Page 94 of Flames and Blood

I think this is a good man. A really good one.

My dragon agrees, though she’s too busy basking in afterglow to do much right now.

He crosses the room while I’m lacing my boots and takes a piece of hair off my face and puts it behind my ear. There’s no reason for it. Nothing needed doing. His fingers are cold at my temple for half a second. I look up at him and feel my throat work as our eyes lock. Then he’s past me and picking up his pack as if he’s already forgotten doing it.

I sit there with one boot half-laced and try to imagine what his fingers would feel like everywhere else.

“We’d better get going,” he says as I stand. “This will be the last stretch, and I think we can fit it in before sunrise.”

“Sure,” I say, not letting myself look back at the bed as we leave the cabin.

We climb for hours. Switchback after switchback, the trees get shorter and sparser until they stop. The ground goes from green to gray rock, and after that there are long fields of old snow that have never had a chance to melt.

We’re silent as we travel now. What happened between us has put an end to the light banter we’ve shared for the past couple of days. I miss it.

Somewhere in it, the air changes. I feel it in my chest first—thinner, so each breath brings back a little less—and I sit up straighter without deciding to.

I know this country. The peaks stack up here instead of spreading out, one behind the other, and I crack the window and pull the air in through my nose.

Ice. Wet rock. Juniper from some ledge below the road, the last of it before the trees quit for good. And under all of that, faint, high up, carried down off the cloud, woodsmoke and sulfur and warm stone. Hearth-smell. Dragon-smell. My clan is up there burning last summer’s wood. I can smell them from a truck cab on a border road, and my eyes are stinging before I’ve finished the breath.

I want to be home. I have wanted it for over a year. It’s not far now, and I can smell it. But there’s something waiting for me up there that I haven’t told him about. I’ve had all night to say it, and I haven’t. It can wait. Set against a clan with a killer in it, it’s nothing. I almost believe that.

I should believe that.

Somewhere up in there is whoever put me in that terrible place.

We climb for another hour, and then the road tops a rise, and he slows without me asking him to.

Mountains, one behind the other, further back than I can see the end of them. Gray rock, white snow. Above all of it sits the cloud that has never lifted in my lifetime, and somewhere inside it, higher than anything in front of us, is the Aldrake Eyrie.

“That’s Ondrathe,” I say. “All of it. From that shoulder across to the water.”

“How far does your mother’s territory go?”

“To the far side of the cloud and about a hundred miles past it.”

I put both hands flat on the dash and lean forward.

Soon, I’ll be standing in that hall. I’ll say the words I was taught before I could fly. I’ll take the hands that are offered to me, and I’ll be gracious to every last one of them—the council, the household, my mother’s people, my grandmother’s.

One of them sold me. I don’t know which face it is, so I’m going to have to smile at all of them.

Under my ribs, my dragon comes awake and turns her head toward the cloud, and for the first time since the snow, she wants something that isn’t him.

Revenge.

Chapter 22

Crowe

The road ends that same night at a walled yard cut into the rock. There’s a gate, a stone shelter with a chimney, and eleven vehicles parked nose-in against the wall with snow packed on their roofs.

Past the yard, the ground goes up at an angle no truck can manage, and a set of stairs goes up with it, cut into the rock and turning back on itself until it disappears into the cloud.

There’s no moon behind the cloud and no stars. The only light in the yard is one bulb over the gate.

“How long will it take?”