Chapter Thirteen
I’M NOT UNUSED to Ninon and I learning at different paces.
While horse riding came naturally to me, Ninon floundered.
Reading the stars and navigating across the wide open Sere was something Ninon picked up easily, as if she’d been doing so her whole life, whereas I would get turned around in the dark.
Where I could move silently and swiftly, she lumbered.
Where she could sit for hours reading texts, I lost interest the moment there were no illustrations or diagrams.
It’s no surprise that shifting is the same. Still, I was hoping my presence would keep Ninon from turning savage, but as night spills across the sky, I hear her grunts and huffs, the clattering of her chains as she thrashes.
Last night, I was overwhelmed by all the things my dragon eyes could see and my senses could experience.
Tonight though, I flex my wings, stretching them tall behind me, testing how far they fan out in the confined space of the enclosure.
I examine myself, this body that’s suddenly mine.
My scales are the color of the underbelly of a fat cloud over the Rising Sea, a silver gray with the promise of rain.
I flick my long tail to coil around my body, the tuft of hair on the end a mossy green.
I watch, mesmerized by the tendrils as I flick my tail up and down, over and over.
Incredible as this body is, relishing in the feeling of it being mine and my own means of reaching the sky, I grow bored.
I lay my head down. As my eyes drift closed, I remember seeing the Sar Dyēus and they snap back open.
I don’t want to see him again. Last night I was thinking deeply of him.
Perhaps if I don’t think of him at all, I won’t dream of him again.
Instead, I think of Ninon, wondering when she’ll overcome this stage of her transformation.
I think of home, the women we left behind.
I wonder if my mother knows, if anyone has bothered to tell her, that I’m not in Dyēus with Alixor – that he’s dead.
Maybe they told her I’m dead. My eyes close as I wonder if Kalixta is in Dyēus with Thrace, reunited with her boy child, like he said she would be—she would know then.
Would she send word to our mother? Would the Sar Dyēus allow it?
I can just imagine his steely expression, the sardonic twist of his mouth, his perfectly placed hair falling out of place, like the way he spoke to me the morning he took Kalixta’s son to the sky. My heart trips on a beat.
I catch my thoughts too late. I look down and my feet are on the smooth polished floors of the castle. I look up and I’m in his rooms once again. I didn’t even realize I’d fallen asleep. Wake up, I urge myself, but nothing happens.
The room is empty. I try to wake myself up again, when I feel a pull; something like a thread tied around my middle, guiding me to the doors that lead to the halls. They open and the Sar Dyēus walks in.
He pauses, eyes on me for a moment, so intense and unyielding that I’m certain he must see me, but then they drift by, glancing around the rest of the room before he ventures all the way in, passing through me like a hand through smoke.
I watch, eyes wide like a saiga stuck in my sights as he moves about the room.
He loosens the cuffs at his wrists and neck, setting the links down inside a set of drawers near the bathing chamber.
He rolls up his sleeves and moves to the other side of the room, passing me, so close that his shoulder should knock into mine, except it slips through as if I were made of mist. It’s all so mundane; the strangest dream I’ve ever had.
It’s almost as if I walked in on him, a spirit watching from another world.
My thoughts bounce from this realization to what I overheard earlier in the night.
What word did Atlanta say? Something walking?
Is this a dream, or is it something more?
I know draconem have powers, most I don’t understand. I have to wake up.
I grasp for the thread I sensed earlier, only now it’s gone. “No,” I whisper, twisting around, hoping to feel it again. I press my fingertips into my temples. “No, no, wake up, wake up. This isn’t real. This isn’t happening. It’s all a dream.”
The Sar Dyēus pours water into a kettle and sets it over a flame. He stands there, hands braced on the table, shoulders hunched, his back to me. He stays still as a stone, but I feel I’m flickering like a flame, my form all heat and no substance.
Cautiously, I take a step toward him. His fingers curl deeper into the table. I take another step and he rises to his full height, turning to look out at the night sky.
I approach slowly, angling my body so I can see his face. I swore when he walked in he looked directly at me. Last night in my dream, he told me to get out. That seemed more dreamlike than whatever this is. In fact, if this is a dream, I’m not certain how my thoughts are so clear.
When I draw up to his side, I study the smooth angles of his face for a moment, before I whisper, “Can you see me?” I don’t know how I’m expecting a dream to respond.
He inhales deeply, then turns back to the table and spoons dried tea leaves into a pot.
Anytime I wanted something when I was here in Dyēus, one of the attendants would do it for me. I look around again. No servants; no one but him and me.
His hand moves with ease, pouring the now steaming water over the leaves to let them steep.
He arranges the pot and a cup on a wooden tray, lifts it from the table, and takes it over to the open balcony where I saw him last night.
He sets the tray on the smooth stone floor before folding himself down next to it.
Then he simply sits there, staring out into the dark night, lit only by the stars, the twin moons, and the gods eyes in the sky, the area between the ovals glittering bright like a hazy, sun-bleached rainbow.
I slowly pace the room, hoping the mundane nature of this dream will wake me or move me to another, but no matter how I try, I always end up facing him.
I twist away, grunting in frustration. Trying another tactic, I go to his drawers to rifle through the contents to see what my mind might conjure, but my hands pass uselessly through everything I touch.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of the door.
I walk towards it with purpose, but stop hard about a centimeter away, as if I ran into a wall.
“What?” I raise my hand and it crosses through, but when I try to make another step forward, it’s as if a rope is tied around my middle, stopping me from going any further. I spin around to face him, and he’s still sitting there, sipping his tea.
“This is ridiculous.” I try the handle again, but every effort only proves how stuck I am.
With a huff, I drop my hands heavy against my thighs, a loud clap echoing through the room.
The Sar Dyēus pauses in his motion, the cup in his hand hovering over the tray on the ground before he places it back down.
Had he heard me? I stride across the room, stopping mere inches behind him.
He doesn’t turn. Doesn’t say a word. I lean down next to his ear, looking him sidelong in the eye. “Blink if you hear me.”
He glances down, picks up his cup, and takes a noisy sip.
I furrow my brow. “What an annoying dream.”
His hand tightens around his cup, his eyes locked on the gods eyes above us. I follow his gaze. The ovals shimmer, iridescent in the darkness, steady and far brighter than last night. Otherwise the sky looks unchanged, no cause for the tension I’m sensing from him.
With nothing else to do, and nowhere to go, I sit beside him.
And since he cannot see me, I stare at him.
Elbow on my knee, chin resting on my hand, I leisurely run my eyes across his face, appreciating the slope of his nose, the bow of his lips, the stern set of his brow.
It’s a shame he’s done such horrible things for as beautiful as he is.
With the room silent, and my head empty of thoughts as I gaze at him, I hear muffled sounds of crying babies in the nursery.
I look towards the noise. A small baby wails, the sound pained.
When I turn back to him, the muscles around his eyes are tight.
Then his eyes close, almost as though he can’t help himself.
“How strange,” I murmur. Why would he endure sounds like this when he can silence them?
A memory charges through me, fast and furious.
Once, when I was young, a mother giving up her son refused to remain silent.
The girl she’d born didn’t survive and when they took the boy, she wailed and screamed while others held her back.
Even with the great hall densely packed with all of us to witness, the sound of her shrieks still echoed in the caves, splitting my ears.
I remember not being able to breathe. I remember Ninon putting her hands over her ears.
I’d pulled at her, trying to leave, but she wouldn’t.
Then the sound stopped. The mother’s mouth was still open, throat corded, eyes bulging as tears streamed down her cheeks, but there was no sound.
The Sar Dyēus’s hand was raised in a fist, and I knew, right then, that he’d taken the sound of her despair, or covered it so it could no longer be heard.
Ninon left with me after that. I cried that day, praying that I wouldn’t have to endure what that woman did.