No rider has ever survived the loss of their dragon. I can’t imagine wanting to.
—Colonel Kaori’s Field Guide To Dragonkind
Andarna is gone.
I don’t leave our room for the next three days. I barely leave our bed.
Andarna is gone.
But I’m never alone.
Brennan reads in a chair by my bedside in the mornings while I drift in and out of sleep. My squadmates take over in the afternoon, but their voices barely cut through the fog of exhaustion. They are an endless stream of company that doesn’t know what to say, which is fine by me, since I don’t have it in me to answer. Xaden holds me at night, wrapping his arms and his mind around me.
Andarna is gone.
Tairn leaves our bond wide open, giving me unfettered access to him in a way I’ve never had. He’s always been with me, but now I’m with him, too. I hear his side of the conversation when he tells the elders about Andarna’s departure. I hear him bickering with Sgaeyl over what he calls her excessive hovering, and I’m privy to the lecture he gives Xaden about making sure I eat.
That’s not all I hear. For the first two days, every time the door opens, there’s an air of celebration, sounds of happy voices and laughter that fade the second someone walks in.
Of course they’re happy. Aretia’s safe. The very thing we were desperate for a few months ago has been accomplished. I don’t blame them for celebrating—I just can’t join them. That would require feeling something, anything.
I sleep, but I don’t dream.
Andarna is gone.
The atmosphere shifts on the third day, but I don’t ask about the tension in my squadmates’ silence. Not because I don’t care, but because it takes all my energy to perform what should be the natural act of breathing.
She’ll come back, right? She has to. She isn’t dead. Leothan will ensure she makes it across the sea. And if she returns to find me like this, huddled in on myself, I won’t be worthy of her relic. If this is an emotional Gauntlet, I’m failing, but there’s no rope to grab to prevent my fall this time.
On the fourth morning, I wake when the mattress dips behind me.
“I did not fly through the night to watch you sleep. Wake up.”
Her voice jars me like nothing else can. I roll over and find Mira staring at me from Xaden’s side of the bed, her legs stretched out on top of the blankets, her stockinged feet crossed at the ankles. Dark circles linger under her eyes as she studies mine, but I don’t spot any new wounds, thankfully.
“I don’t want to.” Lack of use makes my voice scratchy.
“Yeah.” She studies my eyes with a creased brow and smooths my hair back from my forehead. “But you have to. You can cry, or scream, or even break shit if you want, but you cannot live in this bed.”
“I was whole and now I’m not.” My eyes sting, but I don’t cry. That stopped days ago. “She’s really gone.”
“I’m so sorry.” Sympathy fills Mira’s expression. “But not sorry enough to lose you to your grief. You just have to start by getting up.” She wrinkles her nose. “Then you can graduate to bathing.”
Someone knocks, and my focus jumps to the closed bedroom door. “How did you get in here, anyway?”
“Riorson let me in.” Her hand slides from my head as the door opens. Of course he did. “She’s awake,” Mira calls over her shoulder.
Xaden looks in, worry etching lines across his forehead until he spots me. “Look who’s up.” A corner of his mouth rises.
“Unwillingly,” I admit.
His eyes flare, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve spoken to him in days, too.
Shit. I need to pull myself together.
“How did you replace the power you lost?” Mira asks quickly.
I wrench my gaze back to hers. “I…didn’t. What are you talking about?”
“If she’s awake, then let me in,” Brennan argues from the hallway behind Xaden. “They’re my sisters!”
“I can kill him if you prefer,” Xaden offers, raising his scarred brow.
“And give him another opportunity to fake his own death?” Mira scoffs.
“He can come in.” Pushing with both hands, I force myself to sit up. I’ve been in Xaden’s sparring shirt and a rolled-up pair of his sleeping pants for so long, they’re practically embedded in my skin.
Xaden pulls Brennan through the doorway, and my brother immediately frowns at Mira.
“What are you doing?” Brennan questions as he shuts the door behind him.
Xaden leans back against the bookshelves and stares at me like I might flee at any second or worse—disappear back under the covers. “Hi.”
“Hi.” I don’t have it in me to smile, but I drink in the sight of him.
Mira’s eyes narrow at Brennan in warning. “You sent me a missive saying our sister was a breath away from catatonic, so now I’m here. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“I wanted you to get her out of bed.” Brennan gestures at me. “Not crawl into it with her.”
“I’ve been here less than half an hour and she’s already speaking, so I think my methodology is pretty sound.” She levels him with a look that reminds me of Mom. “What exactly have you been doing?”
Mom would definitely be horrified by my inability to function.
“Sitting in that chair”—he points beside the bed—“figuring out how to house and feed the thousands of people currently climbing the Medaro Pass, while overseeing a massive increase in forge output, in addition to spending my evenings mending every wounded rider capable of flying here from the front.”
“You don’t have to tell me about the front.” Mira taps her chest. “Raising the wards must have pissed them off, because they are kicking our ass out there and all we can do is fall back. I can see Draithus from the line.”
“You really opened the border.” My eyes widen on Xaden as my siblings continue to argue in the background.
He nods once. “It’s what my father would have wanted.”
But Fen didn’t actually do it. Xaden did. And I’ve been too lost in my misery to even know, let alone support him in an act of blatant treason. My face falls.
“Whatever you’re thinking, stop,” Xaden says, tilting his head.
“I’ve left you to deal with it alone.” Lewellen would be heinously disappointed in me. I’m heinously disappointed in myself.
“You’ve been breathing, and that’s enough for me.” The relief in his eyes is palpable, and that somehow makes me feel worse.
I’m supposed to be stronger than this. What else have I missed?
“She lost a dragon,” Mira shouts. “Not a boyfriend. It’s not a breakup.” Her gaze swings to Xaden. “No offense.”
The emptiness threatens to overwhelm me again, but Tairn inundates the bond with a deluge of defiance and indignation. “Focus on now, on him if you have to.”
I still have both of them: Tairn and Xaden.
“None taken.” Xaden folds his arms but doesn’t look away. “We’re past the breakup stage.”
“Point is,” Mira lectures Brennan, “the deficit of power has to be staggering, let alone the emotional impact of severing a bond.”
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” I whisper.
“I didn’t imply she has to bounce back like a toy,” Brennan retorts.
“Stop!” My shout brings the room to a standstill. I have to get out of this bed, if only to escape from their arguing.
Brennan’s entire body sags. “Thank the gods. You speak.”
“I told you she speaks!” Mira throws up her hands.
“No wonder Dad spent so much time in the Archives,” I mutter, then peel back the covers. Step one, get out of bed. Step two, bathe off four days of misery.
“And now you’re telling jokes?” Brennan’s mouth drops.
“She likes me more than you.” Mira brushes a piece of grass off her uniform.
“Nothing about this is funny.” My feet hit the floor. “You two have got to stop fighting. Work it out, because other than Niara, we’re all that’s left.” I slowly stand.
Xaden moves to push off the bookshelves, and I shake my head at him.
“I need a moment.” I make my way to the bathing chamber, reminding myself to breathe. The argument dims as I shut the door, then disappears when I start the bath after relieving myself. “Moment over.”
Xaden walks through the door in a matter of seconds and quickly shuts it behind him, cutting off Brennan’s and Mira’s raised voices.
“Are they still arguing?” I sit on the edge of the tub and reach in to test the water.
“They’re your siblings,” he answers, rolling up his uniform sleeves as he comes my way. “Let me do that.” He dips his hand in the bath, then adjusts the lever that brings water in from the aqueduct system. “Can I help you?”
I nod.
He strips me out of my clothes, and I get into the tub. Warm water rushes over me as I lean back, and I start pulling apart the strands of my braid. Kneeling beside me, he lathers soap on a small cloth and begins to wash me, starting at my feet.
“You have other things you should be doing,” I say softly, watching his eyes as his hands move with a gentleness that would shock everyone but me.
“Everything else will wait.” He moves to my knee.
But it can’t. Not if he’s opened the border against the decree of the Senarium, though I love him all the more for saying so. It doesn’t matter how impossible everything feels; the world is still spinning beyond these doors. And I have to catch up to it.
I’m a master of pain, and Andarna’s loss is the deepest I’ve ever had to mask in order to survive. But I don’t have to pretend with Xaden.
“I’ve missed three days of rune instruction,” I whisper when I’m nearly clean. Best to start small when it comes to what’s lacking in my life. Plus, it’s one of the only areas in my life where I’ve never allowed him to assist.
“Hate to break it to you, love, but three days was never going to help you in that subject.” His lips twitch, and he moves the cloth down my arm.
“Will you help me?” The words are easier than I thought they’d be.
His gaze snaps to mine. “Ask me nicely.”
The corners of my mouth quirk as I remember the last time he made the same demand and ended up kissing me against the foundation wall. “Will you please help me?”
“Always.” He finishes with my hand. “May I wash your hair?”
“Please.” I duck my head under the water as Xaden moves behind me. Then I rise and search for the right words. The simple pleasure of his hands working soap through my hair gives me a flicker of hope that I might just be able to feel something positive again. “I think I know why riders die when their dragons do.”
His fingers pause before he continues. “Why?”
“It’s not just the deficit of power,” I muse, cupping the bathwater with my hand, then letting it flow out between my fingers. “In that moment, I didn’t know who I was, where I belonged, or why I should bother breathing. If Tairn hadn’t grounded me, I think I would have willingly floated away. I still can’t comprehend the enormity of her absence. I don’t know if I ever will. I can’t see past it.”
“You don’t have to yet.” He moves to my side and sits on the edge of the tub.
“Yes, I do. I’m pretty sure I just heard my siblings say the western line is crumbling and you have thousands of people fleeing into your province.” I tilt my head. “Is there more?”
“Yes,” he answers without hesitation. “But no rider has survived what you just did—”
“Except Jack Barlowe,” I interrupt.
“Glad to see your sense of humor is intact.” He lifts his scarred brow. “No one expects you to be anywhere close to fully functional.”
“I do.” Keeping busy will prevent me from falling back into that bed. I lean into Tairn and try to ignore the gaping void where Andarna should be.
“Then here’s the question.” He grips the side of the tub and searches my eyes. “Do you need me to take care of you or kick your ass? I’m fully capable of and willing to do both.”
“I know it.” My lips press into a tight line. I want him to take care of me, but I need him to kick my ass, and need beats want every time. I sink under the water and work the soap from my hair, lingering in the absolute silence a moment longer than necessary to rinse. When I emerge, Xaden is leaning forward like he was one second shy of coming in after me. My body remembers to breathe on its own. “Can you grab me a uniform from the armoire? I need to get dressed.”
He nods, then presses a kiss to my wet forehead. “Be right back.”
By the time he returns, I’m drying my hair and body while the water drains.
Reluctance mars his face as he hands over my things. “I’m going back out there to make sure they don’t kill each other. Who is Niara?”
My eyebrows shoot up. “My grandmother.”
“She’s apparently a sore subject.” He grimaces and heads into the bedroom.
I get dressed quickly, leaving my hair wet and unbound as I burst through the bathing chamber door into our bedroom.
Mira and Brennan look one step away from drawing weapons and are utterly oblivious to my arrival. Shadows curl at Xaden’s feet as he leans on the edge of our desk, arms folded, eyes narrowed on my siblings.
“She hated our mother.” Brennan shakes his head. “I can’t believe you would go there.”
“Violet has Dad’s books. You have Aretia,” Mira hisses. “I went to the only other living member of our family because all I have are a few of Mom’s journals, and there are months missing, Brennan.”
“He recognized the bracelet as belonging to your grandmother, and it went downhill from there,” Xaden fills me in.
“So Mom didn’t journal for a couple of months. So what.” He shrugs. “Did you ask Violet if she has—”
“The months are missing in the middle of the book,” she counters. “And they’re from the summer Mom and Dad left us with Grandma Niara. Mom purposely didn’t write anything.”
Wait. I’ve read that journal, too.
“That doesn’t mean—” Brennan starts.
“I was eight,” Mira interrupts. “And it was just you and me, remember? Violet was too little to stay. When they returned, Grandma stopped speaking to them.”
“Want me to figure out…” Xaden lifts a brow and glances in my direction.
“No.” I shoot him a warning look.
“That doesn’t mean they hauled her to Dunne’s temple and dedicated her.” Brennan shakes his head with disgust. “That’s been illegal since the two hundreds.”
Dedicated. Gravity pitches and my balance shifts, like the stone beneath my feet has suddenly become sand.
It is good we did not complete your dedication. The Unnbrish high priestess’s words ring through my head, as does the memory of her silver hair, just like Theophanie’s, just like mine.
“Violet?” A band of shadow wraps around my hips, steadying me for the heartbeat it takes Xaden to reach me and replace it with his arm.
“Then they went to Poromiel to do it!” Mira shouts. “You will believe me, Brennan, because it happened! It’s why she refused to speak to either of them. The priestess started the process, then told Mom and Dad that they only accepted children whose futures are certain, and Violet still had paths to choose from—”
“Since when do you believe in drug-induced hallucinations spit out by oracles?” Brennan throws up his hands, revealing the rune-shaped scar on his palm. “Or the ranting of our grandmother?”
Tell me, did you choose this path yourself? That’s what the priestess asked me.
“—and one of those paths…” Mira runs him right over, shaking her head. “They refused to take her. And I’ve been requesting temple records for months, but of course none of them would list a child, let alone a Sorrengail.”
My mind races, putting together pieces of a picture that I have no desire to see but am somehow a part of.
Brennan glances my way and blanches. “Mira—”
“The priestess spoke all cryptically but basically said if Violet chose her future poorly, she could still earn their mentorship, but she’d turn—” Mira continues.
“Mira!” Brennan gestures toward me.
Her startled gaze whips in my direction, and she flinches. “Violet,” she whispers, shaking her head. “I didn’t mean for you to… I’m sorry.”
“Turn what?” I demand. There’s only one turn that comes to mind.
She looks at Xaden. “Do you want to give us a second?”
“Stay.” I lean into him as my thoughts spin.
“No,” he answers Mira.
“Turn venin?” I guess.
Mira presses her lips into a tight line.
“You wouldn’t find any records at our temples,” I say slowly, heaviness settling in my chest.
“Because they never tried to dedicate you,” Brennan assures me, glaring at our sister.
“They did.” I nod sluggishly. “It just wasn’t here. They must have taken me to Unnbriel. It explains why you think my hair grew in like this, and the wild things that priestess said to me before she sliced my arm open.”
“No.” Brennan puts his hands on his hips. “Dad thought you were perfect, and he said that parents used to dedicate their infants to a particular deity’s service when they thought the touch of a god would help that child—” He quickly shuts his mouth.
My stomach hollows. “They tried to fix me by giving me to Dunne?”
“No chance. Mom was never temple-minded,” Brennan argues. “And you’ve never needed fixing.”
I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive him for what he’s done to her.
Oh gods. They’d never seen dragons until our squad arrived.
“Mom didn’t take me.” My eyes sting at the unexpected betrayal. “Dad did.” A horrified laugh bubbles up through my throat. “It’s why he told you that little piece of history, Brennan. In case you needed to put it together. It’s why he sent me there with those books.” I look to Mira. “I don’t think any of us actually knew our parents.” I blink. “Is that why you’ve been so distant lately? Why you constantly look at me like I’m going to grow a set of horns? Because you think I’m going to turn at any second?”
“No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.” She moves toward me, but Brennan blocks her path.
“What did she say?” Brennan asks Mira. “What were the priestess’s exact words?”
Mira twists the bracelet, then looks me straight in the eye. “She said the heart that beat for you—or within you—would do the wrong thing for the right reason, reach for unspeakable power, and turn dark.”
My lips part.
“Within her or for her?” Brennan asks.
“Isn’t it the same thing?” Mira challenges. “Violet’s at risk of turning, and with power like hers—”
“Stop,” Xaden says, and my head snaps in his direction. “It’s not Violet. It’s me.”
“No!” I shout down the bond, fear grasping me so tight my head lightens.
“My heart beats for her,” he tells Mira without so much as flinching. “I reached for unspeakable power. I turned. I’m the dark wielder she warned your father about, not Violet. Stop treating her like she’s a liability. I’m already the problem.”
Oh fuck.
Mira’s eyes sharpen on him, then me. “He’s not serious.”
“He is,” I confess, my voice barely a whisper. “He’s the reason we survived Basgiath.”
“Since December?” Her eyes bulge as she unsheathes the alloy-hilted dagger at her thigh.
“No!” I move in front of Xaden. “He’s stable.”
“He’s venin!” Mira lifts her blade.
“I don’t take kindly to blades being lifted toward Violet.” Xaden sweeps me to his side.
“Like I’m the dangerous one?” She flips the dagger in readiness to throw, and power rushes into me. “Brennan, are you—”
“Don’t,” my brother says softly.
Mira pauses and turns at the tone of his voice, understanding creeping over her face. “You knew?” Mira’s gaze jumps from Brennan, to Xaden, to me, hurt and shock mixing in a lethal combination. “He’ll kill you,” she says to me finally. “It’s what they do.”
“He won’t.” I pour every ounce of my certainty, my trust into the words.
“I won’t,” Xaden vows. “And yes, I’m stable, but all we can do is slow the progression.”
Mira’s breathing stills, and her eyes harden on mine. “You kept this from me.”
“You kept things from me, too.” My fingernails bite into my palms. “Things about myself that I deserved to know.”
“She doesn’t intend to tell anyone about me,” Xaden says.
He cut through her shields?
“You taught her well.” She glares over at our brother and sheathes her blade as she walks away. “Good luck keeping her alive.” The door slams on her way out.
