And that Ronan returned soon with the others.
The child inside of me kicked once as if agreeing.
Chapter Twenty
VESKOR
The storm should not have come this early, or as hard. Or maybe I was simply reaching my limits. Drakens were not for cold climates, but I had thought myself tougher than most because of what I had endured in my life.
Perhaps not.
I hadn’t thought that I’d travelled north enough for such wind and snow.
Apparently, I had.
Wind howled against the cliffs like a wounded wyrm, snow slashing sideways so violently it stung even my scales. The world outside the cave was a shifting sheet of white: featureless, directionless. I couldn’t smell where the north ended and the sky began.
Perri huddled near the crude fire I’d built in our small cave, wrapped against my chest. Her skin shimmered slightly—pale white with just a hint of rose gold—reflectingthe orange light of the flames. She was so small I swallowed her whole.
“I don’t like it,” she whispered, shivering. “It sounds angry.”
“It is,” I said.
Storms always were. But, the storm also protected us. It meant the red and bronze draken and whoever was trailing him would lose our tracks. It meant no draken scent could carry on the wind.
It meant we were invisible.
Except …
It also meant we were trapped.
The fire crackled weakly as it fought a battle it was destined to lose. My woodpile was shrinking too fast. Perri stuck her hands toward the flame, her small body trembling.
She’d held up better than most would in their first experience of the cold. I was proud of her. She was dead useful in starting the fire as well, sucking the moisture out of all the wood and helping create a spark to get it going. Firewitches were useful things.
But as I knew it would come to pass, her magick wouldn’t last forever. Not a child her size. She was cold again and hungry.
“Veskor?” she asked cautiously. “Why are storms loud?”
I blinked.
No one had ever asked me a question just to understand something. Most people only asked me what I wanted, or what I planned to kill or how.
“It’s the wind hitting the mountains,” I said. “It howls when it’s angry.”
“Is it angry at us?”
For reasons I couldn’t explain, the question stung.
“No,” I rasped. “It’s angry at everything.”
She nodded solemnly as if this made perfect sense.
Two days passed, and the blizzard didn’t let up.
The cold crept in through the cave mouth, through cracks in the stone, through my scales. I’d held Perri while she slept when the fire died down. She burrowed into my chest like a hatchling, and that warmth—tiny, undeserved—kept me awake through the worst of it. Her stomach was growling loudly.
She looked at me, wide eyes brimming with apology as if hunger was a sin.
