Yelena's smile was achingly sweet. "Then I will show you what I am, and what I can do. I don't know why I am so different. I know I came from the north. Far, far from here, and I was abandoned. I don't have many memories of that time. It means I never fit with the wild kind, and I'll never really fit with the fae kind."
"I understand that feeling too," Valentine said and dared to put his hand over hers. "We can not fit in together."
Yelena kissed the top of his hand before stepping away. "You might want to stay there."
Valentine watched her walk back out through the grass, her lovely body and hair glowing in the sunlight. The gold turned to silvery white as her magic surged to the surface, and she shifted.
Yelena was all the colors of a glacier. Greys and whites and blues. Valentine smiled when he saw that her silver hand had indeed changed into a silver paw. He couldn't wrap his mind around that and had to stop wondering how the transformation magic would work. Nothing about Yelena's magic was normal.
She turned her diamond-shaped head toward him and looked at him with the same pale blue eyes. The white horns atop her head curled back almost like an antelope's, ending in sharp points. She stretched out her wings, and their color was a pale blue and purple.
The dragon painted on her chamber door was her own. And Valentine had been drawing her for weeks and weeks. How was that possible?
Valentine dared to walk closer and placed a hand over the sudden yanking feeling in his chest. "You are stunning, baby girl."
Yelena opened her mouth, and he saw her fangs, which were sharply pointed and looked almost translucent like diamonds. Valentine had never seen or read about any dragon like her.
She turned back to the trees and opened her mouth. Instead of fire, what came out with her roar was ice.
Valentine stumbled back in surprise, tripped, and went back on his ass. "So that's how you could freeze yourself and not die."
His heart was pounding so loudly, he could hear it in his ears. Yelena's wings and tail began to lift and move in a mesmerizing dance. Magic hummed in the air, and ice gathered on the grass around him in swirling, strange patterns. When she opened hermouth again, it was to make sounds in a calling of high notes like she was a large exotic bird.
"You are...singing?" Valentine couldn't believe it. He somehow knew that this was something no one had ever seen her do before. The patterns in the frost around the glade began to pulse with light and power, and her song made the ice crystals start to vibrate until they were singing a song of their own.
Valentine's eyes filled with tears, overwhelmed by the magic of the moment. He could feel the song as it vibrated through his body. The dragon side of him rolled to the surface, and it watched Yelena's beautiful display.
Mate, it said, full of yearning.
It had been trying to tell him since she had almost cut his throat, and he had tightened the bindings around it so he wouldn't hear the truth.
Valentine pressed his hand harder to his sternum, crying for the first time since his mother had died. Yelena's song was breaking through all the parts of him that had been numb and closed off for so long.
He gasped, struggling to get a big enough breath through the sudden wave of pent-up grief and new longing. He couldn't fight against it. His magic had always risen to protect him, but it couldn't protect him from Yelena. He just sat there, tears tracking down his skin as his world fell apart.
Mate. Balance, the dragon insisted, solving the mystery of why their magic worked together for him, too.
Valentine knew he should be panicking. He had always looked at his brothers and other family members mating and thought it would be like just another noose around his neck that was designed to choke the life out of him.
This didn't feel like a rope around his neck, but around his heart. As soon as the thought formed, the silver line of light he had been following to find her flared to life.
"Oh, that's what that is," he whispered, feeling like the biggest idiot in all the worlds. He had always been confused about how he was drawn to her. Even masquerading as Caelan, he had yearned to come to Faerie and see her. She was his friend, his magical balance, and his mate.
Yelena was his everything, and he had been too stubborn and caught up in his stupidity to realize it.
Valentine wiped at his cheeks before Yelena could see the tears and climbed back to his feet. She had stopped singing, and he strode through the grass towards her. With no clue what else to do, he climbed up on her clawed foot and hugged her leg.
He didn't know how he could bring up the fact that she was his mate, or how someone as alpha and independent as her would react to it. He only knew that in that moment, he wanted her to see that he wasn't afraid of what she was.
"Thank you," he said, his face pressed to her cool scales. "Thank you for sharing this with me. It was... You're the most beautiful dragon I have ever seen."
Yelena's paw shifted so she could hold him. Her head lowered to sniff him, and he placed his hand on her snout. This was her real form, not the human-shaped one.
"You are amazing, you know that?" Valentine told her, looking into her large eyes. "You learned to live and shift and do magic with no one to show you the way. You are a miracle, Yelena."
Yelena's paw lowered him back to the ground, and somehow, she shifted at the same time, so by the time his feet touched the frost-covered grass, she was in his arms. Her arms and legs were wrapped around him, her face pressed into his neck.
Valentine held her tighter to him. He inhaled her scent, and the numb pieces of himself flooded with warmth.
