“Go back to your city,” I say, trying very hard to keep my voice from breaking. “Protect your brother. Your sister. And Briar, if she’s…she’s…” My words stumble to a stop as the last, bloody image I have of my best friend flashes in my mind.
“She’s safe,” Reave assures me, knowing it’s what I need tohear, even if there’s no time to elaborate beyond those two words.
“Keep her that way. Please. She won't understand why I'm leaving. Or she won'twantto understand, anyway. She's going to be furious with me, and I…I…”
He reaches out and tucks a strand of wind-wrecked hair back from my face, letting his hand linger against my cheek, soft and certain and comforting.
And suddenly I don't feel as if I have to explain myself anymore.
It's such a freeing realization that my wings instinctively begin to flutter and adjust in the breeze, as if I've already taken flight again.
I still want to know you, he once said to me.
And now he does. Even these complicated, half-formed, impossible parts of me. He looks at all of it without flinching, accepting what he sees, understanding the path that stretches ahead of me even before I've fully accepted it myself.
“I'm coming back, once I have more things figured out.” I’m no longer trying to keep my voice steady. Now I'm just fighting to get the words out however I can. “Once I'm safe, and more in control, I'm going to come back. I'm going to help you and Arlo. I swear it. And I swear I'm still…”
My breath catches at the look in his eyes—half agony, half hope.
“Mine,” he finishes, barely above a whisper.
“Yours,” I agree. “And you're mine. However long it takes. Whatever distance comes between us…” I trail off again, searching for some way to explain how I actually feel, how much it hurts to have to walk away from him.
Everything I come up with feels woefully inadequate.
Then he leans in and kisses me in the same soft, certainway he touched me—an achingly beautiful act of defiance in the face of all the hard, brutal things around us—and I give up trying to speak.
“There is no length of time I wouldn't endure,” he says against my lips, his hands cradling my face. “No choice you could make, and no distance that could possibly matter, so long as you come home to me whenever you're ready to.”
Something moves through me with the words—a low, resonant humming, like a song I once knew slowly coming back to me, note by quiet note. My entire body tingles with the growing awareness of it, and then Sesca's words from earlier are suddenly whispering through my thoughts:Something burns brighter, more deeply, and more true underneath that mark, and though he can try to stifle it, he cannot put it out.
A possibility surfaces at the edge of my mind. A faint recollection of something I might have read in the palace library, or maybe something I dreamed up during one of the long, sleepless nights I spent poring over all the books and notes I collected.
Before I can voice any of it, a shadow overtakes us both.
It's the large black dragon that led the charge against Mouren’s army earlier. It looms closer, its forked tail lashing in agitation; Malachi's hold on this particular dragon is tightening again, reasserting itself now that I’ve been distracted.
Quickly, says Sesca, her fear echoing my own.
Reave pulls me into one final, fierce kiss before he takes a step back and nods toward the sky.
“Go,” he urges, and I don't hesitate another second, because I'm afraid I won't be able to make myself leave if I do.
I back away, keeping my gaze on him for as long as I can. His eyes are turbulent seas full of unspoken things, but hequickly blinks all of his emotion away, shifting back into the stoic king he was on the first night we met.
He makes himself turn away first, marching in the direction of the Dralsk retreat and beckoning the closest of his soldiers to follow, drawing Malachi’s attention toward them and away from the sky—away from me.
Distracting them, so that I don't have to fight as hard to wrest control of any wayward dragons.
I don't waste the opportunity.
I run, stretching my wings out and letting them catch the wind before I leap from the hilltop and fight my way upward.
Sesca swoops underneath me and helps me gain more height, patience and steadiness radiating through the bond, calming my ravaged nerves.
Even with her help, I’m floundering badly by the time we reach the outskirts of Lucindris, barely lucid and aching in every way that it’s possible to ache.
But I press on, refusing to let up until we've followed through with our plan. We circle around the city, reaching outward to draw any divine-blooded dragons who might be lingering over its skies into our formation. Most of the beasts we find are the mindless, cursed creatures of Mouren's making, possessing nothing that will make them yield to me—but that also means they won’t be of any use to Malachi.
