"My grandmother." I press my hands to my face, feeling the heat of tears I'm too tired to shed. "Before she died. She came back to the library and removed it herself. She didn't want me to know—or she was protecting me from something—or maybe the cost was so terrible she couldn't bear to leave me the choice." A broken laugh escapes me. "I'll never know. She's gone, and she took the answer with her."
Yaern is quiet for a long moment, the fire crackling between us, the afternoon light slanting golden through her small window.
"You need his library," she says finally. Not a question.
"Yes."
"You need to go back."
"Yes."
She doesn't say anything else. Doesn't need to. We both know what this means—that my pride and my justified anger and my broken trust don't matter anymore, not when measured against my daughter's life.
That night, I dream of him.
Not the nightmare this time—something different, something that aches in ways the terror never could. I'm flying on his back through clouds that taste like rain and smell like the sky after a storm, his scales warm and solid beneath my hands, the world spread out below us in shades of green and gold and deep forest shadow. The bond pulses between us, stronger than it's been since I stopped drinking his poisoned tea, and through it I feel his emotions like they're my own—grief and guilt and desperate hope braided together so tightly I can't tell where one ends and the next begins.
He knows I'm thinking about coming back. Can feel it through the connection the same way I can feel his longing, his terror that I'll change my mind, his bone-deep certainty that he doesn't deserve another chance but will beg for one anyway.
Please, his emotions whisper through the dream, wordless and raw.Please come home. Let me help you. Let me save them. Let me try to fix what I broke.
I wake with tears cooling on my cheeks and his phantom warmth still wrapped around me like a blanket I can't quite shake off.
"Today," I tell Yaern when she stirs on her pallet by the fire, gray dawn light filtering through the cracks in the shutters. "I'm leaving today. Before I lose my nerve."
She doesn't argue, doesn't try to talk me out of it or into waiting longer. Just rises with a grunt and starts packing the bagshe's had ready for a week, moving with the efficient purpose of someone who knew this moment was coming.
The walk to the edge of the village feels longer than it should, each step heavy with everything I'm leaving behind and everything I'm walking toward.
My belly is visible now beneath my cloak—not huge yet, but obvious enough that the women I pass look and know. Some of them nod, small gestures of acknowledgment or maybe encouragement. Most of them look away, afraid of what I am, what I'm carrying, what I might become. I'm contaminated and transforming and pregnant with a cursed dragon's twins—I'm everything the War God's priests would burn on sight, everything this world tried to erase centuries ago.
I don't blame them for being afraid.
I'm afraid too.
Yaern walks with me to the mountain pass, her hand steady on my elbow when the path grows steep and my pregnant body protests the climb. Neither of us speaks—there's nothing left to say. We've talked through every angle, every fear, every possible outcome until the words wore thin and transparent. Now there's only the doing.
At the edge of the tree line, where the path turns upward toward the mountains and the castle that waits beyond them, she stops.
"This is as far as I go."
"I know." I pull her into a hug, careful of my belly, breathing in the familiar scent of her—woodsmoke and herbs and the wool of her shawl. "Thank you. For everything. For taking me in, for feeding me, for not letting me drown in my own anger."
"Come back when it's done." Her voice is fierce against my shoulder, thick with tears she's trying not to shed. "Whateverhappens with him—whether you forgive him or not, whether you stay or not—you come back and tell me how it ends. Promise me, Kess."
"I promise."
I pull away before I can lose my nerve, before the safety of her presence can convince me to stay. Turn toward the path that leads up and over the mountains, toward the castle, toward him.
The bond in my chest aches with every step, pulling me forward like a thread tied around my ribs, like a fish hook caught in the soft meat of my heart. Through it, faint but growing stronger with each step that closes the distance between us, I feel his emotions shift—grief giving way to desperate, terrified hope as he senses me coming.
He knows.
He's waiting.
And despite everything—the lies, the tea, the betrayal that still burns in my chest like swallowed fire—part of me is relieved to be going back. Part of me has been waiting for this since the moment I left, counting the days until I could stop pretending I didn't still want him, didn't still love him, didn't still feel the pull of the bond like gravity holding me to the earth.
I hate that part of me.
