"She's good."
Rhaezon said nothing.
"For the kethral, I mean." The stablemaster was grinning. He was not even trying to hide it. "She's good for the kethral."
"Go check the fence line."
"Yes, my Lord." The stablemaster was still grinning as he walked away.
She finished with Shade and went to the groundskeeper's cottage. Rhaezon followed. He did not pretend he was not following. She looked back once, and the smile she gave him was unguarded and open. Two passing staff members exchanged a glance that contained entire conversations.
The groundskeeper's wife was sitting up in bed for the first time in days with color in her face. November adjusted her pillows. She checked the medicine doses. She asked questions about pain and sleep and appetite.
Rhaezon stood in the doorway. The groundskeeper stood beside him; his eyes were wet. He wiped them with the back of his hand, cleared his throat and said, "She rode through the rain for her. In the dark. Alone."
Rhaezon looked at November bending over the sick woman, her hand on the woman's wrist checking her pulse, her voice low and steady and warm.
"You've got a good one, my Lord."
He did not trust himself to answer that.
Lunch was shared on the plateau sitting between the roots of the old tree.
Both stars hung above the ridge, the smaller one at its apex, the larger one climbing to meet it. The light was the specific amber-gold of Aelthar's midday — warmer than Earth's sun, November had told him once, with a quality she described as thick, as if you could hold it in your hands. He had never thought about the quality of his own sunlight before her. He thought about it now.
She settled between his legs, her back against his chest, and opened the Old Drakonian book across her lap. The pages were stiff with age and the illustrations were hand-painted in pigments that still held their color after centuries. She turned to a page she had marked with a blade of plateau grass.
"This one. Tell me about this one."
A kethral in full display posture, its six limbs extended, its vestigial scaling rendered in metallic ink that caught the light. The Old Drakonian text beneath it was dense and formal.
"The kethral was sacred to the old bloodlines," he said. His chin rested on the top of her head. "They believed the kethral could read the soul of its rider. That a kethral who accepted you had seen something in you worth carrying."
She turned her head to look at him. "Shade accepted me on the first day."
"I know."
"What does that mean?"
His breath ghosted against her neck. The mate bond roared. He moved his mouth away deliberately, pressing his lips to the crown of her head instead — safe territory, neutral ground.
"It means you were worth carrying."
She turned the page.
The illustration filled both leaves — a full-shifted Drakon in flight above a plateau that might have been this one, rendered in the same careful hand as the kethral but larger, the scale of the creature laid out against a sky of layered blues. Wingsspread in a span that dwarfed the ridge line beneath it. A long neck curved forward, the head turned slightly so the painter had caught the profile of one amber eye. Scales worked in gold leaf along the spine and jaw. Smoke curling from the nostrils in a thin, deliberate line.
November was quiet for a long moment. Her thumb traced the edge of the illustration without touching the pigment itself.
"Is this really what they looked like? Your people. When they could?"
"Yes."
"All of them? This size?"
"The size varied with the bloodline. The strongest lines were larger. The Kael-Vaethari were—" He searched for the comparison. "This. Approximately this."
She sat forward slightly. "And when they shifted. Inside." She tilted her head back against his shoulder so she could see his face. "Was it still them? Did they feel the same? Think the same? Or did their minds change with the body?"
