“Why?” I demand. “Why would you let that dragon just fly off and continue threatening your city? Sesca could have dealt with it! Why did you stop her?”
He starts to walk away.
I grab his arm and jerk him around to face me.
Tension ripples through his muscles, and I brace myself for the transformation I've witnessed before—the darkening eyes, the sharpening teeth.
But it doesn't happen, this time.
He remains fully, achingly human.
And then he just…crumples.
He sinks to his knees right there in the muddiest, most flooded spot of the clearing, one hand braced against theground and the other pressed hard against his heart, like he's trying to keep it in one piece, trying to hold it in, desperate to stop it from falling out and shattering on the forest floor.
Sesca exhales a long, measured breath, settling low against the ground with her wings folded. She seems to think any danger he might have posed to me has passed. The forest is eerily quiet all of a sudden, nothing but the sound of the rain pattering against the leaves, the wind dying down to almost nothing.
I don't know what else to do, so I just kneel before Reave, trying to get a clear look at his face, trying to make sense of him, ofthis.
“Why did you let it go?” I say again, my voice barely a whisper this time.
Still no reply.
I lean a little closer, my hand closing over his in the mud, a fear I can’t explain taking root in my chest.
A lifetime seems to pass before he finally lifts his head a few inches, though he doesn't meet my gaze. The anguish written in his expression is so terrible that it freezes the breath in my lungs.
“Because,” he rasps, “that dragon…was Arlo.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The trees are spinning, everything is blurring, and it takes me far too long to realize that it’s because I still haven’t remembered to breathe.
“What do you mean, that wasArlo?”
Reave doesn’t answer. I don’t think he even hears me. Or sees me. His eyes are unfocused, shining with unshed tears. There are more tears staining his face, I think, though it’s hard to tell them apart from the rain.
A minute passes, then another, before he speaks in a rough, broken whisper. “I…I can’t save him. He’s getting worse. Worse than anyone who’s suffered from this before, and I don’t know why. He hasn’t evendoneanything, and yet he still seems to be paying the price for the sins our ancestors committed against the fucking gods.”
Several moments pass before his words sink in and my mind begins to piece together what’s actually happening.
“The sins…” I say slowly, uncertainly. “You’re talking about the things Mouren’s rulers have done to obtain the power of dragons, aren’t you? The way they stole it.”
He finally meets my gaze.
“I…I might have stumbled upon some incriminating evidence regarding that earlier today, under the Temple of the Flame, and I was looking for you, so I could?—”
He laughs.
It’s a bitter, dark, horrible sound.
“So, you’ve figured out the curse of Mouren’s royal family,” he says. “Aren’t you fuckingclever?”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.
He leans away from me but remains on his knees, tilting his head up toward the dark, rumbling sky.
A confusing, painful tangle of emotions has knotted itself up in my chest. But despite this, I’m still determined to ask the questions I’ve been wrestling with all day, to understandsomethingbefore this night is over.
