Page 218 of Feralheart

He placed his hand over mine on his hip.

“Don’t let go.” His voice came out raw. “Not yet.”

“I won’t. Not ever.”

We stood together until his breathing evened.

I counted his inhales. Seven before they stopped catching. It was the only useful thing I could think of to do.

Releasing my hand, he turned to face me again.

Wind caught strands of my hair, sweeping them across my face. He stroked them back, securing them behind my ear. His fingers lingered on my cheek. Sliding down to my jaw.

“Thank you,” he said.

I couldn’t answer. My throat had closed around everything I wanted to say and couldn’t.

Lyndie’s face had gone white. “How long for Grimstone?”

“I can’t give you a promise. Dying doesn’t keep a schedule. My mother used to say that to people who wanted one.” I made myself say the rest plainly, the way she would have. “A few years, maybe. He’s healthier, but the damage runs deep, the roots are already wrapping around vital organs.”

Her hand found her mouth, and her eyes shimmered with tears. “Only a few years?”

Reece had gone very still beside his dragon, one hand pressed against the beast’s scarred scales. “This one too? I realize he’s not mine, but he’s watched out for me. He’s as valiant as me. As old as me. Neither of us is finished yet.”

“He has a year. Maybe two.”

“Fates,” Reece said, his voice strangled. “I knew something was wrong, but I thought—” He looked at Fen, then at me. “They all die like this? Every bonded dragon?”

“They’re being murdered.” The words scraped up my throat.

“By the system that claims to love them,” Lyndie said.

Every dragon I’d ever tended in the aerie. The retired dragons in their pens, the ones everyone called brittle-boned and half-blind. They’d been used up and tossed into a corner to die. The hatchling at the ceremony, freezing the moment the band closed around her neck.

They weren’t freezing. The most vital part of them was being extinguished.

I’d spent hours learning to read a dragon’s distress, to soothe what the elite had frightened or broken. I’d thought I was working around the system, offering small mercies inside a structure I couldn’t change.

But the structure itself was the wound.

The elite had built their entire society on dragon corpses. Generations of them, piled high enough to reach the castle that overlooked it all.

And I’d been polishing their bones for most of my life.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

ERADIN

My hands were a problem. They’d gone still at my sides, the red lines fading to a dull simmer, and I couldn’t make myself move them. My mother’s hands had looked like this after she’d healed something she couldn’t fix, her wrists raw, her palms empty, and her arms hanging like she’d given everything there was to give and only wished she could drag up more. She used to press them flat against each other until the trembling stopped.

I pressed my palms together, but they kept trembling.

The fire Reece had lit had burned down to coals. Somewhere in the elite camp, a servant was banking a cookfire for the night, the sound of it carrying across the grass. They’d eaten. Drank. Relaxed while their dragons suffered.

“I’m going to fly without the saddle and breastplate in the next trial.” Fen’s voice came out flat. “I can’t do anything about the collar, but I won’t use anything else that restricts him.”

“That’s suicide,” Reece said. “You’ll fall. You’ll⁠—”