Chapter 6
Six
Fieran
Ander said my name the way that had become familiar: cold and demanding.
“Somewhere else.” I led him further into Bismyth territory, toward my room.
He had come looking for Cara, which was interesting. And he had brought his shifters with him, who looked as if they weren’t sure they wanted to stay there without him. The tension in the air between Bismyth and Amber was a fierce and living thing.
I glanced back at Cara once. She stood unmoving, her long blond hair hanging loose around her shoulders. She looked radiant in her light armor, her leather vest, and her sword and braces fitted to her lean figure.
I closed the door behind us. The celebration shrank to something happening in another world.
The lamps had not been lit, and the curtains moved with the breeze off the dark sea.
Some part of me yearned to dive out the window and let my wings catch the wind, and it wasn’t solely because speaking with Ander always left me annoyed.
“You married her,” he said.
“She married me. The distinction matters to her.”
“You want me to bring her back to Amber. With the queen’s attention on my clan.” He mentioned the queen’s attention with a flatness that told me it was not the first time he’d said it aloud today. He was worried for his clan, and yet he had time to worry for my wife.
I had expected anger. He had been relieved to see her married to me and out of Amber, and that was unexpected. “Tell me the threat.”
He studied me for a beat. Deciding how much I already knew. A fair exercise; I did it to everyone. “The queen has sent a message. If an Amber dragon claims the half-mortal during the ceremony, there will be consequences. You know her practice of sending clans to die for their disobedience.”
“I do.” She had not been able to order Bismyth into unwinnable battles because of the magic that bound her, but she had done it to Lazuli, thinning their ranks due to their tendency of collecting inconvenient knowledge.
“Whatever you thought you were hiding, she knows who Cara is. Or she suspects enough that the result is the same.”
“She suspects. The distinction matters.”
“Not to my dead clan members if Cara draws an Amber dragon.” Something shifted in his face.
Brief, controlled, and then gone. “I thought you’d solved my problem and protected her.
She would have been free of the queen’s leverage over my clan.
For one moment, I thought you’d done a decent thing. Accidentally.”
The words landed with the weight he’d intended. “She can’t belong to Bismyth. Not yet.”
His eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“The Claiming requires she come through Amber. It will serve both our clans in the end. It will be worth this danger.” He wouldn’t trust me, but I tried anyway.
“She will die, Fear.” Ander turned to face me fully, his voice livid with rage, his eyes blazing. I’d seen that look before when we were boys, before he tackled me into a wall; the memory rose, sharp and strangely nostalgic.
Back then, we used to beat each other bloody and then apologize. We’d always made up.
“She will not. I promise you that, Ander.”
He scoffed. “Putting aside the worth of your promises…you’re asking me to take her back into a threat the queen delivered to my face and tell my clan to absorb whatever damage comes after.”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me what comes through it. What’s worth risking Amber?”
I looked at him. He looked at me. Two men who had spent years reading each other’s silences and now were finding them consistently unreadable. “I cannot.”
“I thought so.” His voice had gone to something quieter and more dangerous than it had been. “You want my clan to take the queen’s punishment for a plan you won’t explain. You want Cara to walk into a volley of arrows. And you’re standing here waiting for me to thank you for the privilege.”
“I’m standing here having a conversation you requested. What I want is for you to understand that this is not a gamble. She will be claimed.”
“By whom.” His eyes didn’t move from mine. “If you’ve prepared for it, say by whom.”
I said nothing.
He exhaled. “There it is. You arrogant fucking prick who will risk Cara, will risk my clan—”
“You don’t need that information to do what’s necessary. Sharing it adds additional risks.”
“I don’t need or want your trust,” he said, with emphasis that matched mine, “but you are asking me to trust the plan of a man who has never once told me the full truth about anything at the cost of my clan’s safety.”
He held my gaze, as if he could force the answer out of me by sheer will. “Give me one reason.”
“You won’t like it.” If I mentioned Corbyn, he would want to murder me. If I mentioned Lightbringer, he would make the leap to Corbyn anyway.
“I haven’t liked one of your plans in a decade.” His gaze narrowed, and my whole body tightened as if preparing for an attack. He’d figured it out. “Lightbringer. She’s a Clan Amber dragon.”
“Look at that. You don’t need me to give you reasons. You come up with them on your own.”
He ignored my condescension, but then he had practice. At one point, Ander and Tesa and the others had made a drinking game out of my patronizing. I had perfected my social skills since then, but Ander brought out an older side. “You still have this obsession.”
“I’m steadfast.”
He scoffed. “Have you seen Corbyn?”
There was no reason to deny him this truth, especially when it was likely to rebound on me viciously in the near future. “Not for years.”
His brows arched. “You’ve kept Cara from him?”
“I don’t even know how to get in touch with him.”
“You’re usually resourceful.” His voice was full of scorn. “He’ll see you suffer for that if he can.”
I put aside the Corbyn situation. He would be a problem, but he’d be a larger problem if the leader of the rebels pulled my wife from my arms.
“I asked her when she was under the healing spell if she would allow me to manipulate and lie if she knew it would serve her wishes. All she wants is to protect Tay and resurrect Lidi’s magic.”
“That’s not all she wants, you fool.” Ander calling me fool sounded familiar too in a way that was unsettling. But he sounded calmer now. “And ‘you gave me permission to lie, deceive, and trick you while you were drugged’ is not going to mean as much as an excuse to her as it clearly does to you.”
I focused on the first part of his little speech. That’s not all she wants. “You’re correct for once. Cara wants the chance to make things better for mortals.”
His gaze fixed on my bed. On the bedposts, from which hung a tangle of gold necklaces. Eventually, Cara would return to Bismyth and to my bed.
“We have made her a good nest,” Shadowbane said, pleased with himself. “She will be delighted.”
I did not enjoy Ander seeing this impulse of mine. I smiled at him tightly anyway, refusing to be embarrassed.
“You would not put her there if you believed she would die,” he said, slowly. Testing it for the weight of whether he believed it.
“No. This plan does protect her, and I will help you protect Amber. I swear on that.”
He looked skeptical. My oaths meant little to him. “And you know something I don’t.”
“I know several things you don’t. Most of them are not relevant to what you’re deciding tonight.”
He looked at me thoroughly, disinterested in the barb, before he said, “I understand that you’re using her and convincing yourself she’ll thank you for it.”
I frowned in response.
“And I understand you’ve convinced yourself you can have both a true relationship with her and the control you always seek.” His voice was level. “I’ve been on the receiving end of that control, and I can tell you this is your greatest stupidity.”
The words found their target, but I did not let it show.
“She has made her choices and now you have yours. You can refuse to bring her back. You can decide not to participate in the ceremony, not to manage your clan’s cooperation, not to provide what her protection during the Claiming requires. Those are your choices to make.”
I let the silence sit for a beat. Ander responded with the same. Little showed on his face, which was different from when we were young. Either he had learned more control, or I no longer knew him or both.
“You cannot decide for her,” I said. “You know that. You know it better than you want to, or you would not have asked for terms.”
Past the windows, the sea moved with the same dreadful patience my mother always displayed.
“If she dies,” Ander said, “it will not be the queen I blame.”
I heard it for what it was: a truth, a warning, and something more personal than either of those things. A man well aware of the potential costs because he’d felt his heart ripped out.
I wondered for the first time, idly, if he had actually begun to love her. I had assumed that he merely wanted to steal her from me as repayment for what I took.
“I know what this costs.”
He held my gaze for a moment. Something shifted, barely.
“I’ll bring her back to Amber. I’ll ensure the Claiming isn’t obstructed.” His voice had the dry, unpleasant quality of a man agreeing to a plan he knows is foolish. “Not because I believe you. Not because you’ve given me any reason to.”
“I know.”
“Because she has decided and because I would rather be in the room than out of it when she needs me.” He turned toward the passage but stopped at the door.
“You should know that you don’t deserve her,” he said. I started to say something, but he cut me off. “Don’t make a joke of it. Just know it. And consider making yourself worthy…if you are capable.”
Then he left.
He had been relieved. When he thought she was coming into Bismyth, that singular, unguarded exhale, the drop of his shoulder, had been too immediate for acting.
He had been afraid of what he would find. And he had been glad she was safe with me and with Bismyth, even if it meant I won.
Ander always chose Amber. That was the anchor of every prediction I had ever made about what he would do in a given set of circumstances. His clan was his loyalty, his identity, the family he carried in every room.
They were all he had left.
I could not quite make sense of Ander, my oldest friend, my oldest enemy. Not since Cara had stepped onto the board.
It left me unsettled.