His gaze flicks toward the sky. “Things that would scare off a dragon, though?”
It’s a long time before I find the courage to keep speaking. Even then, the words are strangled because I’m still clinging so tightly to them.
“The other day, you asked where my older scars came from.” I place a hand over the patch his sister made, my thumb tracing the ruined skin peeking out from underneath. “This one…this one happened on a night we refer to as Emberfall.”
He leans back against the railing, watching me with undivided attention, now.
“It started out…beautiful, almost. Bits of fire falling from the clouds like a soft rain. We didn’t realize what was happening; that it was actually a precursor to much more violent magic. There were no dragons to be seen—there hadn’t been any sightings for weeks—and most went to bed thinking it was nothing but another strange, natural phenomenon we couldn’t explain. Most of us had seen stranger things.” I take a deep breath, exhaling it slowly. “Then I woke up to my city in flames.” Another deep breath. “But what I’ve never told anyone is that I saw…signs, in the days before it happened. Dreams. Visions. Warnings. Like someone, something was trying to protect me. I ignored them, though. I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Understandable enough…people likely wouldn’t have believed you. If that’s your only crime?—”
“It’s not.”
His brow furrows.
“Most of the city burned to the ground that night. I lost my parents. My fiancé. The people of Halvgate blamed your kingdom for the attack. They thought it was because of the Ashwalker guild headquartered there—that you wanted to eliminate us because of the role our kind played in keeping the kingdoms connected and united in some small way. And I encouraged that rumor.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his eyes slightly wide, as if he’s searching his memories for some order he might have given, some brutal choice he might have forgotten about. “I don’t think I…I didn’t command any such attack.”
I fix my gaze straight ahead. “I know you didn’t.”
I sense his eyes narrowing on me. He doesn’t speak, but there’s expectation in the silence. Patient, deliberate expectation while his words from days ago dance in my head?—
Show me the worst of it.
I don’t know what it is about this man that makes me want to reveal the worst of myself.
Maybe I’m just tired of keeping it to myself. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t hate dragons the way everyone back home does, and so it feels safer, admitting this next part to him.
I take the covering from my eye, winding the band of it around my wrist as I say, “Now that I can’t deny the bond Sesca and I share, it’s confirmed something horribly wrong about me. Something that I’ve always feared.”
“Which is…?”
“That Emberfall was my fault.” The words shake as they finally claw their way out, dragging five years’ worth of pain with them. “It was my fault the dragons came to Halvgate that night. They were looking forme.”
“For you?”
“Commander Gareth and I have talked about the way lesser dragons and divine dragons interact,” I continue, voice trembling. “How the lessers can’t resist yielding to a divine once it’s come into its full, bonded power, and so they’ve been known to attack them when they’re still young. I think that’s why Sesca was injured when they found her. And that’s why the more beastly, lesser ones tried to kill me, years before that. They were trying to prevent the bond from having a chance to manifest, to become strong enough to control them.”
He looks as though he wants to refute this, but he can’t seem to find the words.
“Theyshouldhave killed me.” I close my eyes for a moment, trying to prevent tears from welling up in them. “I wish they had.”
“Arowyn—”
“I tried to kill myself, when they didn’t.” The words are coming quickly, now, a rushing current I can’t stop. “After I watched my fiancé being carried away by one of them, I crawled into the burning shell of my parents’ house, and I just…I justlaidthere. Waiting for the flames to reach me. Which they did. They covered every inch of my body. But something stopped me from burning—a magic that I didn’t understand at the time. I didn’twantto understand it.”
Realization dawns slowly across his face. “You think it was Sesca’s magic?”
I nod. “I don’t have proof. Just a theory. I don’t know how she could have protected me across the space separating us. I don’t know if she was even truly born yet, or just a half-formed creature the gods were still shaping from the aether. But I knew her before we met that night at your soldiers’ camp. I just…denied her. To everyone, including myself. And I kept denying her even after we met face to face, and even after coming here, until I finally realized I had no other choice but to let her in if I was going to survive.”
He folds his arms across his chest, his head bowed in thought.
“I’ve never told anyone these things, because I didn’t know how people would react back home, if I showed any ties to dragons. Even before Emberfall, the people of my city hated dragons so viciously…if they knew what I was…”
I can’t bring myself to finish that sentence. The silence stretches for an unbearably long time, heavier than any of these chains I’ve been carrying, and I wonder if I’ve only made things worse, telling him all of this.
“What happened that night…” he begins carefully. “It’s nothing you could have helped. Dragons have been shaping this world long before either of us existed. You were born to bond with her; it wasn’t a choice you made.”
