Chapter 46
SAPHIRA
“I’m worried about you, Neve.”
Neve’s blazing amber eyes remained fixed on the pulsing red crystal she held on her lap, tucked in a bed of velvet within a lacquered wooden box.
She had been staring at it when I had arrived twenty minutes ago with a tray for her and hadn’t acknowledged me during the time I had been sitting outside her home on a padded stool, too afraid to dare to open the barred door.
“You need to eat something. Kaeleron says you haven’t been eating.”
And it was beginning to show.
Neve was immortal, and powerful, but she was wasting away before my eyes. The female sitting hunched over that dreadful stone that had some kind of dark power over her was a stark contrast to the one I had seen only a few days ago.
Her usually shiny and bright golden hair was dull and matted, dangling down her back in clumps, and dirt coated the hem of her worn burgundy dress.
It was how sallow her skin had become that worried me most though, how bony her fingers looked as she desperately clutched the egg-like crystal, her wide eyes permanently fixed on it.
“You need to eat.” I pushed the tray towards the slot in the bottom of the wall of bars before me.
No reaction.
“Isn’t An’sidwain lovely? I think I might take it from you.”
She turned on me in a flash of fangs and fury, hissing at me and filling the air with the scent of brimstone and the heat of fire.
Gold and amber scales shimmered over her skin.
Then her burning gaze returned to the crystal and she sat there as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn’t just threatened me as I had expected, attempting to drive me away from her precious possession.
“What is it, Neve? Tell me what An’sidwain is.”
She slowly blinked and lifted an unsteady hand to stroke her fingers over the pulsing surface of the ancient dragon stone.
“Mine,” she whispered. “It was made for me, and I for it.”
“You told me once that you stole it.”
She nodded and cooed at it, “The owner of you seeks you, but you are mine, are you not? You do not want to return to him, for he is better off without you. Wretched beasty that he is.”
So she had taken it from a male.
“Is the owner of it the reason you’re in this cell?”
She idly dropped her hand to pat the floor beside her thigh. “The stones here are good. Ancient. Powerful enough to keep me from his gaze. Believe me, child, you do not want him to find this place.”
“Why not?” I tilted my head as I studied her, feeling as if I might get somewhere with her at last. Kaeleron had admitted he knew nothing of the male who was hunting for her.
He only knew that if he found her, Neve’s life might be forfeit, and that she had been desperate when he had found her in the Wastes, a crazed dragon and one more emaciated than she appeared now. “Is he dangerous?”
She resumed petting the crystal and hummed a lullaby to it.
Her tone was light, breezy, as she said, “He would destroy us all to take this back… but to take this back might destroy him.”
“You’re sure he’s still alive?”
She lifted her head and looked at me as if I was an idiot. “It beats, does it not?”
I looked at the stone in her hands.
Cold skittering down my spine.
“Neve,” I said, cautiously now, treading lightly because I was sure I was going to sound like the crazy one and she would laugh at me when I voiced the thought that had just struck me. “Neve… An’sidwain means heart. You’re not telling me—”
“It beats, does it not?” She smiled and went back to petting it. “But it is not his heart.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, because of all the crazy things I had seen and heard over the months since I had stepped into this realm, this would have been the strangest of them all and I wasn’t really sure how I would have handled the knowledge that Neve was singing to the actual heart of a dragon she had stolen from someone who was still hunting for her, alive despite missing this vital organ.
“It is only a piece of it.”
My jaw dropped.
She glanced at me, eyes wide, almost nervous. Definitely unsettled by my reaction. And then her lips flattened and she bit out.
“Well, I am hardly powerful enough to take a whole heart!”
I shook my head and found myself saying, “I’m just surprised you could take any piece of someone’s heart.”
“I am not that weak,” she spat and slammed the lid on the box to glare at me.
“I didn’t mean it like that, Neve.” I shuffled closer to the bars of her cell, the legs of my stool scraping on the damp stone floor of the corridor. “I meant… how can you take a piece of someone’s heart and leave them still alive?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Magic, silly.”
And then she shrugged.
“That and I stole it while he was sleeping in his dragon form. It was incredibly difficult to prise open his scales and I expended much magic keeping him asleep, but he wanted me to do it.”
“He wanted you to do it?” My eyebrows pinched.
“Well… yes.”
“He asked you to carve out a piece of his heart?”
“Well… no,” she countered. “Not exactly. But it was necessary. Sometimes we must cut out the darkness so we can be led back into the light.”
She went to lift the lid on the box again.
I panicked, fearing that if she did, I would lose this lucid female before me.
“I need to ask you something about your visions,” I blurted.
“Is it about your ring? It is missing. Do you need me to find it?”
I glanced at the finger that was sorely missing the ring, that felt naked without it. “Kaeleron has it. He’s fixing it for me. It got a bit dinged up when I hurled it at him.”
“Ah. Most likely a well-deserved retaliation for what he failed to tell you.”
I wondered how much Neve knew, and if Kaeleron was aware that his seer knew about his past and his arrangement with the high king.
What Kaeleron had told me on the bluff up on Noainfir yesterday still played on my mind, together with the things he had said to me in the glade before we had sparred and he had done his best not to pull his punches.
He hadn’t struck me. Not once. Every time I had screwed up and left myself open, his blade or claws had come close to striking me, but he had always stopped before they touched me, his control and reaction speed incredible.
I had landed several blows on him, mostly on the metal plates that shielded his forearms—plates I realised he had donned so he could use them as shields, moving them to wherever I would have struck to stop me from accidentally stabbing him again.
Because he had seen how badly what I had done had disturbed me.
I still felt guilty over stabbing him like that. I hadn’t meant it, but I couldn’t say a tiny, dark little part of me didn’t feel he had deserved it.
He had seemed satisfied that I could handle an ‘average fae’ which I had assumed meant I wasn’t ready to handle anyone on his level, but maybe I could fight a lesser skilled guard or soldier and live to tell the tale.
He had given me several routines to work through, a terribly long list of areas I needed to focus on, and had dropped a kiss on my forehead before telling me he had meetings and was going to bathe so he didn’t smell like sweat and the horrible tang of magic.
Words I had used for him once.
It had been hard to get my mind off him bathing and back on my routine, and instead I had decided to give myself a break and had gone to the kitchens for something to eat. There I had decided to bring Neve something.
And all the while I thought about that bastard in his bath—just as I was sure he had intended.
I shifted my mind to other thoughts of him now. The more I thought about the things he had confessed to me, the sadder I became. Not because I couldn’t be with him—I was willing to fight to make that happen if he was willing to rebuild this shaken trust between us and do his part.
No, my sorrow was for that little boy he had been.
That scared little boy who had done the only thing he could to protect his sister and his people from a darker, violent king.
Sacrificing himself.
A boy who looked as if he had loved to smile in that portrait of him, forced to tread a path he had known wouldn’t bring him any happiness, giving up so much for his court in some desperate attempt to save it.
No wonder that side of him had disappeared in the aftermath of his parents’ deaths and his brother’s disappearance, and his ascension to the throne.
His confession had also filled in some missing pieces for me, making me realise what he had meant when he had spoken of his sister being forced to marry for the sake of relations between courts, and how he would ensure it never happened and it was his burden to bear.
He hadn’t meant the choice and what he would do to keep her from a loveless marriage was his burden.
He had been telling me that he would be the one to condemn himself to that hollow life in her place, sparing her from having to do the same.
My heart ached for him.
My beautiful, noble, Kaeleron.
He shouldn’t need to sacrifice his happiness for his court, but he had been willing to do it, just as I had been willing to do it for my pack.
He had feared what he had told me yesterday would push me away, but it had only made me want to hold on to him more firmly.
It only made me more determined to win him and to love him, and to give him the happiness he deserved.
I wanted to give him back the light that had been stolen from him by the seelie, by his uncle, by the bastards who had whispered about him and called him terrible things, and the harshness of this world.
I was no better than those bastards who had insulted him and his mother, and had made him feel so unworthy.
I had all but called him a whore.
I regretted that more than he could ever know.
Voices drifted down the stairs from the courtyard, but I tuned them out as I focused on Neve and one thing Kaeleron had said to me.
Because the more I thought about all the things he had told me, the more stuck I became on it.
I couldn’t get past what he had said about never having his true mate.
And I couldn’t stop wondering…
What happened if Kael found his fated one?
In that moment, while he had been letting it all tumble from his lips, allowing it to flow freely from his heart and his memories, he had sounded as if he wanted to find her, and that knowing he would never have her was painful to him.
I knew the power of a mate bond. I knew how consuming it could be.
How it could make you blind to someone and love them without question.
I knew how strong it could be and how it could bend you to its will, even if they rejected you.
I knew how it could strip you of autonomy, trying to force you together.
I knew how important it was to some species, wolves included.
Valued and treated with the highest respect.
In my world, being fated was like being a sure thing.
Everyone expected you to end up together.
It was an unspoken law that a wolf who found their fated one would be with them and it was so rare for one to reject the other and deny the mate bond that it had shaken my entire world to its foundations when Lucas had done it to me.
I wasn’t sure how unseelie acted towards their fated mate when they found them, whether it was as powerful and undeniable as the bond wolves felt.
I feared it might be. I feared that even if we rebuilt the trust between us and ended up together, if his fated one crossed his path, he might be pulled away from me, bewitched by the potential bond and that dream he’d had of finding his true mate.
Gods, I wished he was my mate.
I wished wolves could have two, like Kali and her mates.
I wanted that for us.
Because I was scared I would lose him one day.
“Saphira?” Neve whispered, luring me back to her. “You are upset.”
I swiped at the tears in my eyes, dashing them away. There was no point in being miserable over what might never happen. We might have forever together. Discovering that was part of the reason I had come here.
I looked into Neve’s amber eyes, searching them for the truth, a little afraid she might try to hide it from me if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“Have you ever had a vision of mine and Kaeleron’s future?”
“I have.” She held my gaze, as if she knew how badly I needed to see if she was lying, as if she knew the truth was vital to me, whatever it was.
“What did you see?” My voice trembled as I uttered four words that felt like the hardest ones I had ever spoken.
“Your future is the most glittering of gold,” she said and when some of the tension faded from my shoulders and heart, she added, “Carved from blades of bone and blood.”
I leaned towards her, reaching for the bars, for her. “What does that mean?”
She went rigid.
Her gaze growing glassy as it drifted towards the stone ceiling.
“Vengeance nears on wings of jaded night.”
I frowned. “What?”
Her amber eyes snapped down to me.
“Malachi comes.”