Chapter 3: Shields Down
He's not back by midday.
You fly your own patrol because you have to, and you fly it badly. Fiachra notices. He notices everything now, and he's insufferable about it, a low rumbling amusement at the back of your skull every time your attention slides northwest.
"You are distracted," he observes, as you overshoot a waypoint by half a league.
"I'm fine."
"You smell like her rider."
"You can't smell me from up here."
"I can smell you from the Vale," Fiachra says, deeply satisfied with himself. "Sgaeyl is pleased. She says he has been unbearable for three years and it is about time someone wore him out."
You put your face down against the cold scales of his neck and groan, and he laughs, a sound like a rockslide, and banks for home.
Garrick Tavis catches you in the corridor outside the mess that evening. He leans against the wall with his arms folded and the look of a man who's been waiting a while, and he's not grinning this time.
"He's late," he says, without preamble.
"I know."
"You know." Garrick studies you. "Because you can feel him."
You don't answer, which is an answer. Garrick nods slowly, and something in his face changes, softens and hardens at the same time, the way a man's face does when he realizes a stranger has just become family whether he likes it or not.
"Then you already know more than you should," he says quietly. "Whatever he tells you tonight, Lieutenant, he's trusting you with my neck too. Remember that."
Xaden comes back after dark.
You feel him long before you hear him, a slow approach out of the mountains, tired to the bone and edged with that same old guilt, and something new on top of it. Dread. You're sitting on his bed when he walks in. He stops dead in the doorway. He smells of ash and pine and cold air, and there's a fresh cut along his forearm, already crusted, that he didn't have this morning.
He looks at you for a long time.
"You know," he says.
"Your patrol was east." You keep your voice level. "You flew half the compass in the wrong direction. You went to Aretia."
He closes the door behind him, carefully, and leans his back against it. You feel him reaching for a lie. You actually feel it: the shape of it forming, smooth and plausible, the way he'd say it to the colonel. Then you feel him set it down.
"I could tell you it was nothing," he says. "I'm good at that. I've been doing it since I was old enough to hold a sword."
"I'd feel it."
"I know." He laughs, short and humourless, and scrubs a hand down his face. "That's the problem. Do you understand what you've walked into? If I tell you, you're part of it. If anyone ever gets inside your head, a mind reader, an interrogator, the wrong professor at the wrong time, it isn't just me they hang. It's Garrick. It's every marked one I have ever trusted. And it's you."
"Then don't tell me," you say. "Show me."
He goes still.
"You can wall it off," you go on, standing. "I felt you do it this morning. I feel you doing it now, holding the door shut with your whole weight. So stop." You cross the room until you're standing right in front of him. "I'm not asking for the plans. I'm asking you to stop deciding for me. Let me feel all of it, and then let me choose."
For a long moment there's nothing. Just his breathing, and the lamp, and the shadows in the corners holding perfectly still, waiting with him.
Then he drops his shields.
It's like stepping off a ledge into deep water. Everything floods in at once, years of it, and it's so much that you put your hand on his chest to stay standing. Grief, first, old and enormous: a father's execution in front of a crowd, the burn of the relic being carved into skin. Fury that's been banked so long it's gone hard and blue at the center. Fear. Constant, low, exhausting fear, not for himself, never for himself, but for the ones he's keeping alive. And a secret so big it makes your knees go weak.
You don't get details. You get shapes. Supply crates in the dark. A city of scorched stone with lights in its windows again. Riders who fly the border not to hold it, but to cross it. Weapons going over the mountains to people Navarre has always told you are the enemy. And beyond them, at the very edge of what he's showing you, something that makes your skin crawl: a pale, spreading wrongness, things in the sky with wings that aren't dragons, and a hunger that drains the life out of the land.
You pull back, breathing hard.
"They're real," you whisper. "Whatever those are. Out there."
"They're real." His voice is raw. "And Navarre knows. And Navarre lets Poromiel bleed for it."
You stand there with your hand over his heart and feel the truth of it, steady and terrible. There's no lie anywhere in him. You check. You go looking for one the way you'd look for a false bearing on a map, and there's nothing. Only that tide of grief and fury and fear.
And under all of it, rising, the last thing he hasn't let you see.
It's you.
It's you in the flight field on your first day, squinting into the sun, saying something sharp to the quartermaster, and the jolt that went through him like a blade between the ribs. It's three weeks of making himself look away. It's last night, his forehead pressed to your hip, the startled tenderness so big it frightened him. It's this morning, walking out of his own room with your scent on his skin and hating himself for the lie. It's a feeling so steady and sure that it doesn't need a name, but it has one, and you know it the second it reaches you.
"Xaden," you say.
"I know." He doesn't look away from you. His eyes are wet and furious about it. "I know what you're feeling. I've been feeling it since Fiachra knocked you sideways out of the sky. I'm in love with you. I was in love with you before any of this. That's why I didn't look." His voice drops. "I didn't want to put you anywhere near me."
"Too late," you say. "Our dragons are married."
He laughs, a wet, cracked sound, and you kiss him in the middle of it.
It's different this time.
Last night was a storm. Tonight there's no wall at all, nothing held back, and every touch goes all the way down. When you peel his leathers off his shoulders you feel how tired he is, and how much he's been needing someone to take something off him. When you kiss the fresh cut on his forearm, carefully, you feel the sting fade into something warm. When he lays you back on the bed and undresses you slowly, piece by piece, you feel every bit of the reverence in it, and it's almost too much to bear. He doesn't hide a single thing. He lets you feel exactly how badly his hands want to shake.
"I'm not as good at this part," he admits against your shoulder, laughing a little at himself. "Being looked at."
"I'm not looking," you tell him. "I'm feeling."
"That's worse."
"Then you'll have to get used to it."
You push him onto his back and climb over him and take your time. You learn him the way he learned you. The hollow of his throat. The place under his ribs that makes him suck in a breath. The long dark lines of the relic, which you trace with your tongue from his collarbone up to the edge of his jaw, slowly, while you feel what it does to him: not the ache of the scar, not anymore, but something like being forgiven. His hands grip your hips so hard you'll have marks tomorrow, and you want them.
When you finally sink down onto him you both go still.
He's watching you. His eyes are black and gold and completely undefended, and you feel everything. The heat of you around him. The fullness inside you. His wonder that you're here, that you came here knowing, that you chose it. You start to move, slow, rolling your hips, and the feeling builds between you so gradually it's like a tide coming in, both of you rising together, a single long pull with nowhere to go but deeper.
"Look at me," he says roughly, when you start to close your eyes. "Please. I want to feel you see me."
So you do. You hold his gaze and ride him slow, and he holds your hips and lifts into you, and nobody says anything for a long time. You don't need to. You can feel the words he isn't saying. You can feel your own echoing back. It's the strangest, most intimate thing you have ever done, being known all the way to the bottom while someone is inside you, and you never want to stop.
When it gets to be too much he sits up and wraps his arms around you and holds you against his chest, and you move together like that, wrapped up and sweating and gasping into each other's mouths, until the tide breaks. It takes you both at once, his pleasure and yours so tangled now that you can't tell where one starts, and he groans your name into your neck and you hold onto him and shake and shake.
Afterward you stay like that, foreheads together, catching your breath.
"Everything," he murmurs. "You can feel everything now."
"Good," you say. "Don't you dare put that wall back up."
"I won't." He pushes your hair back from your face, gentle as anything. "Not with you. I swear it. Whatever comes."
You lie together in the dark for a long time afterward. He tells you a few things, carefully, in a voice barely above a whisper. Names you're allowed to know. Names you're not. How the runs to Aretia work. Why your signet, if you choose it, could save more lives than his shadows ever have. You listen and you don't flinch. You can feel him feeling you not flinch, and the relief that comes off him is so enormous you want to cry.
"You don't have to decide tonight," he says.
"I already did."
He's quiet. Then he presses his mouth to your temple and keeps it there.
At the back of your mind, Fiachra stirs. You feel him wake, out on the ledge where he and Sgaeyl sleep curled together, and you feel his attention sharpen and turn east, toward the border, toward the wide dark country beyond the cliffs.
"Wayfinder," he says, and it's the first time he's ever called you by Xaden's name for you. His voice is very low, and there's no amusement in it at all. "Tell him. Something is flying on the border tonight. It is not a dragon."
Beneath you, you feel Xaden's whole body go tense. Sgaeyl must have told him the same thing in the same breath. He turns his head on the pillow and meets your eyes in the dark, and you feel the fear come up in him, not for himself.
For you.
"Well," you say, already reaching for your leathers. "I suppose you'd better show me the rest."