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He looked up at me.
His deep, royal blue eyes locked onto my green gaze, holding me captive in the cold night air. The subtle, dangerous smirk that I knew better than my own name touched the corner of his lips—a silent, fierce promise that despite the dragons, despite the court, and despite the shifting balance of the world, I was still his Trouble. And he was still my Captain.
“You kept me waiting at brunch, Princess,” Caspian rasped, his voice a low, gravelly wire that carried over the roaring surf.
A faint, breathless laugh broke from my cracked lips, my green eyes shining through the soot on my face as I looked down at him.
“The traffic on the mountain was terrible, Captain,” I shot back, my tone dripping with the familiar armor that belonged only to us.
Caspian reached up, holding his large, calloused hand out toward me.
I didn’t hesitate. I reached down, wrapped my fingers around his, and let the shadow take us both.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The shadow of dragon wings blotted out the midday sun over the capital, throwing long, monstrous silhouettes across the white stone walls of the citadel.
The return from Isath Nalore was not a triumphant parade. It was an arrival of ghosts.
As the colossal forms of the bonded dragons descended toward the grand parade grounds outside the city’s outer gates, the sound of their landing made the ground tremble for miles. The Nyxalith took the high center, its opalescent scales reflecting the cold sunlight, its phantom shadow-head hovering beside its skull like a dark eclipse. To my left, Caspian’s Umbrax glided silently onto the perimeter wall, an immovable shadow of onyx scales.
Below us, the entire city of Nymeria had gathered.
Thousands of citizens, guild masters, lower-tier guards, and high-born families pressed against the iron railings of the outer gates. The air was thick with a volatile mixture of desperate anticipation and ambient fear.
They had sent twenty candidates onto the sea-drakes. Twenty of the realm’s finest, high-born heirs and elite commanders, clad in steel and promised glory.
Only a handful returned.
When the cloud of dust settled and the survivors disembarked from their mounts, a sharp gasp rippled through the crowd. I stood beside the shoulder of the Nyxalith, my leathers torn and singed with ash, my jaw set into a wall of unyielding stone as I watched the scene unfold.
The celebration was instantly poisoned by grief.
Families searched frantically through our tiny, battered line. Mothers pressed against the iron bars of the gate, their eyes darting wildly from Mal to Dax, to Kaelor, to the other transfers; searching, begging for faces that were not there.
A noblewoman from the Western Reach let out a piercing shriek of relief as her younger brother dismounted from his Lumi, falling to her knees in the dirt as she wept. But right beside her, an elder lord stood completely frozen. His eyes swept over our broken ranks once, twice, three times, searching for the proud son he had sent away to claim a dragon.
When his gaze landed on the empty space beside Kaelor, the realization hit him like a physical blow. The color drained from his face, his posture collapsing as he realized the male he was waiting for was never coming home. He was floating somewhere in the freezing deep of the northern sea, or reduced to ash on the black sand.
Out of twenty elite candidates, only eight stood before the gates. The cull had been absolute.
And then, the sea of eyes shifted to me.
A strange quiet swept over the gathered thousands as I stepped away from the Nyxalith’s side.
No one in the capital had expected the half-blood to return. In the noble courts, my inclusion in the trial had been treated as a dark joke. A convenient, lethal theater arranged by the sovereign council to strip the royal line of its half-breed embarrassment. They had expected me to die on the sea crossing. They had expected my bones to bleach in the dragon wilds.
Instead, I had returned riding the sovereign titan of the northern sky.
The shift in public perception was immediate and profound.
A group of young children standing near the front of the gate, their eyes wide with awe, began to cheer—their high voices cutting through the somber weeping of the crowd. Across the parade grounds, several high-born lords who had spent years ignoring my presence at court slowly dropped to one knee, bowing their heads in rigid submission. Others took frantic steps backward, their faces pale as their eyes flicked from the wisps of shadow clinging to my form to the colossal, two-headed nightmare standing behind me.
For the first time in my existence, people were not whispering half-breed. They were not whispering bastard.
A low, reverent murmur washed over the crowd like a rising tide:
“Princess... Dragon Rider... Shadow-born...”
