Chapter 3: Signet
I've spent a year learning what my power costs.
Headaches that split my skull. Hands that shake for hours after. Nosebleeds, the week I pushed too hard in training, and the burn I carried on my palm for most of last winter after a strike went sideways. Every time I channel there's a bill, and I've always paid it, because that's what being breakable and bonded to Tairn means. You pay.
At dawn, over the eastern pass, I don't pay anything.
The wyvern come up out of the valley in a black wave, maybe forty of them, the grey-scaled, dead-eyed things that venin make out of nothing and send at us like arrows. Our wing is a dozen dragons. On a normal day I'd pick my targets one at a time, carefully, measuring the distance to every rider, hesitating, hesitating, and by the time I'd decided, half of them would already be on top of us.
Today I don't hesitate. The power is right there, rested and clean and ready, and when I reach for it, it comes like it's been waiting for me to ask.
Left flank, Tairn says. Low. Now.
I bring down a bolt that splits into seven branches and drops seven wyvern out of the sky. Then I do it again.
I can feel exactly where everyone is. That's the strange part. I've never felt it this clearly. Rhiannon on the borrowed dragon to our right, Ridoc above, Bodhi wheeling high on the far side, Sgaeyl like a blue blade cutting through the middle of the wave with Xaden on her back. I know how far each of them is from every strike, down to the foot, and I put every bolt exactly where I want it and nowhere else.
Somewhere in the chaos, Xaden's voice slides into my head, dry as dust and entirely pleased with himself: Told you.
Don't. I bring another one down. Don't you dare say I told you so in the middle of a battle.
I already said it. Duck.
I flatten myself against Tairn's neck as a wyvern passes so close above me that I feel the wind of it, and then Xaden's shadows wrap around its throat and drag it down into the trees, and I sit up and hit the next one before it can turn.
It's over in less than an hour. Thirty-nine wyvern on the slopes. One that fled east, which Tairn is still grumbling about. Not a single scorch mark on any of ours.
The lake sits in a hollow below the pass, cold and still and green as a bottle, with pines crowding down to the water on three sides and a long flat sweep of shale on the fourth where the dragons land. While the others set up camp on the far ridge, Tairn puts me down at the water's edge with a grunt and tells me I smell like burned wyvern and he won't be having that on his back on the way home.
You smell like burned wyvern too, I tell him.
I am a dragon. It suits me. Then, gruffer, as he lifts off toward the ridge where Sgaeyl is already sunning herself on a boulder: You did well, Silver One. Do not let it go to your head.
Too late, I think, and I'm grinning as I strip off my armour.
The water is so cold it punches the air out of my lungs. I wade in up to my waist and dunk under and come up gasping and swearing, and when I push the wet hair off my face Xaden is standing on the shale, arms folded, watching me.
"I was wondering how long you'd take," I say.
"I let you get a head start." He's already pulling off his boots. "I'm a gentleman."
"You're a menace."
"That too."
He wades in without flinching at the cold, because of course he doesn't, and stops in front of me with the water at his hips. There's a cut on his cheekbone, shallow, already scabbing. There's soot on his throat, right over the relic. I reach up without thinking and wipe it off with my thumb, and he goes still under my hand.
"You were incredible today," he says quietly.
"I know."
That startles a laugh out of him. "Do you?"
"I do." It's strange to say it. It feels like stepping off the edge of a cliff and finding Tairn under me. "I felt all of you. Every rider. I knew exactly where everyone was. I've never been able to do that before." I swallow. "It's because I wasn't scared. I wasn't holding anything back. I don't think I can do it when I'm holding back. I think that's been the problem the whole time."
He doesn't say I told you so. I watch him not say it, which is somehow better.
"It's not only my power," I go on, before I lose my nerve. "It's everything. I've been holding back with you, too. For months. Ever since we... since we fixed things. I keep waiting for something to go wrong, so I keep a little bit back. Just in case. So it won't hurt as much when it does."
His hand comes up under the water and finds my waist. "I know," he says. "I can feel that, too."
"I'm done with it."
He searches my face. Then he pulls me closer, slow, until we're chest to chest in the cold water, and touches his forehead to mine.
"Then don't hold anything back," he says. "Not today."
I kiss him. Slowly, this time. Nothing like the landing at Riorson House. His mouth is cool from the lake and warm underneath, and his hands slide up my back, and there are no sparks at all. My power is quiet for once, resting, sated, and without it in the way there's just this: his skin and mine, the sound of water lapping at the shale, the smell of pine and cold stone and him. He kisses me like he's learning it all over again. I kiss him back like I've finally decided he's mine.
When the cold starts to bite he picks me up, and I wrap my legs around his waist and let him carry me out of the water, laughing into his neck, shivering. He sets me down on the warm flat rock where the sun has been all morning, on top of his flight jacket, and stretches out over me, and his body blocks the wind and the sky and everything else.
"Your knee," he says.
"Is fine."
"Violet."
"It's fine," I say, and catch his face in both hands. "I promise. I'll tell you. I want this. I want you, right here, right now, with the whole wing on the other side of that ridge and Tairn complaining in my head. I want you."
His eyes go dark. "Say it again."
"I want you."
He kisses his way down my body slowly, unhurried, as if there isn't a war and there isn't a ridge full of riders and there's nothing in the world but the rock and the sun and my skin. He stops at every scar. The new one on my forearm from last month. The old one on my thigh from my first year. The faint white line on my shoulder that he carried me home with. He kisses each one like he's thanking it. By the time he settles between my legs again I'm trembling, and it isn't the cold.
This time when I come, it's quiet. A long, slow, shuddering wave that rolls through me while the sun beats down on my closed eyelids, his name falling out of me over and over. No thunder. No light. Just me, all of me, and him, holding my hips like he'll never let go.
He comes back up and I pull him into me with my legs locked around him, and he slides in deep, and we both breathe out at the same moment. He moves slowly. Rolls his hips into mine with a patience that's almost cruel, and holds my gaze the whole time, and I don't look away. I've always looked away before. Some part of me always has, closed my eyes, turned my face into his shoulder, kept a little piece of myself tucked away safe where he couldn't reach it.
Not today.
"There you are," he whispers, like he can see the exact moment I stop hiding. Maybe he can. "There you are."
The pleasure builds slow and deep, sweet and heavy, nothing like the storm last night. It's warmer. Steadier. It's the sun on the rock and the lake shining beside us and his weight over me and his hand cradling my head so the stone doesn't hurt. When I feel the edge coming again, I hold his face and keep my eyes open and let him see all of it, every bit, the whole of me breaking apart in his hands.
"I love you," I tell him. Out loud, which I've never quite managed without a war or a wound or an apology attached to it. Just plainly, in the sun. "I love you. I'm not keeping any of it back anymore."
He makes a sound like he's been struck. Then he's kissing me, desperate, and his rhythm breaks and he's coming with my name against my mouth, holding me so tight I can feel his heart hammering against my ribs, and I'm right there with him, falling.
For a long time afterward we just lie there on the warm rock, tangled up and breathing, while the sun moves across the sky. He traces lazy patterns on my hip. I watch a hawk circle high above the lake.
"You said it first," he says eventually, sounding smug.
"I did not. You've said it a hundred times."
"Not like that." He turns his head on the jacket so he can look at me. "You've never said it like you weren't afraid of it."
I don't have an answer for that. I don't need one. I lace my fingers through his and hold on.
Above us, out of nowhere, a single fat drop of rain hits my cheek. Then another. I look up. The sky over the lake was clear blue a minute ago. Now a soft grey cloud is drifting in from the west, low and gentle, and as I watch it opens and a warm summer rain starts pattering down onto the shale and the water and us.
No lightning. No thunder. Just rain.
Xaden looks at the sky. Then at me.
"That one's yours too," he says.
"I know," I say, and I'm smiling so wide my face hurts. "I didn't even try."
Silver One. Tairn, from the ridge, deeply aggrieved. Sgaeyl is now wet. She would like to know why.
I laugh, and tell him, and somewhere on the ridge a dragon who has seen a thousand years of war and more generations of riders than anyone has bothered to count makes a sound I've never heard from him before. It takes me a moment to place it.
He's laughing too.
Then, between one breath and the next, his voice goes flat and cold. Silver One. The one that fled east. It has come back. And it is not alone.