Maybe I did, too.
I don’t think either of us is ready to admit this, but it’s a positive start to our visit, nonetheless. I try to appease her further by immediately offering up the gift I’ve brought for her: a basket of marrow bones.
“The servants told me that this seems to be your favorite treat.”
She slips down from the platform she was lounging on, moving with surprisingly silent grace, her frill raised and her golden gaze narrowing on the bundle in my hand until I drop it at her feet.
While she crunches through the bones with obvioussatisfaction, I take in the arena and all the evidence of my fiery loss of control. It’s dark—because I put this visit off for longer than I should have, probably—but I can still make out the scorch marks climbing the walls like black vines, the sand fused to glass in places, the charred training equipment.
My appraisal is soon interrupted by a dragon snout shoving into my hands, then sniffing at all of my pockets. When it’s obvious I have no more treats on me, she instead points her nose at my face and inhales deeply.
You smell like the king.
I sigh, pushing her away. “I thought that would have worn off by now.”
It hasn’t.She tilts her head, studying my face.You come with questions.
“Or maybe I just came to enjoy your company?”
She snorts.
I give her a crooked grin. “No fooling you, is there?”
Turning her back to me, she slinks back toward her platform. It groans a bit as she leaps onto it. After circling a few times, and carefully stepping over and through the chains that bind her, she flops down and fixes her eyes on mine.
Ask.
I slowly step toward her. “…I was wondering about an ability you might have. Is it true that a divine dragon can see what drives a person—the flame that most fuels their soul?”
Karath-ven, in my tongue.Her nostrils flare.Fire-reading, in yours.
“That’s right.” I chance another step closer. “I’m trying to make sense of it. Of what you see. Because you didn’t get upset when the king got close to me yesterday, and you didn’t act as though he was a threat to me—even though I’vespent most of my life believing there is no greater threat to me than King Reave and all that he represents.”
She regards me silently. Patiently.
“But you seemed so certain of Gareth and the danger he might pose.”
Anger always burns brightest, even when it’s buried deep.
I think of the moment Reave and I first met. The way he seemed on the verge of losing control that night, and several times since. “You don’t see anger when you look at the king?”
No.
“What do you see, then?”
She considers for a long moment.
Sorrow.
I don’t know what I expected her to say, but it wasn’t this.
My knees feel a bit weak, suddenly. I want to sit, so I start to climb up on the platform she’s reclining on. In the dark, my single eye misjudges the distance when I try to reach for one of the chains that helps support that platform; I slip, but Blight’s tail curves under me, catching me and lifting me the rest of the way up. The feathered fronds along the end tickle my skin as she rolls me onto the cool metal.
I crawl over and settle on the edge of the platform, staring at a charred target on the ground below, considering her words.
“Sorrow can make men as dangerous as anger,” I think aloud.
Yes.And the entire palace echoes with this same sorrow. It rises up through the sand in this very arena. The air is thick with it.
