Page 217 of Feralheart

Fen shrugged, but his hand didn’t drop from his blade.

The urge to reach for my magic was already there, a pressure behind my chest I kept shoving down. I knew what the collars were doing. I’d touched Aristus’s and felt it in a single, searing second. What I didn’t know yet was how much time was left.

So I made myself look.

I pressed my palm against Selira’s neck and let my magic rise.

The heat came fast, eager in a way that twisted my belly. It rolled through our bond, and Selira caught it and carried it outward, dragon to dragon, the way wild ones read a whole flight for sickness before a migration. What her senses touched came back through my palms.

It found Aristus last.

The recoil hit me so hard I nearly lost my footing.

My palm tore free from her scales as I stumbled backward, my vision blurring. Fen wrapped an arm around me to hold me upright. I couldn’t process it yet because I was still drowning in years of something truly horrifying.

I hadn’t felt pain. That was too clean a word. This was the slow unmaking of a creature that had never been allowed to fully exist. Runes pulling them inward, year by year, so gradually they’d adapted to compensate.

I stood in Fen’s arms and shook until my teeth rattled.

My magic didn’t hand me a number. It gave me the feel of the damage and how hard the body still fought against it. The number came from every deathbed I’d ever sat near. My mother had taught me what months felt like. Tolross was teaching me weeks.

Aristus felt close.

I didn’t know how to put that into words for Fen. And I could be wrong. I’d never read a dragon this way. I’d just never yet been wrong about a person.

Fen turned me in his arms, his eyes finding mine.

“What did you see?” His voice came out steady, but it fractured underneath.

I couldn’t answer. My throat had closed around the words.

“Eradin.” Quieter now. Broken. “Tell me.”

“Aristus is sick.”

He nodded, urging me on, but how could I tell him?

“He only has months.” It came out barely audible. “Maybe less.”

Fen’s face emptied.

“No.” The word came out reasonable. Too reasonable. “No, that’s not—You’re reading it wrong.”

“I’m not.”

“Then check again.” His voice climbed. “You said you could help him. After the trials. You said maybe you could.”

“Fen.”

He stepped back, his boots catching on grass. His voice cracked clean through. “He’s been suffering for a long time. I did this. I kept the collar on him, and I⁠—”

“You didn’t know.”

“I should have.” The shout came from deep in his chest before his voice fell to almost nothing. “He’s been dying right in front of me, and I have done nothing.”

Aristus’s low rumble carried across the meadow, comfort offered to the human who couldn’t accept it yet.

I wrapped my arm around the back of his waist and held him like he’d just held me.