Chapter 27
Stesha
In the days and weeks that follow, Zenevieve and Zabriel suffer under the weight of their failures. Zabriel has his mate to comfort him, and he has lost nothing but a battle, so I have no doubt that he will pull himself together. It’s Zenevieve who I’m worried about.
When I look in her eyes, they are dull and empty.
Even in the days after she lost her parents, she was never as devastated as this.
Loss has piled upon loss. Pain is heaped atop pain, and I don’t know how to ease her suffering.
A rider grieving a dragon is grieving a child, a parent, a sibling, and a dear friend all at once, and Zenevieve is grieving both Minta and Shar.
Her pain is an open, aching wound. The flare feels her grief, particularly Nilak.
My useless words do little to comfort Zenevieve, but Nilak approaches her whenever my former ward is on the dragongrounds and nudges her toward the center of the flare.
Destrin’s grandfledgling has no dragon. We will all be her dragon, Nilak tells me later when I ask her why.
I press my face gratefully into her scales, squeeze my eyes shut, and breathe raggedly.
Not for the first time in my life, I am acutely aware that dragons are better than people.
Also, that my life would not be worth living without Nilak.
She clicks her teeth and snorts through her nose, her way of saying she feels the same way about me.
But there must be more I can do to help Zenevieve and understand what she’s been through.
I feverishly turn every event since the dragons returned to Maledin over in my mind, especially the ones that relate to her.
She was in the city for weeks as Odanna, Emmeric’s spy.
She befriended the future queen while she was disguised.
Recently, she visited Isavelle’s crone, and what kind of potion, what kind of poison, did that old woman give her?
I’m suddenly burning to know. Lady Isavelle’s crone owes me some answers.
I remember the way to Amriste, and Nilak and I fly there one morning. I leave my dragon on the edge of the woods and walk down toward the little fields and cottages on foot, finding a man working in a field.
“Can you help me, please? I’m looking for your witch.”
The old man gives me a long, assessing look. Then he points the way. “Cottage at the far end of the village. But she doesn’t like visitors. Or strangers.”
Too bad. She’s getting both.
As I march in the direction the man pointed, there are a great many crows circling above me. They follow me as I approach the ramshackle old cottage, cawing, flapping, and wheeling through the air.
The village of Amriste is neat and pretty, with thatched cottages and a well for drawing water, but I don’t think much of the witch’s dwelling.
The front gate hangs drunkenly on its hinges.
Much of the garden is overgrown with weeds, and the thatch is coming loose.
It looks like a mad old woman lives here, cackling and talking to herself.
Anger burns through me. A human witch should not be treating a Maledinni dragonrider.
I raise my fist and thump three times on the cottage door, and a dry, cracked voice speaks from within. “Come in, dragonmaster. Mind your head.”
I stare in astonishment at the door, and then my eyes narrow in annoyance. This is some kind of witch trick, and I won’t let her know that she surprised me.
I push open the cottage door and stoop low to enter. The old woman is seated by the fire in a sagging chair. It’s very dark and smoky inside, with witchy paraphernalia everywhere. Bundles of herbs, earthenware pots, a mortar and pestle. Gods know what she’s brewing up in here. Probably poison.
“Mistress Hawthorne of Amriste,” I say with a small nod.
“Dragonmaster Stesha of Lenhale,” she replies, just as formally, but with a wicked grin on her lips.
Fine. I’ll rise to the bait. “You know me?”
“Who can mistake a man of your looks? The white-haired man who rides a beautiful white dragon. I’ve heard a little about you from my trainee witch. Oh, how you irritate her.”
The feeling has been mutual, but I say nothing because it’s beneath an Alpha to admit that he’s been irritated by an Omega. I wonder how she knows how I arrived on a white dragon. Perhaps it has something to do with all the crows following me.
“You may sit,” she says, indicating a low stool that would better suit a child than a seven-foot-tall Alpha.
I would like to stand to deliver what I have to say, but I feel silly bent double at the waist. I sit, and I feel even more ridiculous on the stool with my knees up around my ears.
I settle for kneeling on one knee with my forearm braced upon my thigh.
“I came here to speak to you about my former ward, who has visited you with the future queen. You claim she was poisoned, but you made Zenevieve ill. What was the poison, and how did you treat her?”
She examines me with clouded but strangely shrewd blue eyes, the silence punctuated by the crackling fire.
“I know who you speak of. The hazel-eyed young woman who sometimes comes here with my trainee witch. Is that how you still think of her after all these centuries? Your former ward?” The old woman gives me a crafty smile. “Or is it that you enjoy saying mine?”
I clench my teeth and fume. “I say my former ward so you understand that I have a right to ask about her welfare.”
The old witch sits in silence, apparently doubting I have that right.
I try again. “What poison was dragonrider Zenevieve of Vierforn suffering from? Her parents died long ago. So did her brothers and her dragon. I am her only family left and the only one who cares about her.”
“Yes, I see that.” She settles back in her chair, her eyes gleaming with speculation. “The poison was something very old. I could feel it wrapped around her insides. Malicious. Cruel.”
“It was killing her?”
“Not killing her.”
“But what was the poison?”
“Don’t you know?”
I feel my temper mount. “I wouldn’t be here if I knew. I suppose that means you don’t. What did you give her to cure it?”
“A mixture of things, good for purging stubborn poisons from the body.”
“And the poison is gone now?”
“How does the young woman fare? What does she say?”
My dragines throb in my mouth as I remember Zenevieve’s half-lidded eyes and her alluring whisper. Why don’t you be my lavish?
I swallow hard. “Zenevieve is grieving her dragon, and she does not say much. Her memories have come back to her, but that is more of a curse than a blessing. I don’t know what to do.”
The old woman sniffs, clearly brimming with opinions that she’s keeping to herself.
I tilt my head to one side. “You say very little.”
“You did not come here to talk, young man. No one knows you here. No one expects you to be the dragonmaster. You came here because she comes here, and you want to feel closer to your former ward.” The words are spoken with an ironic lilt.
“I came here for answers.”
“Yet you did not speak with her yourself.”
I sigh and look around the little room. I only ever make things worse when I speak with Zenevieve. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. “Is she happy when she comes here?”
“As happy as a dragonrider can be in a witch’s cottage, far from her beloved dragons.”
“Is she ever going to recover?”
“Who can say?”
I kneel in furious silence. Meanwhile, Mistress Hawthorne seems perfectly at ease, and I can feel her judging me for my feelings for Zenevieve and my inability to do anything about them.
“Things between us are not as simple as you seem to think. Heartbreak for our kind isn’t like how it is for humans.
It’s dangerous. We were together once, and she nearly died. ”
“Then don’t break her heart, you silly man. You don’t need a witch to tell you that.”
“I told you, it’s not as simple as that.” I raise my voice in a roar that rattles the windows. Outside, crows are cawing. Biddy Hawthorne merely watches me.
I take a deep breath and get to my feet. “I apologize. I shouldn’t have come.”
I burst out of the smoky darkness and into the sunshine. It was a waste of time coming to Amriste.
When I return to the castle, every rider is eagerly discussing Isavelle’s coronation, because Zabriel has decided without consulting me that his new queen is to be celebrated in the traditional manner, with Dragon Games.
They are a series of competitions for dragonriders with one final victor.
They are a mighty spectacle, and they draw large crowds to the capital.
There are storm clouds raging inside my head, and I don’t take the news well, or the fact that holding the Dragon Games was decided without consulting me, the dragonmaster.
“Now is hardly the time for games,” I say to Nilak as I tend to her at dusk.
Nilak raises her head and gazes proudly across at the other dragons. I can feel the competitive spark inside her. Whether it’s the time or not, the Dragon Games are happening, and she wants us to win.
For Maledin, she insists.
What do you mean? How is this for Maledin?
With a nibble of a talon and a rustle of her wings, she shows me her memories.
She and I slaughtering Brethren Guard. People cowering in fear as dragons flew over the city.
Much has changed since then, but while the people don’t outright fear the dragons, they don’t love them as they once did. The Dragon Games could change that.
“You are probably right,” I mutter, and Nilak gives a soft chirrup of approval, and then one that curls in a question.
“Of course we will compete,” I tell her. “Someone has to show Lenhale what a proper dragon and rider are capable of.”
And we will win, Nilak tells me.
My eyes seek a young woman, and I find her moving among the flare, trailing her fingers over Merrex’s scales and then Omaira’s.
Zenevieve hasn’t smiled in such a long time, and I feel a pulse of agony and yearning so powerful that it takes my breath away.
I want to make her proud. I want to give her hope.
Mistress Hawthorne’s words haunt me, and the implication that I should know what’s wrong with Zenevieve has me breaking out in a cold sweat.
Somewhere, at some important moment, I’ve made a mistake. Missed something huge. Something I’ve been missing for five hundred years, and if I don’t do something to fix things between Zenevieve and me soon, it will be too late.