52. Eradin
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
ERADIN
Every bonded dragon was dying. Not someday, but now. Slowly strangled by the very thing that marked them as chosen.
The knowledge sat in my belly like a stone I’d swallowed whole, and the worst part was my hands.
They’d gone still at my sides, the same hands that had polished scales and applied salve and believed they were doing something good.
My mother had taught me that healing was sacred work.
That touch was the first language of care.
I’d been practicing it on dying things and calling it kindness.
Selira’s fury ignited. Told you. Metal-necked ones die. Always die.
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
Now you know. Her rage wasn’t directed at me. It was older than that. Centuries of watching. They do this. Over and over. Choose chains instead of trust.
“We’re going to fix it,” I said.
How do you fix murder?
You couldn’t. I couldn’t.
But I’d try.
I needed to move. Do something. Anything that wasn’t standing here adding up how many dragons I’d groomed while they were dying and called it care.
I grabbed clothing and strode to the river, then bathing and dressing. After, I took the brush from my pack and went to Selira.
Warmth flowed through our bond, and while my hair dripped, I groomed her.
The brush bristles caught on the ridge of Selira’s neck scales, the familiar resistance settling the heat in my chest. This I knew. This I could do.
Stroke. Smooth. Repeat.
My mother’s tune rose inside me, the same song I’d hummed in the aerie while polishing scales on dragons whose collars were killing them.
My hand came to a standstill.
I made myself keep moving, pressing harder, working the brush in circles until Selira’s breathing evened and the tension in her flanks melted.
Touch can say things words can’t. My mother had taught me that.
Footsteps approached from my left. I didn’t look up, but my shoulders tensed. The elite had been watching us since Fen crossed the boundary, their gazes sharp as blades.
“She’s beautiful.” Lyndie said.
I let my shoulders drop.
“I’ve never seen coloring like hers before.” She stopped a few feet away.
“Elite dragons are bred to be black or red.”
Selira’s coloring would mark her as other even if her wild-born stripe didn’t.
She nodded. “I don’t understand why, not when there are colors like this.”
“Control, maybe, even of the dragons. Being wild-born changes everything.” I kept brushing, the motion giving my hands something to do.
She came closer, her dragon trailing behind her. Up close, I saw the shadows under her eyes and the tightness around her mouth that came from holding something back stood out starkly. We’d all left something in the last trial.
“May I?” She gestured to Selira.
I nodded.
Lyndie ran her hand along Selira’s foreleg, her touch careful. “When I was elite, before…” She paused. “They taught us grooming techniques. Ways to calm agitated dragons. Make them more compliant.”
The elite were all about compliance, applying it to dragons, commons, and even themselves.
Lyndie’s hand slid up Selira’s neck to her jaw, her fingers moving with the familiarity of someone who’d done this a thousand times. She found a spot behind the hinge and pressed.
Selira’s entire body went liquid. She made a sound between a purr and a sigh, and it vibrated through my palm where it rested on her neck.
“How did you—”
“Pressure point.” Lyndie’s fingers didn’t move. “Elite dragons respond to it. Makes them docile.” Her throat worked. “Grimstone loves it.”
“Your dragon is named Grimstone.”
She nodded.
“Show me,” I said.
Lyndie guided my hand to the spot, her fingers cool on mine. “Here. Gentle pressure, like this.”
Selira’s rumble deepened, her contentment flooding our bond.
“There.” Lyndie pulled her hand back. “She’ll remember now. It’ll work faster next time.”
If there was a next time. Neither of us said it out loud.
“Dragons are dragons,” she said. “The court didn’t change them. It only broke them.”
“Like the elite try to break the commons.”
Her hand dropped away, smacking against her thigh. “I’m not that person anymore.”
“Who are you now?”
“I’m still figuring that out.” Her mouth curved without humor. “Losing everything makes you question who you were when you had it all.”
We’d been watching the same horror. Her, from inside, as the elite destroyed what they claimed to love. Me, from the stables, as I polished the chains they’d forged.
Fen came closer, watching Selira quiver from my touch.
“Could I try?” he asked.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
He came to stand directly behind me, a fire at my back. His arm stretched past mine to reach Selira’s jaw, his tunic sleeve grazing my shoulder.
“Here?” His voice whispered across my ear.
“Closer to the—yes. There.”
His fingers found the spot, his touch careful.
Selira rumbled her approval.
“She trusts you,” I said quietly.
“She trusts you.” His chest pressed against my back as he leaned in, following the curve of Selira’s jaw. “I’m just borrowing it.”
Reece joined us, his dragon and Aristus following. The space around Selira grew crowded with four dragons and four riders packed together.
Reece’s throat worked. He pressed his fingers against his wrist where the scarf had been. “There’s something I should tell you.”
The way he said it made the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“I worked maintenance at the aerie before I took a job in the mines,” he said quietly. “I didn’t go near the dragons much, but sometimes I’d be fixing something near ones slated for retirement.”
He paused, his jaw working.
“They weren’t old. That’s what struck me first. Dragons that should’ve had decades left if they lived in the wild were being shuffled off to pens.
Always dying younger than they should. I heard two of the queen’s council talking once when they thought no one was listening.
They said the collars made the dragons weak. ”
My gaze swept across the meadow. Three elite riders near the fire pit. Two servants moved between tents. No one was near, but someone could still hear this. Anyone could have already heard.
I leaned closer to him, speaking softly. “How long ago was this?”
“Fifteen years. Maybe more.”
This wasn’t an accident or unforeseen consequence.
They’d known.
“Who else heard this?” Fen’s voice came out too controlled, but I could tell by the twitch in his jaw he was about to explode.
“Just me, I think.” Reece rubbed his face. “I was up in the rafters, fixing a pulley. Working alone. They didn’t know I was there.”
“Did they say why they keep using the collars if they knew they weakened the dragons?” Lyndie growled.
Reece met her eyes. “One of them said removing the collars would destabilize the kingdom. That commons might get ideas if they knew dragons could bond with anyone.”
My stomach dropped through the ground.
“Control,” I said, the word tasting like bile. “They’d rather kill every dragon than risk losing control.”
A high lady passed close by.
My hand remained on Selira’s neck. Reece’s mouth closed on whatever he might’ve said next. Lyndie found something fascinating to study in the grass. Fen went perfectly still behind me, his hands on the hilt of his blade.
The rider kept walking.
We stayed frozen until her footsteps faded and breathing felt like something we were allowed to do again.
“She heard nothing,” Lyndie whispered.
Fen shrugged, but his hand didn’t drop from his blade.
The urge to reach for my magic was already there, a pressure behind my chest I kept shoving down. I knew what the collars were doing. I’d touched Aristus’s and felt it in a single, searing second. What I didn’t know yet was how much time was left.
So I made myself look.
I pressed my palm against Selira’s neck and let my magic rise.
The heat came fast, eager in a way that twisted my belly. It rolled through our bond, and Selira caught it and carried it outward, dragon to dragon, the way wild ones read a whole flight for sickness before a migration. What her senses touched came back through my palms.
It found Aristus last.
The recoil hit me so hard I nearly lost my footing.
My palm tore free from her scales as I stumbled backward, my vision blurring. Fen wrapped an arm around me to hold me upright. I couldn’t process it yet because I was still drowning in years of something truly horrifying.
I hadn’t felt pain. That was too clean a word. This was the slow unmaking of a creature that had never been allowed to fully exist. Runes pulling them inward, year by year, so gradually they’d adapted to compensate.
I stood in Fen’s arms and shook until my teeth rattled.
My magic didn’t hand me a number. It gave me the feel of the damage and how hard the body still fought against it. The number came from every deathbed I’d ever sat near. My mother had taught me what months felt like. Tolross was teaching me weeks.
Aristus felt close.
I didn’t know how to put that into words for Fen. And I could be wrong. I’d never read a dragon this way. I’d just never yet been wrong about a person.
Fen turned me in his arms, his eyes finding mine.
“What did you see?” His voice came out steady, but it fractured underneath.
I couldn’t answer. My throat had closed around the words.
“Eradin.” Quieter now. Broken. “Tell me.”
“Aristus is sick.”
He nodded, urging me on, but how could I tell him?
“He only has months.” It came out barely audible. “Maybe less.”
Fen’s face emptied.
“No.” The word came out reasonable. Too reasonable. “No, that’s not—You’re reading it wrong.”
“I’m not.”
“Then check again.” His voice climbed. “You said you could help him. After the trials. You said maybe you could.”
“Fen.”
He stepped back, his boots catching on grass. His voice cracked clean through. “He’s been suffering for a long time. I did this. I kept the collar on him, and I—”
“You didn’t know.”
“I should have.” The shout came from deep in his chest before his voice fell to almost nothing. “He’s been dying right in front of me, and I have done nothing.”
Aristus’s low rumble carried across the meadow, comfort offered to the human who couldn’t accept it yet.
I wrapped my arm around the back of his waist and held him like he’d just held me.
He placed his hand over mine on his hip.
“Don’t let go.” His voice came out raw. “Not yet.”
“I won’t. Not ever.”
We stood together until his breathing evened.
I counted his inhales. Seven before they stopped catching. It was the only useful thing I could think of to do.
Releasing my hand, he turned to face me again.
Wind caught strands of my hair, sweeping them across my face. He stroked them back, securing them behind my ear. His fingers lingered on my cheek. Sliding down to my jaw.
“Thank you,” he said.
I couldn’t answer. My throat had closed around everything I wanted to say and couldn’t.
Lyndie’s face had gone white. “How long for Grimstone?”
“I can’t give you a promise. Dying doesn’t keep a schedule. My mother used to say that to people who wanted one.” I made myself say the rest plainly, the way she would have. “A few years, maybe. He’s healthier, but the damage runs deep, the roots are already wrapping around vital organs.”
Her hand found her mouth, and her eyes shimmered with tears. “Only a few years?”
Reece had gone very still beside his dragon, one hand pressed against the beast’s scarred scales. “This one too? I realize he’s not mine, but he’s watched out for me. He’s as valiant as me. As old as me. Neither of us is finished yet.”
“He has a year. Maybe two.”
“Fates,” Reece said, his voice strangled. “I knew something was wrong, but I thought—” He looked at Fen, then at me. “They all die like this? Every bonded dragon?”
“They’re being murdered.” The words scraped up my throat.
“By the system that claims to love them,” Lyndie said.
Every dragon I’d ever tended in the aerie. The retired dragons in their pens, the ones everyone called brittle-boned and half-blind. They’d been used up and tossed into a corner to die. The hatchling at the ceremony, freezing the moment the band closed around her neck.
They weren’t freezing. The most vital part of them was being extinguished.
I’d spent hours learning to read a dragon’s distress, to soothe what the elite had frightened or broken. I’d thought I was working around the system, offering small mercies inside a structure I couldn’t change.
But the structure itself was the wound.
The elite had built their entire society on dragon corpses. Generations of them, piled high enough to reach the castle that overlooked it all.
And I’d been polishing their bones for most of my life.