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His apparent indifference about the situation didn’t fool me a bit. I had spent too long living with my own outer scars not to recognize the inner scars of another.
“Saint,” I said softly. “I’m so sorry. But what happened wasn’t your fault.”
“Try telling that to the families of the girls my Drake killed,” he said and I heard the bitterness creeping into his voice again. “Try telling them it isn’t my fault. I cannot bear to go to our court in the Western Province and meet their eyes.” He sighed and looked away. “It’s why I spend so much time flying—so much time in my Drake form. Though it sounds strange, it’s easier to forget what he’s done when I’m one with him. Maybe because his mind is savage and strange—not like the thinking, reasoning Drakes of other males. His thoughts are…snarled. Tangled like a ball of twine I cannot unravel.”
It sounded to me like his Drake might have some kind of mental disorder or chemical imbalance. I wondered if maybe modern medicine could help. Would Prozac or Zoloft or one of those other depression drugs—I had been on a few of them after my parents died—help a magical being like a Drake?
“Have you thought about coming to the human world and going to the doctor?” I asked frankly. “We have medicine there…”
“Medicine to break a curse?” Saint demanded, rounding on me. He laughed and it was a wild, angry, unhappy sound.
I shrank back from his sudden outburst, even though he was still over by the door and I was sitting on the bed. Saint saw my gesture and sighed unhappily.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “I know what you’re thinking but you’re safe with me. Even if my Drake came out, you’d be safe. You’ve been claimed by another Drake—you’re someone else’s L’lorna which means you would never try to tame him. So he’d leave you alone.” He shrugged. “He really does have no interest in females, you know. Maybe because I have no interest in them myself.”
“Oh,” I said faintly. “Well…that’s good.” I had another thought and dared to speak it. “You should still think of coming to the human world, Saint,” I told him. “Even if you don’t think medicine could help your Drake.”
“Why?” he demanded. “Assuming that Nocturne Academy you all go to would even have me.”
“Well…because,” I said carefully. “We also have this thing called ‘therapy.’ It’s where you talk to someone about your past and the things that happened to you and all the guilt and anger and sorrow it caused. I had lots of therapy after my parents died in The Fire,” I went on candidly. “And it helped—it really did.”
“Therapy, you say?” Saint looked skeptical but I thought there was a note of hope in his voice. “But how can talking about your past help make anything better?”
“Don’t you feel at least a little better after telling me your past?” I asked him gently. “Sometimes it helps to just have someone listen.”
“You know…” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I didn’t think it would but…it did. A little, I think.”
“See?” I asked. “And I’m not any kind of a trained therapist. But talking helps.” I thought of how I had talked and cried with my Coven-mates—especially Megan—about the pain of losing my parents. My heart went out to Saint. What a terrible load of guilt he was carrying! I wished I could get him an appointment with my old therapist back home. She had been such a wonderful listener.
The people of the Sky Lands might have magic and the wonderment of dragons merged with humans, but they were living in the Dark Ages. They needed things from the human world they couldn’t or wouldn’t take. It was like poor little Jalli, going around with a club foot which could be fixed by surgery if only Ari’s parents would let her have it.
I resolved right then and there that if I ever did get to be Queen of the Sky Lands, I would make some big changes. People who needed medical help would get it and all this nonsensical insistence that anyone who was born or looked different from the norm was “bad luck” would have to stop. Diversity was an integral piece of a successful society where people had sympathy and empathy for each other and the Sky Lands badly needed it.
Then I realized I was planning for a future which was most likely never going to happen—not now that the Blind Crone had given everyone such crazy, unrealistic expectations of me. When the Drake people found out I wasn’t the mother of a new race they had been waiting for ever since the first dragon merged with the first man, they would reject me. They might even want to kill me.
No, it was never going to happen.
