Page 49 of Feralheart

I couldn’t picture past the mounting.

My hand found the blade’s hilt and held on.

Four hours until dawn.

Then I’d find out if a commons could ride a broken dragon without dying.

CHAPTER TWELVE

ERADIN

I’d imagined this moment a hundred times since I signed the waiver. In none of those versions did my hands stay steady.

The kettle hissed on the stove, steam curling toward the low ceiling.

Father poured tea into three clay cups, the ones Tolross had painted with flowers two years ago when his hands didn’t shake. The liquid was pale. Too much water and not enough leaves. But it was hot, and it soothed my soul.

We sat at the table, the silence pressing down like a big rock on my chest.

Tolross’s face had gone the color of old parchment, bruises shadowing the hollows under his eyes. But he was trying to smile, his mouth pulling up at one corner, putting on a show for me.

“You look terrible,” I said.

“You look worse.”

Father’s cup rattled on the table when he set it down.

I wrapped both hands around my cup and let the heat soak into my palms. The red lines were still there, faintly visible in the early light. Father had seen them years ago. I was sure he saw them now. But like then, he didn’t comment. I was my mother’s daughter, with her skills, and he’d accepted that easier than I had.

Tolross reached under his blanket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, holding it out to me.

“For when you feel like giving up,” he said.

I went to him and took it. “That means I won’t be reading it.”

His brown eyes met mine, and his gaze held all the things we couldn’t speak aloud.

I nodded and tucked the poem into my pocket with the dragon scale.

He took my hand, his fingers cold and too thin around mine.

“You’re freezing,” I said.

“I’m always freezing.”

I rubbed his hand between mine, trying to push warmth into him the way I’d tried a hundred times before. Heat stirred in my palms, a useless flicker that woke for injured dragons but never for him.

“Do you remember when I was five, and I tried to climb the quarry wall?” he asked.

“You fell and broke your wrist in two places.”

“You carried me home. I was screaming the whole way, and you just kept telling me to count the steps. Count the breaths. You made me count to eight hundred before we got to the door.”

I’d made him count so he wouldn’t pass out from the pain.

“I’m counting now,” he said quietly.

My vision went hot at the edges.