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“Where is my other son?” Joachim roared.
But they couldn’t find Branok on the riverbank.
Joachim’s knights winged me away, but my brother was safe.
And protecting the ones I loved was all that ever mattered to me.
CHAPTER33
Honor
I was sleepingbetween Jaik and Caldren when the tent fluttered as someone shook it. I scrambled up.
“Where are your idiots?” Damyn demanded harshly.
“Mine, in particular?” I asked as Jaik, Caldren and I traded sleepy looks. “Aren’t they alsoyouridiots? You made them.”
But even if I was being a smartass, I was already scrambling up and getting dressed, and so were Jaik and Caldren. The three of us tumbled outside the tent to face an irritated-looking Damyn. Funny how my stomach flip-flopped even when he wasn’t mad at me, and even Jaik and Caldren looked abashed when Damyn was angry.
“Branok and Lynx went missing.”
“I’ll find them,” I promised, reaching out. I frowned. I couldn’t find Lynx. Cold panic spread through my body at the realization. Could he be dead?
Then I brushed against Branok’s mind. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, but as he briefly surfaced, his sense of pain and fear and cold rocked me to my core. He tried to drag himself across the rocks, realizing he was hiding in some brush, to find his brother. But he passed out before he could get any further.
“Stay there,”I tried to urge him. I blinked my eyes open to find Damyn, Jaik and Caldren staring at me. “He was attacked.”
Damyn scoffed. “He was a—”
“You can yell at him later,” I said. I grabbed the three of them to shadow travel, and the next thing we knew, we were stumbling in the shade of a bank along the river that wound just outside the city.
Jaik turned his head up, pressing a hand over his eyes to watch the dragon knights circling above. “Do you think they’re still under my command?”
“I’m sure we’ll find out,” Damyn said grimly.
I rushed into the brush, searching for Branok with my heart pounding in my chest. It wasn’t until Jaik caught my wrist and pulled my bloodied hand to his face that I realized I’d been searching through thorns that pulled at my skin. I’d been so anxious to find Branok after feeling his fear.
“We’ll take care of each other,” Jaik promised me. “You don’t have to carry the burden of all of us alone.”
Pulling his leather gloves on, he wrapped me in his cloak, then forged ahead of me into the thorns.
I let out a cry as I caught a glimpse of golden hair deep in the thicket. He must have crawled here to get away from the dragon knights during his moments of consciousness.
The three of us crouched around him. Damyn held out a hand and said grimly, “I sense Joachim’s magic. These aren’t merely his injuries making him pass out.”
“I’ll break the curse,” Jaik said, holding me off with a hand. “Honor, you need to preserve your magic. You’re the one who can shadow travel.”
I chewed my lower lip as Jaik worked to break the curse and Caldren set to healing Branok’s wounds.
Meanwhile, Damyn held out a hand, giving me a look. All I cared about was Branok at the moment, but I didn’t dare argue. Damyn’s healing golden magic swept across my bloodied hands, then he moved to repairing the other scratches and wounds. He’d never been able to heal before—or we wouldn’t have needed the physician in the arena to piece us back together—and as the warm glow lit his handsome, intense face, I thought for a second about how even he could learn new things.
I must have said something out loud, because his gaze flickered up to mine. “I’m not exactly ancient, Honor.”
Funny, because it seemed he was always reminding me he was so much older.
Branok startled awake, dazed at first, then looking at all of us frantically. “What happened? Where's Lynx?”
“I hoped you’d be able to tell us that since you decided to be a fool,” Damyn’s voice was steel, and Caldren winced sympathetically.
