Chapter 17 #3
“I know a little about how Lightbringer thinks. I might as well be direct. She doesn’t respond well to being finessed. Among other things you two have in common.” He said it lightly, almost to himself.
I had no way to know what it meant, what the history in it was, what had passed between him and a dragon I had apparently been meant for since before I understood the word destiny.
“You always think you know everything,” I snapped. “It’s one of the many things I hate about you.”
I felt a flicker in my mind of something easing. An almost-amusement, brief and wary.
“Lightbringer is my dragon’s—”
“Mate. I know,” I cut in. “But maybe you don’t know Lightbringer just because you know him.”
He studied my face for a moment.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said without deflection. “I’ll be quiet and let you and Lightbringer come to an understanding.”
I tried again. The emotions swirled but didn’t resolve.
“Maybe,” Fieran said, after a while, quietly, almost to himself, “it isn’t Lightbringer.”
He had staked everything on bringing back Lightbringer. He sounded calm, but I would bet he was afraid. He had paid so much for this plan and forced others to pay too. Tesa had been lost, his friendship with Ander broken. How many others had died for this plot?
He had to be afraid that the plan was wrong in a way that couldn’t be fixed, and I didn’t think he had decided to let me see it so much as he hadn’t been able to prevent it.
I didn’t have an answer for him that felt adequate.
Only that sense of being trapped, the dragon’s emotions and mine coiled together in a way I couldn’t separate. The worst of it was that I couldn’t tell where she ended and I began.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe we were going to have to figure that out together.
We stood in the alcove, and the ceremony continued in the chamber beyond, and the dragon didn’t speak, and I carried the word trapped in my chest alongside everything else I was carrying, and I did not yet know what to do with any of it.
But this dragon and I had time.
Some time, anyway.
A fragment.
“Brace yourself,” Fear said quietly. He set himself beside me in that way he had, his arm brushing my shoulder, his warmth comforting.
The shifters were walking out of the ceremony. I caught a glimpse of Caela, Iven’s friend, her face streaked with tears. Korren, walking beside her, sneered at me. I gave him back a blank look. He was nothing to me.
Kiegan started to come to me, frowning with worry, and Fear shook his head. Kiegan gave him a look that suggested he might celebrate his Claiming by challenging his clan leader, but I mouthed to him that I was all right, and he reluctantly went on.
Alone or in pairs, the newly claimed shifters walked to the edge of the cliff. Kiegan and Sera found each other at the edge and traded looks. Sera was grinning; Kiegan was definitely not.
Abruptly, Kiegan fell forward onto his hands and knees. I took a step forward before I understood; it was not his hands that landed in the grass, but claws. His shimmering black wings unfurled from his back between one heartbeat and another.
My gaze flew back to Sera, but she had been replaced by an iridescent purple dragon. Brightstar. She still looked as if she were grinning.
She threw herself off the edge of the cliff first. Kiegan—Ironheart—lunged after her, then hesitated.
Brightstar shot past the edge of the cliff, shooting up into the air.
She let out a triumphant roar, and Ironheart could not resist. He launched himself too.
The two of them chased each other through the air, full of joy, and the sun reflecting off their scales was so bright that I shaded my eyes and winced, trying to follow them across the path of the sun.
I tried to imagine what I looked like from up there.
From their height, I was just small figure staring up at them.
I had been claimed. But to complete the Claiming required me to fly, my dragon and I bonding, and nothing was happening. What did it feel like, to grow those heavy wings, to feel them catch the wind?
There was a strange impulse in me to walk to the edge of the cliff, and I caught Fear’s muscled forearm to steady myself, afraid I would follow the urge.
She wanted to fly.
The yearning was physical: a pull toward open air, an awareness of the wind as full of possibility. She wanted the sky.
I waited. The yearning stayed. The resistance stayed. Both of them together, coiled in my chest around each other. I could barely endure it, especially when Fear was watching me.
“You don’t have to have the answers tonight,” I told him, and perhaps myself as well. “You were right about enough things to get us here. I’ll handle the rest.”
It was an unusually cocky thing for me to say.
His lips twitched in a smile. “You’re taking pity on me.”
“Well. I saw your face when you thought I was going to burn alive. You’re fragile right now.”
He was too much himself to be offended. “I was afraid.”
“Of losing Lightbringer.” I said the words stubbornly.
“Of losing you.” He corrected, and warmth bloomed in my chest, reckless warmth. “The rest we can figure out.”
“Can we? What happens now?”
“Now, you are my wife,” he said, and even with his plans in ruins, he sounded satisfied. “Now, you come home to Bismyth.”
Your ruse, I corrected his words in my head. Not your wife.
Sometimes I struggled to remember.