Chapter 21 #3
She’s right. I shut out everyone and focus on the dragons. Many are injured after so many battles and need my care. I look after them, and I speak to no one.
I reclaim my old rooms in the castle, though I have to stand for a long time in front of the door before I’m able to open it.
The rooms are much changed and neglected and in need of dusting, sweeping, and scrubbing.
It takes me many days before I can look inside the room that was once Zenevieve’s.
After that, I have to keep that door closed or else I keep expecting to see her in there. I eat all my meals in silence.
After Zabriel’s coronation and the majestic displays by our dragons, the people’s fear of our mounts seems to relax a little. I don’t wait for Zabriel’s approval. I tell the dragonriders that they may fly over the city in the old manner, and they and the dragons are happier for it.
Esmeral, the little Omega dragon fated to Zabriel’s Omega, needs an annoying amount of attention from me because she has neither mate nor rider.
But I must do it, because an unhappy Omega is more vulnerable than a hatchling, and I am not so soured in my heart that I would permit her to become injured.
Some evenings, I take walks through the city, relearning my way around the streets. Some things have changed. The main market has moved to the east side. The street sellers hawk unknown dishes. The ruthouse I used to frequent has become a private residence.
Some public houses are still known by the same names. The tanner’s district and the smithies are where they used to be. The gates are once more guarded by men and women who wear Maledinni livery.
Sometimes I think I catch a familiar scent, and it stops me in my tracks, making my heart squeeze painfully in my chest. On my next breath, the scent is always gone. It was never there in the first place.
A dead woman is haunting me.
Her memory flays my soul, leaving me shaken and gasping for breath. I do not begrudge her this revenge. I deserve to be haunted for the rest of my life.
I manage to conceal my torment from everyone, until the day it nearly costs me my head.
I pass Lady Isavelle in the castle grounds as she comes in through one of the city gates. I ignore her and keep walking, but then a scent reaches my nose, mingled with hers.
I turn around and stare at her.
I know that sweet scent.
Blood thunders in my ears. It’s one thing to hallucinate my former ward’s fragrance on the wind, a ghost who is tormenting me from beyond death.
It’s another thing to perceive it on another person.
Slowly, I approach Isavelle. Her bodyguards are distracted while she drinks from a fountain.
In a trance, I reach out and lift a tress of her hair to my nose.
There’s a roar and a thunder of footsteps behind me. Zabriel seizes me and pulls me around to face him, fury blazing in his red eyes. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Does he really suppose that I have designs on his Omega?
The idea is so preposterous that I want to laugh, but nothing about this is funny.
I’ve touched the king’s Omega. Me, who believes in stringent protocol at all times.
Except when I gathered a distraught Queen Magritte into my arms and carried her up to the castle.
Except when I spent my rut with Zenevieve under the shelter of my dragon’s wing while a storm raged outside.
Acting without thinking is a trap I keep falling into.
I snarl something at Zabriel, and he punches me in the face. He demands I fight him. He threatens to take Nilak from me if I don’t, and I see his hateful father looking at me through his eyes.
We fight, and the first time in our lives, Zabriel is able to best me. I have been neglecting my training. I haven’t sparred in weeks. As I pick myself up out of the dust, he demands to know if I covet his mate’s scent.
His mate? He thinks I want his mate? My insides contort with disgust. “Her scent is nothing to me. I thought—I thought I could smell—”
“What? What did you think you could smell on my mate?”
She was here.
She was here.
My heart is beating so fast that I think it’s going to burst out of my chest. Sweat is pouring down my back. Zenevieve is so close I can taste her. Isavelle is staring at me in shock and a little fear. The suggestion that I could covet her or another woman is preposterous. There is no other woman.
I grip my head with both hands, my fingers digging into my scalp. There is no other woman but Zenevieve. This is what I have been wanting to believe for so long, but why only now, five hundred years later, can I believe it? Now that it’s too late. “I think I’m losing my mind.”
Zabriel has no sympathy for me. I pull myself together, apologize, and stagger away from him.
It’s a cold winter in Lenhale. Every snowflake that lands on Nilak’s back is a memory of Zenevieve and the day up on that mountain when she was so briefly mine. Every snowflake is painful. As the days pass, there are strange happenings afoot, reminding me again that this is not the Maledin of old.
Half of Lady Isavelle’s village is slaughtered, impaled on magical vines.
A city woman called Odanna stole a wyvern and lured her there, which means she’s not a city woman at all, but a Brethren spy.
We search for the girl, but we find no sign of her.
Or rather, I don’t. The wingrunners catch Odanna first.
The first I know that something’s gravely wrong is when I pass a wingrunner and he is covered in Zenevieve’s scent. It’s unmistakable this time. Not a dream. Not a ghost. It’s her.
I seize the Beta by the lapels of his uniform and yank him to me. “Where is she? I know you have been near her. I know you have touched her. Tell me where Zenevieve is. Tell me why you’ve touched her.”
“Are y-you talking about the s-spy, dragonmaster?” he asks, shocked that my enraged face is suddenly an inch from his.
“The spy? Don’t be fucking stupid. Where is Zenevieve?” My Alpha roar erupts up my throat and shakes the air around us.
“The prisoner was taken to the Great Hall, dragonmaster,” he gasps, because I have given him no choice but to answer.
Prisoner. She’s a prisoner? I release the man and run. I don’t understand how this can be happening, but that is Zenevieve’s scent I can smell. She’s alive. She’s here. Perhaps the gods have not forsaken us after all.
As I fight my way through the crowd, I hear her voice and nearly fall to my knees in relief and happiness, but she’s speaking in a strange monotone.
“…didn’t like Lady Isavelle. She told me she was having visions, and so I waited until she was alone with her dragon and gave her a happy vision of her family returning home.”
Zenevieve is unemotional and she’s saying impossible things. She can’t give visions to anyone. She never practiced dragon magic, and she’s not a witch.
I can’t see her, but I can see Zabriel on his throne, gripping the golden arms of the chair, and his red eyes are bright with fury as he glares at a kneeling figure just out of sight. Lady Isavelle is at his side, and his rutting scent fills the Great Hall.
“You have been working with the Brethren, and you will be punished as a traitor to Maledin,” he snarls.
“No!” I shout, pushing forward. I break through the crowd and finally see her, but it’s not Zenevieve as I knew her.
She has not looked this way since she was fifteen.
Her caramel hair hangs in strings and her hazel eyes are dull.
Gone is any sign that she once bonded with Minta.
Gone is any sign that she knows my voice.
She doesn’t look up at me. She doesn’t seem to recognize anyone around her.
I turn to the king. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying. Please don’t hurt her.”
But Zabriel’s rut and his fear for his mate make him crave vengeance. He questions Zenevieve while she answers him in monosyllables, clearly out of her mind from some unknown trauma, but Zabriel doesn’t seem to see it, and the king is on the verge of ordering her execution.
I beg on my knees for him to spare Zenevieve. “If you must satisfy your rage, punish me instead.”
Zenevieve is right by my side. I could reach out and touch her, but she doesn’t turn her head or even acknowledge my presence.
Zabriel glares at me with his father’s eyes, a breath away from making one of his father’s hateful decisions. “One more word, dragonmaster, and I’ll banish you from Maledin for the rest of your life.”
My life is already not worth living. I will give everything up to save Zenevieve. “I will leave Maledin forever. I will release Nilak back to the flare. I will do anything. You may beat me. Starve me. Kill me, I don’t care. Only don’t hurt Zenevieve.”
I hear Nilak’s desperate, unhappy scream from the dragongrounds.
I’m sorry. I have to. This is all my fault.
Finally, it is not the king who shows Zenevieve mercy.
It’s his future queen. She gently points out that he’s in a rut, and he should not make any hasty decisions.
I was not under the impression that Lady Isavelle knew the first thing about ruts or that she cared about anyone or anything apart from herself.
She reminds Zabriel of the kind of king he wants to be, something he must have confessed to her in one of their private moments.
A merciful one.
Zabriel asks me what Zenevieve’s punishment should be.
Nothing.
But Zabriel isn’t going to let me take her home with me. If her mind is broken, then the next best place for her is in the Flame Temple. The Temple Mothers know how she has suffered, and they will treat her well. “Zenevieve should be placed somewhere until we are able—”
Zabriel speaks over me and orders Zenevieve to be locked up in the dungeons like a criminal, and I am ordered to stay away from her. He is concerned that I might grab the girl and flee, and he’s right to fear it because I am sorely tempted.
My former ward is dragged from the room by soldiers and taken down into the dungeons, and I am helpless to do anything but watch.