Chapter 1: Mating Flight
You have been at Samara for twenty-three days, and for twenty-two of them you have managed not to speak to Xaden Riorson.
It isn't hard. The outpost is a fist of grey stone shoved into the cliffs above the eastern border, and it has more corridors than people. You fly dawn patrols. He flies whatever he wants, because the colonel in command of Samara looks at Xaden the way a man looks at a loaded crossbow someone left on his desk: very carefully, and from the side. You eat early. He eats late or not at all. The only time you see him is across the flight field, a tall dark shape in black leathers with shadows pooling around his boots even at noon, and you have trained yourself to look somewhere else.
You know what he is. Everyone does. Fen Riorson's son, the marked one who made wingleader anyway, the rider whose shadows killed more people at Basgiath than most cadets ever meet. You know the rebellion relic that coils up out of his collar and along his jaw. You know the scar that slices through his left eyebrow. You know he looked at you exactly once on your first day, took your measure in one sweep of those flat dark eyes, and dismissed you so completely that you felt it like a draft.
You are a lieutenant. You are twenty-two. You graduated with the highest navigation marks in your year and a signet that makes the other riders call you a compass with legs, because you can feel true north in your teeth and find your way home from anywhere you have ever been. You are not interested in being dismissed by anybody. So you look somewhere else.
Then, on the twenty-third day, your dragon ruins everything.
"Something is wrong with you," you tell Fiachra, two hours into a patrol that should have taken one.
He doesn't answer. That's how you know. Fiachra always answers, usually with something rude. He is a storm-grey swordtail, long and lean and fast, with a voice in your head like boulders grinding in a riverbed, and he has had an opinion about every decision you have made since the Threshing. Today he has been silent since takeoff, flying in long restless loops along the border instead of the route you mapped, and the muscles under the saddle are bunched so tight you can feel his heartbeat through your thighs.
"Fiachra."
"Be quiet," he says finally, and his voice is strange, rough and distracted. "She's here."
"Who's—"
You don't finish, because a dragon drops out of the cloud bank above you like a falling knife.
Navy blue, so dark she's nearly black against the sky, with a daggertail that could take your head off at a hundred yards. Sgaeyl. You'd know her anywhere. Every rider at Samara knows her, gives her the widest berth in the field, because she has eaten at least one cadet who looked at her wrong and isn't sorry about it. And on her back, low against her neck, a figure in black.
Sgaeyl banks hard and passes so close that the wind of her wings knocks you sideways in your seat. Fiachra roars. It isn't a warning. It isn't anything you've ever heard him do before. It comes from the bottom of his chest and goes on and on, until your ears ring, and then he folds his wings and dives after her.
"Fiachra!"
He doesn't hear you. Or he hears you and doesn't care, which is worse. You grab the pommel and flatten yourself and hold on as he chases Sgaeyl down the cliff face, the grey rock blurring past close enough to touch, and up again, a spiral climb so steep your vision greys at the edges. Sgaeyl turns. Fiachra turns with her. They go round each other in a tightening coil, two dragons and two riders, and for one long second at the top of it you are face to face with Xaden Riorson across ten feet of empty air.
He's furious. You can see it in the set of his jaw. His hair is whipped back, his eyes narrowed against the wind, and he is looking straight at you as if all of this is your fault.
Then the two dragons collide, chest to chest, talons locking, and the sky goes white.
It's not pain. That's what you'll try to explain later and fail. It's like a door opening in the back of your skull, a door you never knew was there, and someone walking through it. All at once there is something inside you that isn't yours: a hot, coiled, banked-down anger, a cold thread of fear under it, and beneath that, deep, like a current in dark water, a hunger so sharp and specific that it knocks the breath out of your lungs.
You gasp. Across the gap, Xaden's head snaps up. His eyes find yours, wide for the first time since you've known him.
He felt it too. Whatever you just felt from him, he felt something from you.
Fiachra and Sgaeyl break apart and glide, wingtip to wingtip, down toward the flight field in a slow companionable spiral that you could swear is smug.
"Mine," Fiachra says, in a tone you've never heard from him. Satisfied. Bone-deep. "She is mine."
Sgaeyl's voice cuts in, cool and female and very amused, and you realise with horror that you can hear her too. "Debatable. But I'll allow it."
He's waiting when you slide down Fiachra's foreleg.
Of course he is. He landed first and he's standing in the middle of the flight field with his arms crossed, and the shadows around his feet are moving, slow and agitated, like water just before it boils. The riders on the edge of the field have found urgent reasons to be elsewhere. Garrick Tavis, Xaden's friend, big and broad and grinning, gives you a long look of something like pity and herds two curious second lieutenants back inside.
"Do you have any idea," Xaden says, very quietly, when you're close enough, "what your dragon just did?"
"My dragon?" Your legs are still shaking from the flight. You lock your knees. "Yours dropped out of the sky on top of us."
"Sgaeyl has been flying these skies for decades. She's never taken a mate." His jaw ticks. "Your swordtail is three weeks out of Basgiath and he just claimed her."
"Pretty sure she claimed him back."
His eyes flash, and you feel it. That's the thing that makes your stomach drop: you don't just see him get angrier, you feel it bloom in your own chest, hot and bright, so clearly that for a second you're angry at yourself. You press a hand to your sternum without meaning to.
Xaden sees it. Something moves across his face, there and gone.
"Mated pairs bond their riders," he says, flatter now. "That's not news to you. You read the texts. Proximity. Shared lifespans. If Fiachra dies, Sgaeyl might go with him. If she goes, I go." A beat. "So if you die, Lieutenant, I die. Congratulations. You're now the most important person at this outpost to me, and I don't even know your first name."
"You've never asked."
"I'm not asking now." He steps closer. You hold your ground. "What I'm asking is what else you're feeling. Because it isn't just proximity, is it?"
You swallow. There's no point lying. He'll feel it.
"I can feel you," you say. "What you feel. Right now you're angry and you're scared and you're trying to hide it under the angry."
His nostrils flare. The shadows at his feet go absolutely still.
"That's not in the texts," he says.
"No."
"Anything else?"
And there it is, the thing you've been trying not to think about since the sky went white. Under the anger. Under the fear. That current. It was there in the air, and it's here now, closer, three feet away and closing, and it is pointed at you.
You lift your chin and look at him. His eyes are onyx, flecked with gold, and he's close enough now that you can see the fine pale line of the scar where it splits his eyebrow.
"You want me," you say quietly. "You've wanted me since my first day. You looked at me once and decided not to look again, because you knew."
For a long moment Xaden Riorson doesn't move. Then he leans in, so close his breath stirs the hair at your temple, and you feel everything he's holding back rise like a tide against a wall.
"Careful, Wayfinder," he murmurs. "Feeling it goes both ways."
And then he's gone, shadows folding back into him as he walks off the field, and you're left standing in the wind with your heart slamming against your ribs, and a hot, shameful ache low in your belly that you are absolutely certain he is feeling, too.
You avoid him for three days. It doesn't work.
You feel him everywhere now. In the mess, two floors away: impatience. On the training mat, across the outpost: focus, cold and clean, broken every so often by a flare of something that makes you stop mid-sentence and lose your place. At night, lying in your narrow bed in your narrow room, you feel him lying in his, and he's not sleeping either.
On the third night you go down to the sparring room because you need to hit something, and he's there.
Of course he is.
He's shirtless, wrapping his knuckles. The relic coils down his neck and over his shoulder in dark, intricate swirls, and there are more scars on his back than you'd have guessed. He doesn't look up when you come in. He doesn't need to.
"Go back to bed," he says.
"You go back to bed."
He finishes the wrap. Then he looks at you, and you feel the decision happen in him before he moves. "Fine. Mat. Let's see what Emetterio taught you."
He's better than you. You knew he would be. He's faster than anyone his size has a right to be and he fights like he's done it for his life, which he has, but you're small and quick and you were taught by people who had to be scrappy, and you get one hit in, a sharp elbow to his ribs that makes him grunt. You feel the surprise go through him, and under it a flicker of pleasure that you're actually trying.
Then he sweeps your feet out from under you and you hit the mat, and he follows you down, pinning your wrists over your head with one hand and his knee between your thighs. Not hard. Just there.
You're both breathing hard. Sweat has darkened the hair at his temples. His face is inches from yours.
And it hits you both at the same time. You feel your own heat roll up through you and you feel it echo back from him doubled, his want slamming into yours like two waves meeting, and the room goes very small. His grip on your wrists tightens for one second. His eyes drop to your mouth.
"Tell me to get up," he says roughly.
You don't.
He stays there for one more second, two, his whole body a line of pure restraint, and you can feel what it costs him, the wall he's holding up with both hands. Then he lets go and rolls off you and stands in one motion and walks to the door without looking back.
"Lock your door tonight," he says, and leaves.
You don't lock it. You lie awake in the dark and tell yourself you're not waiting.
At some point past the second bell, you fall asleep. And at some point after that, you wake up all at once, gasping, with your sheets twisted around your legs and your skin burning.
It's him.
He's awake, two corridors away, and he's thinking about you. You can't see his thoughts, only feel the shape of them, but the shape is enough: your wrists under his hand, your mouth, the noise you made on the mat when his knee pressed in. He wants you so badly it feels like a fever, and he's lying there in the dark not doing anything about it, and the wanting pours down the bond into you until you're arching off the mattress with nobody touching you at all.
You get up. You don't decide to. You just find yourself barefoot on the cold stone in nothing but your sleep shirt, walking the two corridors with your heart hammering so hard you can barely hear your own steps.
His door is plain and heavy and dark. You raise your hand to knock.
It opens before your knuckles touch the wood.
Xaden stands in the doorway, shirtless again, his eyes black in the low light, and the shadows of the room spill out around your bare feet like they've been waiting for you.
"I felt you coming," he says.