35. Eradin
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
ERADIN
Reece and Lyndie disappeared into the corridor, and the door banged closed behind them.
Fenian and I guided our dragons toward one of the remaining arches.
“Stay close behind me,” he said.
“No,” I said with a huff. “You stay close behind me.”
His mouth curved.
Selira burst forward, flying into the opening. Fenian and Aristus weren’t far behind.
The threshold felt like passing through water, thick and resistant. My ears popped. The temperature dropped so fast my next breath frosted in the air. Then we were through, and the door’s slam behind us had the finality of a tomb sealing.
The world dropped away, and the magic of this trial activated.
Cold water came up to meet me like a fist. The silver lake swallowed the arena and the horn and the sky and us in one black gulp. The same lake that had turned Lord Callix and a dozen others to stone on the first day of the Scorching.
Down. Water sucked us down, and we kept going. My hands clawed for reins that weren’t there.
Except…I’d never flown a dragon before Selira, so I didn’t use reins.
And these weren’t my hands.
They were too big. Callused across the fingertips where mine ran smooth. Soft palms where mine were split and burning. Broad fingers that knew the grip of a sword and had never once crushed graymallow into a wound. I turned them in the murk and did not know them.
And the dragon beneath me?
Aristus.
Was I…inside Fenian?
No, it wasn’t possible.
But it could be.
Panic flooded me, and I flailed, my arms and legs flying outward.
Stop. Selira’s voice in my mind that wasn’t my mind but possibly Fenian’s.
Selira? I cried out.
No, it didn’t feel like her.
Aristus?
His low rumble rippled up through my thighs, but distant, as if he’d spent his life in water, trying to break the surface to scream.
I rode him. Not Selira. And I was drowning, floundering in the murky deep that ate whatever it could steal, leaving what was left in a watery grave. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. My heart thundered, and my lungs screamed for air.
Something wrenched me off Aristus and he was swept away. Gone with Selira. And…
I hit the lake bed on my hands and knees.
As I clawed at the sandy floor, panic shoved my magic up. It spilled off my knuckles in blue.
Fenian’s blue. A killing color I’d watched the prince throw in a garden to save me.
My lungs were on fire. I pushed off the lake bed and shot up, passing stone people and dragons locked mid-scream, their arms flung toward a surface they’d never reach. Callix was near enough to touch, one hand still outstretched, his mouth open on a word the water had stolen.
A small, clear glass rectangle sat on the silt beside him, and under it, on a scrap of dark cushion, a round, pale bead glowed.
A swallowed moon.
Someone bumped into me, and I bit back my scream, spinning to face them.
I knew the reddish-brown hair fanning in the water. The narrow shoulders. The red lines climbing a pair of hands I’d worn my whole life, the talon-blade riding a hip that was mine. The body thrashed, a stranger driving it under.
Fenian…inside me.
My lungs could not pull in air. Pressure built beneath my bones, spreading like something alive, reaching through flesh and muscle. Wanting out. My vision doubled. For one disorienting moment, I saw through Fenian’s eyes. Myself, my face tight with concentration.
Then I snapped back into his body with a gasp that bordered on a sob.
New emotions slammed me sideways, determination so fierce it made my tendons ache. Except I wasn’t determined about anything right now except not dying.
I gaped at him, finding him looking at me with pure shock on his—my—face.
Fuck, if I was feeling him, then he was feeling…
…me.
Latching onto his—my—arm, I kicked, driving us both toward the far, faint light of the surface—
We impacted with a clear, smooth wall, a dome of nothing arching over the whole graveyard, sealing us inside with the dead. It ran on and on, unbroken, and the light beyond wobbled, close enough to see but never to touch.
We’d been switched.
I couldn’t work out how, or why, or what undoing it was supposed to look like. The trials had reached into me before and shown me things. Made me feel things. But it had never pulled me out of my own skin and dropped me into his.
The burn in my lungs climbed and never crested. The lake was holding me at its edge on purpose, curious to see how long I’d last.
And that scared me worse than drowning would have.
However this ended, it ended the same. I’d die in Fenian’s body while he died three lengths away in mine. Two strangers in the wrong skins.
Neither of us would ever get home.
I dragged him closer and stared into his wide, fear-filled eyes, and linked our fingers.
Fenian gripped back.
The lake pressed down.