Chapter 17 #2
I was glad that no one witnessed this but us. And for the first time, it felt as if there was an us, as if all the shifters were united.
Iven stepped forward, laid his hands on the sigil, and nothing happened.
He repeated the words of invitation. Nothing.
He repeated them again, voice growing more frantic. The conversations in the chamber died as everyone turned to watch in deep silence.
Then flames burst over his skin.
It was over almost as soon as it began. He was there one moment and gone the next, nothing left but smoke drifting through the chamber. A fresh scorch mark marred the ground.
Choking coughs filled the air. I inhaled some of the smoke, and even though it didn’t smell any different than ordinary dragon smoke—or even a bonfire—it turned my stomach. I wanted to vomit.
Ander put a steadying hand on my shoulder. When I glanced up, his face was grim, but he squeezed. “He wasn’t worthy.”
“Do we understand dragons, another species from another world, well enough to say what they consider worthy?” I whispered.
“You are,” he promised.
I wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t want to argue in what felt suddenly like a funeral. I nodded and tried to look as if I believed my survival at the morning’s end was certain.
The rowdy joy that had filled the chamber when others were chosen was gone.
And then, lucky me, it was time for Clan Amber’s recruits.
“Get it over with,” Ander said low in my ear and, since he was still gripping my shoulder, he gave me a forward shove.
After I survived, I’d probably appreciate that. But at the moment I was more interested in pretending certainty about my survival for ten more minutes.
Still, there was no escape. I stepped forward.
Into the still-smoking ring.
The marks were not abstract from inside the circle. They were individual. Some were faded, some fresh from this morning, but each one was the record of a shifter who had walked to the altar and had not walked back out. My vision had gone dark at the edges, tunneling down as I faced death.
The altar stone was warm under my palms when I laid them down, and I almost snatched my hands away. I had to force myself to press my hands down. Was it still hot from Iven’s burning? Would Lightbringer see my fear and panic, the way my breathing was coming short, and reject me?
I spoke the words of invitation, hoping my voice wouldn’t shake. My voice sounded oddly muffled to my ears, as if it came from far away.
Nothing happened.
I looked up.
I was searching for Fieran before I had decided to search for him. He was the one I wanted now. I wanted to be back on the horse, leaning against his chest, feeling his strong arm around my waist.
Fear had not moved, but he strained forward toward me as if he were just barely resisting the call of his body to my side. His face was calm, composed, but there was something in the heat of his golden eyes.
I repeated the words again.
The room, already hushed, grew silent as the grave.
Ander took a step forward, then stopped. He couldn’t help me now. He had been beginning to reach, and now his hand fell to his side.
Fieran, though, surged toward me. Two of Bismyth’s shifters caught him, trying to deflect him to the side rather than step directly between him and me.
He staggered with them, then kept moving forward, and then Anayla stepped in front of him, her hand flat on his chest. Whatever she said was brief. It stopped him. Barely.
I turned back to the sigil.
I felt hollowed out, as if all my hope had been dug out of me with a spoon.
Fear had been so sure that I would be claimed that I had believed him.
I was believing it less with every second, and the seconds were accumulating.
Part of me wanted to run, but if I stepped back out of this scorched circle unclaimed, I would ignite.
I did not know what to do. Speak the words a third time? No one else had done that. Yet I dared not leave the circle, and I had not been claimed.
Flashes of memory rose up in my mind, unbidden by any thought.
Touching Tay’s face when I was barely more than a baby myself, and he was squishy-faced and new.
Standing at my father’s side as he drove in the posts for our fence.
My mother and I laughing over a joke I didn’t remember as we gathered eggs from our chickens.
Tay’s first coughing fit and how I didn’t know what to do. My father outlined in the doorway, and my joy seeing he was home, and then his body crumpling. My mother putting Lidi in my arms and turning over in her bed, back into her grief.
Could this be Lightbringer? I was so wild with terror it was hard to close my eyes and turn inward, to feel.
Slowly, I became sure I was not alone in my mind. There was another presence moving through, and I had the strangest impression of a gentle violation—of an invited guest rifling through the contents of my mind to uncover my secrets.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
My voice came out steady. Small mercies.
I did not want to assume. I did not want to name Lightbringer and be wrong. I did not want to offend whatever was in the room with me right now.
My dragon, if this was a dragon, said nothing.
Could this be one of Fear’s tricks?
I opened my eyes feeling none of the certainty and joy that had marked the Claiming.
Instead, I stepped carefully toward the edge of the scorched circle, bracing myself to be incinerated.
The raw burning ache of my thighs returned with every step.
My hands curled into fists, trying to harden myself to what would come when I stepped out of the circle.
I hesitated at the edge, wondering if there was something else I should do.
I looked at Fear, then Ander. Ander was blank-faced. Fear grim. Neither helped.
I put the toe of my boot on the other side of the circle and then launched myself forward as Kiegan had launched himself toward the altar. I breathed in the scent of smoke, but nothing happened. Cool air moved over my skin.
I made it back to Ander’s side.
Across the hall, Fieran relaxed, no longer fighting off his friends to reach me.
“What’s wrong?” Ander asked. As soon as I opened my mouth, he saw something in my face, and he caught my arm and pulled me away.
He glanced back. As always, he was acutely aware of where Fieran was and what Fieran felt. He had to know it drove Fieran mad that he was the one standing beside me.
Ander led me into an alcove at the back of the chamber overlooking the grassy opening—and the sea beyond. The dark, roiling sea. I was supposed to shift and throw myself off those cliffs to fly.
“My dragon didn’t speak to me, Ander.” I blurted out the words. “I don’t know who it is.”
Reflexively, he frowned. Hardly a comforting response.
“We’ve never had a mortal dragon-marked before, so maybe it makes sense that I’d have a strange dragon.” I was babbling and I knew it.
“Perhaps,” Ander said, looking as unconvinced as I felt.
“Go back,” I told him. “The other members of Clan Amber will need your support, especially after seeing that.”
He hesitated; we both knew it was true. “Are you sure you’re all right alone?”
He reached out to squeeze my shoulders.
“She’s better off that way,” said a familiar voice from behind me.
I wasn’t sure I could handle Fieran right now on top of everything else, but I rested my hands lightly on Ander’s forearms. “At least you know that I’m safe with Fieran.”
“I don’t know about that.” Ander looked at me carefully, checking in with me to see that I meant for him to go, then nodded. “It will be all right, Cara.”
Then he walked back into the chamber to support a clan he had put at risk for my sake, leaving me with a man he didn’t trust, because he always respected my agency. It occurred to me that I had chosen entirely the wrong man.
But I didn’t want anyone else. I wanted Fear, this cocky, charming, manipulative mistake.
Fieran started to speak, but I held up a finger. “Do you know why my dragon won’t talk to me?”
He shook his head.
“Then just be quiet for now and let me try to talk to her.”
“Oh?” He sounded intrigued. “So you have some sense of her?”
He looked almost pleased, which, given my frustration, felt unbearable.
I held a finger to my lips pointedly. “You could help by being silent for once.”
Then I closed my eyes, hoping a lack of distractions would help me open myself to my dragon. “Are you there? Why won’t you speak to me?”
There was no answering voice.
But I felt a tumult of emotions: frustration, anger, a sense of being trapped.
The word landed before I could move past it. Trapped. Was it mine or hers?
I had felt trapped since Fear forced me to go with him to the Trials.
Trapped in this world I did not understand.
Trapped by the queen, by Fear, by the plots that had woven together before I was even born.
Trapped yearning to be one of the Bismyth shifters and not sure I ever would truly be.
Even before that, I had felt trapped in the hopelessness of trying to take care of Tay and protect Lidi’s magic.
This sense of being trapped was immense.
“Are you trapped?” I asked. “Can I help?”
The question felt ridiculous as soon as I asked it. The presence retreated. But it was still there, a strangeness in my mind, an awareness of something else, as if there were a shadow lurking in my peripheral vision that disappeared when I turned my head.
I opened my eyes. Fieran’s expression had shifted, his gaze troubled, as if he saw something in my face that worried him.
“Lightbringer.” He sounded exasperated as he looked into my gaze, his face different as if he were looking through me to the dragon. “Stop throwing a tantrum and talk to her.”
I frowned at him. “Has irritating me worked so well that you thought you’d try it on a dragon too?”