Page 11 of Feralheart

Nuant would report this. Not to my mother directly, however. He wasn’t stupid. But word would reach her. A prince defending a commons? She’d want an explanation.

I didn’t have one that would satisfy anyone, not even myself.

Aristus waited in the courtyard outside the aerie. He lifted his head when I came near, his silver-touched scales catching the afternoon light. I’d had him longer than I’d been without him. He was as much a part of my life as my own hands.

The dragon shifted under my touch, and a hitch came through in his breathing, the one I’d been noticing for months, a slight drag on the exhale. I’d told myself it was an effect of the rigorous training schedule before the Scorching. A change in feed. Three healers had told me the same thing, each more certain than the last.

I stroked his neck and felt his heartbeat under my fingers, steady but not right.

My hand shook. I pulled it back and pressed it against my thigh before anyone could see.

Last week during a routine flight, Aristus had banked left when I’d cued right. He’d corrected before anyone noticed, but I’d felt the change.

The third healer had used the word irreversible and dragged his gaze to his boots.

Is peace what you felt when you bonded with Aristus?

“That commons woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” I said. “She can’t. She doesn’t ride dragons. Commons don’t have bonds like we do.”

Aristus watched me. Through our bond, I felt only bits of him, like pressing your hand against a door and sensing movement on the other side, but never the room itself. That distance had been growing for months, a slow retreat I’d told myself was normal.

I tried to remember him from before we’d bonded, but only the after existed. My tutors had called that completeness. A bond so total it erased the seam.

I ran my thumb along the Unity Band and felt the groove worn into his scales beneath it. Twenty-three years of accommodation. I pressed my thumb into the calluses and held it there, the way you pressed a bruise to confirm it still hurt.

It did. I sensed it through our bond.

My hand dropped back to my side, and I mounted up, urging him to take flight.

As we flew, I didn’t look back toward the ceremonial chamber, and I didn’t let myself think about the hatchling standing frozen. Or the commons woman’s hands jerking away. Or the question she’d asked that I still couldn’t answer.

Leaning forward, I stroked Aristus’s neck.

Is peace what you felt when you bonded with Aristus?

No. It wasn’t.

CHAPTER FOUR

ERADIN

Late that day, I left work with dragon claw oil staining my fingers and a plan forming that would probably get me killed.

The descent path to Shaleside Village carved through three switchbacks, past the old boundary marker where the cobbles gave way to shale. The queen’s castle glowered from the highest peak above, all pale stone and glass, overlooking the ruin we commons called home.

Two alleys from my family cottage, I stopped and pulled the ties from my hair, letting it fall loose below my shoulders. I shook it out, wishing I could shake out the day along with it.

The lanes narrowed as I walked, carved into the shale centuries ago by people who’d had no choice but to make homes in the valley’s unwanted spaces. Iron dust lined the gutters, a never-ending rust-red grit that worked its way into the seams of my boots and clothing and stayed there. Laundry lines crisscrossed overhead, shirts and trousers and bedsheets snapping in the wind. On clear days you could tip your head back and catch the fortress’s lower turrets through the laundry lines. The stove smoke that hazed the air smelled of beet mash and old fat, nothing like the aerie’s coal-fed braziers.

Somewhere below, the mine lift clanged, hauling people down or ore up in the rhythm Shaleside lived by. A notice nailed by the lift listed last week’s fall-dead. By noon the names always smudged.

Three children crouched in a doorway, drawing dragon silhouettes on slate scraps. Their dragon wings were too big and the necks too short. Everyone in Shaleside knew what dragons looked like, but unless we were hired to work with them, we couldn’t get close.

A poster from the last Scorching flapped above the children’s heads, all sun-bleached and torn edges. The faded rider on the poster stared into the distance from the back of an onyx dragon, both frozen mid-flight. Both long gone.

Father said the race used to launch from the fortress’s high platforms, a drop so steep your stomach fell twice before the wind caught up. I wouldn’t know. It had been twenty-three years since the last Scorching, and my memory was only vague around the event.

I didn’t stop long to look at the poster. Stopping meant wanting, and wanting made the ground under your feet give way.