“No,” I agreed. “But he was still trained to be a fighter, a killer, a tool for war.” His father, Balor the Butcher, the infamous dragon slayer (slayer of Fell and Vetr’s mother), had seen to that—bringing him up to be just as skilled and vicious as he was.
“Oh.” She considered that. “So not so different from us,” she admitted slowly, her eyes taking on a gleam. “Just think what he could bring to the pride.”
I winced and looked out at the carnage again, saying with conviction, “When his brother gave him to the skelm, any chance of Fell joining the pride was lost.”
I would not even think to ask it of him.Ino longer even wanted it for myself. No, I wanted a different life than what the pride offered me. The kind of life that saved Penterra from Stig and still protected dragons at the same time. The two things needed not be exclusive.
Such a path had first occurred to me during my rekon. It meant leaving the Crags and going back to Penterra. I was willing to do that.
There comes a time when one must make a stand … even if no one else stands with you.
I sucked in a breath. If I was lucky, I might not be alone. I might have Fell with me.
“It’s not as though Vetr did it on purpose,” Kerstin said.
My lips twisted and I shot her a look. “You are so certain of that?”
Kerstin looked affronted. “He didn’t! Vetr is many things. Hard, ruthless, stubborn … but he wouldn’t do that.”
I wasn’t about to get into an argument with her over Vetr’s integrity (or lack thereof). Besides, he’d told me with his own words what he had done, and I could never trust him again.
Gazing into the sky, I marked where Fell was etched against the bright blueness. Soon he would be out of sight, eaten up by the drifting clouds or simply too far away to see. Urgency built in me, drumming in my veins.
“He’ll come back to himself. He’ll remember,” I said—not that she had asked—and I didn’t know if the words were for her or me.
She followed my gaze. I felt the motion of her shaking head beside me—I still would not look away from Fell. The motion felt sad, woeful. As though she believed him lost. As though she pitied me. “How do you know Fell is still inside him at all?”
He was alive. I would not give up on him a second time.
“Because,” I snapped with bone-deep conviction, “he didn’t kill me.”
He didn’t destroy me like everything else in his path when he exploded from his tomb. It felt very deliberate to me that he had left me alive and able to go after him.
Perhaps a part of him knew that I would follow him. I needed to believe that. Kerstin made a sound, a grunt that seemed to convey that she was not swayed by my conviction.
“I’m going after him,” I said, shrugging off my fur mantle and then my cloak, letting them drop to the snow.
“What? Why?” Her features creased with perplexity. “Clearly, he does not want—”
“He doesn’t know what he wants. He doesn’t know himself.” I yanked off my gloves and tossed them down, feeling my core heat and spark in preparation.
She eyed me incredulously as I pulled off my tunic and let it fall. “This is a bad idea. He let us go, but if you chase after him, he will see you as a threat. He will kill you.”
I exhaled heavily. He could do that.
“He won’t,” I stated, glad for the steadiness of my voice that revealed none of my misgivings, none of my internal doubts.
“Oh, he will.”
“He can try, but I’m not like them.” I waved at the piles of dead around us. “I can handle myself against him. He needs me now more than ever.”
Somehow, some way, I would figure out how to bring him back to himself. I would remind him who he was—and who I was.
I would remind him that I was someone to him, someone he should care about because he once did.
That could not have been lost. Not even after all this time. He had to remember me.Us.
Hope breathed to life inside me.Purposeformed within me. It was an irresistible thing, a warm tide that soothed and eased and took away that sense of wrongness and awkwardness, that sense of being trapped inside ill-fitting clothes while trying to pretend they felt right, that sense of straddling two worlds—being two things and not wanting to choose one over the other.
