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“Fuck me, it’s always something around here,” Ridoc mutters.
“I’m hungry. I think I’ll partake in a flock of sheep.” He launches with great beats of his wings.
“This place cuts away the bullshit and the niceties, revealing whoever you are at your core.” I repeat his words from this summer. “Isn’t that what you said to me? Is this who you really are at your core? Someone so enamored with rules that he doesn’t know when to bend or break them for someone he cares about? Someone so focused on the least I’m capable of doing, he can’t believe I can do so much more?”
“The reason we’ll never be anything more than friends isn’t because of your rules. It’s because you have no faith in me. Even now, when I’ve survived against all odds and bonded not just one dragon but two, you still think I won’t make it. So forgive me, but you’re about to be some of the bullshit that this place cuts away from me.” I move to the side and march past him through the tunnel, forcing air through my lungs.
But I can’t take his constant pessimism about my future anymore.
“Even worse, I think I’m getting used to it.” Either I have kick-ass compartmentalization skills or I really am acclimating to always being a target.
There’s a sense of connection in those moments that I crave, a momentary banishment of loneliness.
He’s the last person I should be craving, but lust and logic never seem to go hand in hand.
“I let someone live once, and he almost killed you last night, Silver One,” Tairn says. Then, as if this is all that really matters in the end, “Justice is not always merciful.”
take in the rows of tables, slowly filling with scribes readying themselves for work, and imagine my father among them. “It’s like coming home, but not. And it’s not that it’s changed—this place never changes. Hell, I think change is the mortal enemy of a scribe. But I’m starting to realize that I’ve changed. I don’t quite fit here. Not anymore.”
“They show the appropriate level of deference,” Tairn grumbles. “To what they think I’ll be, not who I am.” We find our row and walk to our seats, sitting as a squad among the first-years. “That shows excellent forethought.”
The first rush of power is unmistakable. The first time it forms to you, surrounds you with a seemingly endless supply of energy, you’ll be addicted to the high, to the possibilities of all you can do with it, to the control you hold in the palm of your hand. But here’s the thing, that power can quickly turn and control you.
“Challenges resume after solstice,” I remind her. “You’re not doing me any favors by holding back.”
Finally, the pain ebbs, but the energy—the power—doesn’t. It’s simply…there, prowling through my veins, saturating every cell in my body. It is everything I am and everything I can be all at once.
“I know you just want to keep me safe, Dain,” I whisper. “But keeping me safe is keeping me from growing, too.”
At my core, Dain, I’m a rider. Tairn knew it. Andarna knew it. It’s why they chose me. And until you can stop looking for ways to keep me in a glass cage, we aren’t going to get past this, no matter how many years of friendship we have between us.”
The pain in his eyes is the kind that never dies, the kind that rises like an unpredictable tide and floods the shoreline without mercy.
I shouldn’t be saying these things. These are the thoughts families keep behind their doors so they can wear their polished, perfect reputations like armor when in public.
“Or she sees right through me. Problem is, I’m never quite sure which it is. I’m too busy trying to live up to whatever impossible standard she sets to ask myself if they’re even standards I give a shit about.”
“Dragon relationships are absolutely incomprehensible,” I murmur. “Yeah? You should try a human one sometime. Just as vicious, but less fire.” He mounts with an ease I envy. “Now let’s go.”
Your mission is simple: find and acquire, by any means necessary, the one thing that would be most advantageous to our enemies regarding the war effort.
“I avoid that duty like the plague,” Emery answers. “Scribes freak me out. Quiet little know-it-alls, acting like they can make or break someone by writing something down.” I grin. There’s more truth to that statement than most people realize.
There is no stronger bond than that between two mated dragons. It goes beyond the depth of human love or adoration to a primal, undeniable requirement for proximity. One cannot survive without the other.
Funny how much can change in such a short time.
“Here’s the thing. If you want your signet to manifest, then stop blocking it by thinking it has anything to do with Mom. Your power is yours and yours alone, Vi.”
“I needed to change in order to survive. He wouldn’t let me.”
“There’s nothing anyone can do about the way I’m made.”
This isn’t about me.
He may have been an ass the last few months, but that doesn’t negate the years he’s been my best friend.
Winning the War Games isn’t about strength. It’s about cunning. To know how to strike, you have to understand where your enemies—your friends—are most vulnerable. No one stays friends forever, Mira. Eventually those closest to us become our enemies in some way, even if it’s through well-intentioned love or apathy, or if we live long enough to become their villains.
“Hardly. Tell me something real.”
“He cares for you. That’s already hard enough for him.” I scoff. “He cares about keeping me alive. There’s a difference.” “Not for him there isn’t.”
My fingernails bite into my palms as I search for another reason, another excuse, but there isn’t one. I might not want to appear different than every other rider on this field, but I already am.
“When did I ever give you the impression that I give a fuck what people think about me?” A corner of his mouth rises, and now it’s all I can concentrate on, damn him. “I only care what they think about you.”
Power crackles above me, swirls around me, wraps along my feet below me. I am the sky and the power of every storm that has ever been. I am infinite.
Xaden nails him with a glare. “The blood in my veins is as warm as yours, Aetos, and if it’s my job you want next year, then you’d better start understanding that you never get used to killing, but you do understand that it’s necessary.”
“You might not like it, might even loathe it, but it’s power like yours that saves lives.” “By killing people?” I cry.
“By defeating invading armies before they get the chance to hurt civilians. You want to keep Rhiannon’s nephew alive in that little border village? This is how. You want to keep Mira alive when she’s behind enemy lines? This. Is. How. You are not just a weapon, Sorrengail. You are the weapon. You train this ability, own it, and you’ll have the power to defend an entire kingdom.”
Just once, I’d love to see him disheveled or unnerved, anything outside that calm control he wears like armor.
“I told you that you’d have to develop a stomach for killing. I never said you’d get over it.”
I’m mad that him dying changes me.”
Signets are based on the rider, just fueled by the dragon, which means this has always been there under the surface, just waiting to be unleashed. And to think—” A knot forms in my throat. “All this time, I had this tiny, driving hope that I would be like Brennan, and that would be the twist in my little fable. That my signet would be mending, and I could put all the broken things back together. But instead, I’m made to split them apart. How many people will I kill with this?” His eyes soften. “As many as you choose. Just because you gained power today doesn’t mean you lost agency.”
It’s not the same for you. You wanted a quiet life full of books and facts. You wanted to record the battles, not be in them. There is nothing wrong with you.
He nods. “If it makes you feel better, I couldn’t keep anything down after the first time I killed anyone, either. I don’t think less of you for having a reaction like that. Just means you still have your humanity.” “So do you,” I say, gently taking the book from him. “That’s debatable.” Says the man who has one hundred and seven scars on his back. “It’s not. Not to me.”
One of the purposes of the fables is to teach children about the dangers of too much power.
Right here, both wanting and only one of us brave enough to take, and I deserve more than a relationship that’s only on his terms.
Because if there’s one thing I know for certain, it’s that I’m going to fall for this man—if I haven’t already—and he’s halfway there, too, whether he realizes it or not.
“I’m just…his.”
As if knowing him would somehow make me want him less, but everything I learn about him only makes me tumble harder and faster. Oh gods. I know this feeling. Denying it doesn’t make it any less true. My feelings are what they are. I haven’t run from a challenge since I crossed this parapet a year ago, and I’m not about to start now.
The look in his eyes is wild, like he’s been driven past the point where he can contain himself in the neat, apathetic facade he usually wears in public. It doesn’t scare me. I like him better when he’s real with me anyway.
