?
” I cannot tie myself to that man for my life.
I’d kill him before I endured that fate.
“A bond can be broken at will.”
I nod, squeezing my hands together. “How is it done?”
“As with most things, it’s easier said than done. And there’s much we’ll need to do before we get to that.”
“The deaths in Nevoba have become more frequent.” What I really mean to say is, do we have the time to do what is necessary? Before it’s too late?
“It’s been the same here.” His gaze strays to look out the windows surrounding us before focusing back on me. I feel like I can’t get enough air into my lungs. Ninon is at risk and every day that passes could be her last. I realize he’s waiting for me to say something. He’s waiting for my answer.
I look him in the eye. “I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever it takes.” And I will do it quickly, because I don’t have another choice.