51. Eradin #2
“The collar.” I stared at my hands. The red lines glowed brighter than they ever had, the light climbing past my elbows.
“My magic felt it when I saddled him for you.” I should’ve mentioned it right away, not waited until the trial had finished.
“Selira says the wild ones have always known. I hoped I was wrong or that this was just pain where the collar rubs.” The words came out ragged.
“Every bonded dragon wears a collar. They all have abrasions under their tack.”
“We remove the harnesses, breastplates, and saddles, but never the collar. Why?”
“Without it, they’ll die.”
I tilted my head, studying the collar interwoven with runes. “Will they or is that what you’ve been told?”
He raked his good hand through his hair. “I…don’t know.”
“Has anyone ever removed the collar?”
He shook his head. “No one would dare try. Every child dreams of bonding with a chosen dragon. We want this.”
“But do the dragons?” I stroked Aristus’s leg. “My magic thinks this is a serious wound, not just an abrasion. Let me…” I reached out again, slower this time, letting my magic lead. The heat built as I got closer, but I pushed through it, my fingertips brushing the metal.
The world tilted.
Images flooded me. Not mine. Aristus’s.
Twenty-three years of pressure. The collar magically adjusting as he grew. His scales deforming around metal that never went away. Magic flowing through runes that weren’t just restricting his fire. They were restricting him. His growth. His healing. His ability to be what nature intended.
He was dying, slowly fading away into nothing.
I pulled my hands back, but the images didn’t stop. They kept flashing through my mind.
You see now, Selira said through the bond. We try to warn young ones, before the metal. We say, stay away, stay away. They do not always listen.
How could they listen when they were stolen the moment they hatched from their eggs?
“Do the mother dragons fight when you take their hatchlings?” I asked.
He blinked a moment before shaking his head. “I’ve never seen that part of the process. The council handles this for the kingdom.”
“There are no records?”
“None I’ve found, and I’ve read extensively in the archives.”
Hmm. I couldn’t fix that part of all this now. Only what was happening to Aristus. Assuming I could fix it.
The retirement pens were full of dragons barely thirty years old who moved like creatures three times their age. Aerie dragons stopped responding to anything but pain, while the wild ones stayed sharp. They were alive in ways the bonded ones weren’t.
I’d spent years watching elite dragons fail, telling myself it was breeding. The cost of domestication.
I was wrong.
They weren’t fading because of what they were. They were fading because of what had been put on them.
My palms blazed bright enough to throw light on the grass.
“Every bonded dragon.” The words scraped up my throat. “Every single one. The collars are slowly killing them all.”
Selira turned toward Aristus. Whatever passed between them had no words. She made a low sound I’d never heard before.
Mine. Hurts.
Fen shifted his feet on the ground and desperation flickered across his face. I’d seen that look before, the one you got when you had to find a way out, when you kept turning something over, hoping it wouldn’t hold up.
It did.
His hands twitched at his sides. That was what frightened me most. I could handle rage or denial, but he’d gone absolutely still. He gazed down at his hands like he wasn’t sure they were his.
“Fen.”
He didn’t answer.
“Talk to me.”
“I knew something was wrong.” His voice came out even, the tone of someone holding a cracked thing very carefully to keep it from falling apart.
“So many healers. Months of telling myself it was training stress. That he just needed rest.” He turned his hands over, looking at the palms now. “I knew, and I kept choosing not to.”
He laid his forehead on Aristus’s neck.
I remained where I was. Some things needed to be done without witnesses.
When he stepped back and faced me, his face had been scraped bare.
“Take it off.” His voice cracked. “Whatever it’s doing to him—”
“You know what they teach us. Break the band, break the beast.” I made myself hold his eyes.
“Maybe that’s one more lie. But if it isn’t, and I pry that thing loose with magic I barely control, in the middle of the race, with nothing left in me after that trial, I’ve killed him myself. I won’t gamble him on maybe.”
“Can you fix it then?” he asked. “Do something to keep it from killing him?”
The misery in his voice stabbed through my chest.
“I don’t know.” I studied the collar that had been slowly strangling him for two decades. “Maybe. If we weren’t in the middle of a fates-damned race designed to kill us.”
“After, then.” Fen’s jaw locked. “When this is over. You can fix him.”
The certainty in his voice hollowed out my insides.
“That’s your wish. You’re not here for glory or to prove yourself. You want to save Aristus.”
“I’ll do anything,” he said quietly. “Trade anything. The crown, my title, my life. Whatever it takes to help him.”
My hands were still glowing, the red lines pulsing beneath my skin.
Tolross was dying.
So was Aristus.
Only one of us got the Oracle’s wish.
Stepping aside meant watching them die when we could’ve saved them.
“We keep going,” I said.
“Until we can’t.”
“One of us will lose.”
“Yes.”
He ducked beneath Aristus’s neck and stopped in front of me, his hands gently cupping my shoulders before sliding down my arms to thread our fingers together.
The contact burned worse than the collar had, because this meant something, and we both knew it.
Curling forward, he kissed my forehead before pressing his against mine, his arms sliding around to hold me tight.
Lyndie came over to stand beside us, her face pale but her eyes sharp. She looked at my glowing hands.
“You found something,” she said.
“The collars are slowly killing the bonded dragons.”
Her jaw dropped, and her gaze cut to her own dragon, to the collar it wore. “How long does he have?”