Chapter 3: The Truth
Sebastian came for me in the morning, before I had even finished dressing, and told me Lord Raevor wished to see me privately.
Clara laced the bodice more gently than the night before, though it still pulled the breath thin from my chest by the time she finished, and I had already learned to brace for it, filling my lungs fully in the last moment before the laces drew tight, the way I imagined a diver might brace before going under water.
"You'll want to walk slowly," Clara reminded me, smoothing the skirt over my hips. "The stairs to the east wing are steep."
I did walk slowly, one hand trailing the banister the entire way down, my slippers finding the hem of the gown twice before I reached the bottom, though neither time did I stumble as badly as the evening before. Some small, grudging part of me noted the improvement, though it brought me little comfort given everything else I still didn't understand.
The study Sebastian led me to was lined floor to ceiling with old books, their spines cracked and faded, maps spread across a long table beside stacks of papers yellowed with age. Cedric was already there, standing near the window, and Lord Raevor sat behind the desk, his expression unreadable as always, though something in the set of his shoulders told me this conversation had been weighing on him longer than a single evening.
"Please, sit," Cedric said, gesturing to the chair across from the desk.
I lowered myself carefully, the boning at my ribs resisting the bend the same way it had at dinner, and folded my hands into my lap once I'd settled, the fine fabric of my skirt unfamiliar against my palms.
"What I am about to tell you," Cedric began, "does not leave this room, save for those already aware of it. Do you understand?"
I nodded, though I understood nothing yet at all.
"Some years ago," he continued, "a plague swept through dragonkind. It killed every female of our race, without exception, without cure. Every dragoness in the world is dead. Only males remain."
The words settled into the room like something physical, heavy enough that I felt the weight of them even before I fully grasped their meaning.
"Dragonkind faces extinction," Raevor said quietly, speaking for the first time since I'd entered. "Every scholar, every physician, every mage who might have found an answer has failed to find one. Every path but one."
Cedric continued, his voice steady, practiced, as though he had explained this exact history many times before, if only ever inside his own head. "Ancient records, long dismissed as fantasy, suggest that certain human males share enough likeness with female dragons to carry a child to term. No one has ever proven the theory. No one has ever attempted it. Lord Raevor believes it may be our only hope."
I sat very still, my mind reaching for the shape of what they were telling me and finding it too large to hold all at once. Somewhere beneath the shock, some quieter part of me understood, at last, why I had been dressed the way I had since the moment I arrived — why a gown, why a name that wasn't mine, why a stranger's hands had laced me into a shape I hadn't chosen.
"You were chosen," Cedric said, more gently now, "because your body matches the old descriptions more closely than any other candidate we have found in years of searching."
"Why me," I finally managed, my voice barely above a whisper. "Has this— has it ever worked before? On anyone?"
"No," Cedric said honestly. "You would be the first."
"And if it fails?"
"Then it fails," Raevor said, "and no blame will fall to you for it. You would still have a place here, should you wish it. Or you may return home, if that is what you choose."
I looked at him, searching his face for some sign of pressure, some hint that the answer he wanted was the only answer he'd accept. I found none. He watched me with the same stillness he always wore, patient in a way that unsettled me more than urgency would have, because it meant the choice was, as he'd said from the very first day, genuinely mine to make.
I thought of the mud on my knees the morning this all began. I thought of my mother's hands, red and cracked, and the tears she hadn't been able to stop. I thought of Finn's apology at the carriage door, fourteen years too late, and the ridicule that had followed me every day of my life until the moment Lord Raevor looked at me and called me suitable. I thought of the gown I now wore, tight at my ribs and unfamiliar at my ankles, and how strange it was that I had not yet decided whether I hated it.
"I already said I would go," I said quietly. "I meant it."
Something in Raevor's expression eased, just slightly, though he said nothing more than, "Thank you."
---
The days that followed passed more gently than I expected, though my body took longer to agree with that assessment than the rest of me did.
Clara laced the bodice a little looser by the third morning, enough that I no longer needed to brace myself quite so deliberately before drawing breath, though the ache in my ribs by evening never entirely disappeared, only dulled into something I'd learned to stop noticing until I moved too quickly. I stopped catching my slippers on the hem sometime around the fourth day, though I never told anyone I'd been counting, embarrassed at how long it had taken me to learn something Lily managed without a single thought.
I learned the castle's rhythms slowly — the hour the kitchens began their work, the hour Helena inspected the linens, the quiet stretch of afternoon when the gardens emptied and I could walk the hedge paths alone, my skirts brushing soft against my ankles in a way I was still, days later, not fully used to. I found the library again on my own one afternoon and discovered Raevor there, seated at a table buried in old texts, a pair of thin spectacles perched on his nose that made him look, for just a moment, less like a lord and more like an ordinary man lost in his work.
"I didn't mean to disturb you," I said, already turning to leave.
"You aren't," he said, not looking up right away. When he did, he studied me for a moment before adding, "You may stay, if you'd like."
I stayed, lowering myself into the chair across from him with the same careful attention I'd learned to give every movement now, and if he noticed the stiffness in it, he said nothing. We didn't speak much, that afternoon — only a few polite words exchanged over the hours — but something about sitting quietly in his presence, unhurried, unwatched by anyone else, made the silence feel less like the coldness I had assumed it to be at first.
We shared dinner again another evening, and I found myself talking more freely than I had the first night, telling him small, foolish things about the village — Finn's terrible aim with a slingshot, the goat that used to escape into Old Maren's garden every spring — and watching, with something like quiet satisfaction, the way the corner of his mouth would twitch, almost a smile, before he caught himself and smoothed his expression back into stillness.
No one in the castle mocked me. Not once, not in all those days. Nobody laughed at the softness of my face or the narrowness of my shoulders, not even now, dressed as I was, addressed as I was, by a name that had once belonged to no one but was somehow, slowly, beginning to feel like it belonged to me. For the first time in my life, the things I had always tried to hide were simply accepted, without comment, without cruelty, as though they had never needed hiding at all.
It was Helena who found me in the garden on the evening everything was about to change again, her expression careful in a way I had learned, by then, to recognize as meaningful.
"Madam Avery," she said. "Lord Raevor has asked that you come to his chambers tonight."
I felt my heart still for a moment in my chest.
"I don't know exactly what to expect," I admitted quietly.
Helena's expression softened, just slightly. "No," she agreed. "I imagine you don't." But she offered nothing more than that, and I understood, watching her walk away, that whatever came next was mine to face alone.