Chapter 5 #2
“Our magic is harvested to raise the best mortals to Fae. What could we do with those little wisps of magic anyway?” She gave me a curious look. “You would take away the opportunity to be raised entirely? How does the prince plan to raise us into shifters?”
I felt as if I had stumbled into quicksand, composed of Fieran’s lies. Luckily, she looked past me. “Oh—I have to get back. Bismyth will be waiting on their wine.”
“And Malachite will be waiting a long time,” I said.
She shared a grin with me as she backed toward the door. Then I was left alone in the life dome.
I looked for the three stars clustered together. Tay’s and Lidi’s were tattered and dull compared to the brightness of my unstable star, its color and size ever-changing. And Fear’s—I couldn’t have missed Fear’s star, bright and blue, if I had tried. Ander’s words came back to me.
“The ones we love might not be special, but when we see them, they shine a little brighter.”
I’d accidentally confessed to Fear before that conversation with Ander when I asked him why his star looked so bright. The thought still made me cringe.
I left the stars behind and kept a watchful eye out for any impatient Malachite shifters.
After, Bismyth still celebrated. The noise in the barracks hit me like a slap at first. It took me a moment to adjust.
Dair plucked a bread roll from my plate without asking and bit into it. I gave him a look, but he ignored it magnificently. “We knew you’d come around eventually.”
“I didn’t come around. Circumstances meant I had to help Fear, and apparently that means I’ll be one of you—eventually.” But the truth was I had wanted to be. It had bothered me to stand outside that door to Bismyth and knock before, no longer welcome inside without permission.
I might want Bismyth more than I wanted Fear, to be honest. Fear was charming and complicated. Bismyth already felt like home.
“She came around,” Dairen said, to no one in particular. He was already reaching for my throat, and I almost lost a roll trying to step back before I understood. He had a dark purple cloak over his arm.
“Not yet,” Asrael warned, catching his forearm. “You know Fear’s orders. She’s returning to Amber.”
Dair grimaced. “But not for long. The selection ceremony is soon. It should be tomorrow, but the queen has delayed it for Fear’s engagement celebrations—”
“Hence, not yet.” Asrael’s voice was edged with exasperation.
Dairen told me confidentially. “He’s thrilled. He just expresses it through disapproval of everyone else’s happiness.”
“Just yours,” Asrael said without stopping.
“A week’s respite before we face the potential of our fiery deaths,” Sera said brightly, bumping my shoulder. “Well, not you. We all know now you’ll be claimed.”
“Of course you’ll be claimed. What dragon wouldn’t want you?” I meant it.
Both of us glanced at Kiegan involuntarily. He paused in the midst of tearing into a whole chicken, grease smeared in his beard stubble, to give us a dark look.
“He’ll be chosen.” I thought of Ironheart—a strange but powerful dragon—who had been my bet for Kiegan when I read through the Bismyth Dragon Compendium. “He’s the best of us in his own way.”
“Of course.” Sera echoed my earlier words.
But we both worried, because he was half-orc and barely tolerated here. I had no idea what the dragons would make of him, and I resolved to ask Fear. Or rather, Shadowbane, through Fear.
Fear came to a stop beside me and reached past my shoulder for a glass, close enough that I caught the warmth of him and the faint smoke-and-salt smell that I had spent months trying not to notice.
“The sigil on the ring. You made it from when I traced it.” On his chest, in the dark, half-asleep. “You were plotting.”
He reached over and refilled my wine without asking before he poured his own. “Are you impressed? Or angry?””
When I stared at him, he looked back at me with an expression that was placid in that infuriating way of his, the one that meant he was pleased with himself and had absolutely no intention of apologizing for it. It was a very familiar smile.
“Neither. I simply can’t stand you,” I told him.
“You keep saying that. It hasn’t been true yet, wife.”
He relished calling me that word a bit unnecessarily when our marriage was a ruse. I warmed slightly every time he said it, which was also unnecessary.
“Clan Bismyth,” he began as he lifted his glass, and the room went quiet with the silence of people who’d followed him into a diverse variety of dangers and would do it again tomorrow.
Their adoration of him was a thing to behold.
“We fight for a kingdom that does not yet know it needs saving. We have gone into the dark and come back out of it, which is not guaranteed and should never be taken lightly.”
Asrael raised his glass in acknowledgment. Kiegan, I noticed, was watching Fieran with an expression of disapproval, though his orcish face could manage little else, to be fair.
“And we have, against considerable odds, managed to ruin my mother’s evening.” A ripple of laughter. “Which I consider a victory.”
“There is one wildly unpredictable mortal who made that victory possible. Who has fought on our side since she stood between a school and a wyrm with nothing more than a shovel and her impressive sense of spite.”
More laughter, warmer now; they all knew the story. “She has been cornered, trapped, thrown into an arena, and, most frightening of all, has faced my mother. She has met all of it the same way. Head on. Courageously. With a few sharply pointed remarks about me and my failings.”
More laughter. A few loud exclamations regarding Fear’s failings that he took with an easy grin.
When he raised his glass to me, I studied my wine.
“She saved my plot and my liberty today. My fierce mortal protector.” His voice was easy, warm with gratitude. “And she married me to do it, which I consider the greatest personal victory of my life and also something I will carry a certain amount of guilt about for the foreseeable future.”
“Highly doubtful,” I offered to my cup, and the room laughed—they knew him and his pleasant, guiltless manipulations too—and Fear’s grin ticked upward at the corners, pleased by me.
“She’ll tell you she did it for practical reasons. I want her as my wife for reasons both practical and very much not. But I am grateful, and I will do my best to be a worthy husband.” He raised his glass. “To Cara. Who chose this knowing exactly what she was choosing and did it anyway.”
To Cara rang through the barracks in dozens of voices, warm and genuine. These were the people who had welcomed me into their world, into their family. It was hard for me to let my walls down at all, but somehow they had breached them.
I was not going to cry at a toast for a fake wedding. I took a large swallow of wine, and then Anayla swept me up in a hug so sudden I nearly lost the cup entirely.
Rees appeared from nowhere and shoved between us with great indignation, nosing at my hand.
“He’s congratulating you,” said Anayla.
“He’s checking for food.”
“Both,” she agreed, and wrapped an arm around my shoulders in the easy, warm way she had that I still didn’t entirely know how to receive. “I’m glad you’re here, Cara.”
I swallowed against something that had gotten stuck in my throat. “I’m glad you’re here. You’ve helped me all along the way.”
“Of course I did.” She looked at me as if this were obvious, the same expression she had when she expected better from the world and refused to be disappointed by it. “You’re one of ours.”
One of ours. I let myself keep that for a moment before I started wondering how long it would hold.
I ended up sitting with Kiegan and Sera for a while, resting before I had to return to Clan Amber. I needed to, but I was in no rush for what would no doubtfully be a tough conversation with Ander. Rees had colonized my lap, or as much of it as his enormous head could occupy.
“He prefers me to Fear.” That still felt like one of my larger victories. I scratched his ears.
“Because you’re better.” Kiegan sounded satisfied, as if he were personally invested in my superiority since he had chosen me as a friend.
“Because I am more generous with snacks.”
Sera leaned back on her elbows. She always looked comfortable. “Kiegan tells me you’re the reason the griffins didn’t kill anyone in the second trial.”
“Kiegan is generous.”
“He’s not, actually,” she said. “Have you ever even looked twice at his plate? He’ll stab you.”
Fieran came to sit beside me eventually, as the room began to settle into that second stage of celebration where the noise dipped and people found corners. He dropped onto the stone beside me with his usual graceful ease.
Rees adjusted himself to accommodate both of us without waking up. His tail thwapped dramatically across Fear’s lap, who raised his eyebrow at his hound’s ass but allowed it.
For a while we didn’t say anything, which was its own kind of luxury, sitting in the middle of clan noise in companionable silence.
“You must miss your family,” Fieran said quietly, not looking at me. “On a night like this.”
I had never dreamt of my wedding as a girl.
I thought of what it would be like to have my family in the celebration, though.
I thought of Tay’s face when I’d seen him at the banquet, strong and bright-eyed and real, healed in a way I’d been afraid to believe in.
I thought of Lidi, back in Stonehaven, braiding flowers into her hair with fingers no longer deft with magic.
“Someday I’ll have a real wedding.”
“Someday when you actually want to marry me, and you aren’t just doing it to save my life.”
“How much wine have you had, Fear?” I asked.
His free hand rose and his fingers brushed my cheek, gentle and unhurried. The noise of the clan faded to something distant. Rees breathed heavily across both our laps.
I could lose myself to this man, this clan.