“You’re lucky she didn’t bite your head off,” Reggie said, sourly, and meantthank you, I wish you could come with me.
Connor’s responding smile saidI know, but you’ll do fine. “Nah.” He reached a hand up and stopped shy of touching Valencia’s muzzle. “She’s a good girl.”
As if to prove the point, Valencia sniffed his palm, and then delicately butted the end of her nose into it.
“See? Gentle as a kitten.”
“A flying, fire-breathing kitten,” Reggie muttered. He tweaked Valencia’s curb strap again, for no reason. It hid the shaking of his hands, if nothing else.
Speaking of hands: Connor’s landed on his shoulder. He couldn’t feel its warmth or grip through his pauldron, only the weight of it. As if he knew this, Connor let his fingers slide down his arm, and then over, ducking under his cloak so he could touch the middle of Reggie’s back. Where Reggie shivered against the familiar heat, blunted by fabric, but still there.
Connor leaned in close, until his chest pressed against Reggie’s arm, and his breath tickled warm in his ear. His voice was so warm and sincere that it brought a sudden sting of tears to Reggie’s eyes. “Youcando this, Reg. You’re the best horseman I’ve ever met.”
Reggie refused to look at him. Dashed at his eyes with a corner of his cloak. “You’re saying that because you think flattery will hurry me along.”
“I’m saying it because it’s true. Hey. Look at me.”
He did, with reluctance, and Connor kissed him. Not a quick good luck press, but a deep, searching sort of kiss, open-mouthed, and hungry, and, in Reggie’s estimation, desperate. He dragged his teeth over Reggie’s bottom lip when he withdrew, and when Reggie—more than a little dazed, and thoroughly distracted from his fear—lifted heavy eyelids, he saw a rare crack in Connor’s façade.
His expression was broken open, worry and affection and a dozen other raw, tender emotions plain in his dark eyes. His mouth hitched sideways in a fleeting, affectionate smile. In a soft voice, he confessed, “If it was me, I’d fall off on the ascent, break my neck, and we’d be doomed. If I managed to get up in the air, I’d flee at the first sign of danger.”
“Con—” Reggie started.
Connor pressed their foreheads together. “Go. Make me proud.”
Reggie exhaled shakily. “It must take quite a lot to make a rogue like you, proud.”
“Oh, on the contrary.” Blurred from closeness, his smile was still clearly delighted. “I’m very easy.”
“You are,” Reggie agreed. “Slut.” And then his eyes started stinging again, and he flung both arms around Connor’s neck.
“Oh, all right.” He patted Reggie on the back, and then caved and hugged him in return. “You’re all right. You’re fine, love.” He kissed the side of Reggie’s head, and it was easy, in that moment, to believe that he was.
Connor let him hold on until he was ready to step back, and by that time Reggie had gotten his tears, and his too-quick breathing, under control. Dry-eyed, braver than he’d felt a fewminutes ago, he met Connor’s steady, warm, encouraging gaze, and said, “Try not to die in my absence.”
Connor gave him a sloppy salute. “Try not to fall off a dragon.”
Reggie snorted, thrilled that he could joke rather than wet himself with fright.
Then he took a deep breath and turned toward Valencia. “What do you say, Lenny? Shall we take to the skies?”
She trilled a happy-sounding answer that could only be ayes.
~*~
Náli had never been so grateful for a white-scaled drake as he was when they landed in the snowy crook between two peaks. “Stay hidden,” he told them, for all the good that it would do, but Percy snuggled down into the snow, fluffing it up around him with his wings and tail, and Alfie and Valgrind followed suit.
“Huh.”
“What?” Rune asked. He was wind-chapped, whey-faced, and wobbly on his feet, voice a rough scrape thanks to the cold air and altitude.
“I didn’t think they’d listen. Come on.”
Rune muttered a wordless protest, but when Náli leaned forward and started his laborious climb up through the waist-deep drifts, he heard the prince floundering along behind him. The wind bit like a tangle of thorns, stinging against his scalp, his eyes; licking insidiously down the collar of his tunic, until his whole chest was a mess of gooseflesh. He leaned farther and farther forward as he climbed; it was a short distance to the precipice, but he was forced to plunge his gloved hands down into the snow and search for rocky handholds to pull himself along. Sunrise was against his back, and it was by its first, brilliant white light that he finally beheld the capital ofAquitainia when he gripped a ridge of snow-covered rock and hauled himself the last meter.
He saw the water first. The half-moon bay of sparkling blue, and beyond its rocky shores and jutting piers, the blue-black of deep ocean water. He lifted a hand, and from this far distant, the curve between thumb and forefinger cupped the entirety of the bay.
Closer, at the foothills of the mountain range upon which he currently perched, the city lay in a tangled jumble of pale stone buildings at irregular heights: towers climbing taller and taller in concentric circles until there could be no question that the tallest belonged to the king’s palace: a many-tiered cake encircled by a high wall that spiraled down and down its hilltop, a long ramp that led up to a pair of iron gates that looked ant-sized from this far away.
