Lucien does, though. He groans and rolls his head to look up at me. “If I have to hear one more baby dragon scream, I swear I’ll create the first dragon daycare… somewhere far away in this town.”
“Good luck,” I say, because as cute as the dragons are, no one is equipped to watch them but their parents.
“Are you even listening to yourself?” Gareth demands, breaking his long silence. “Ebron’s up there doing all the hard work. We just have to listen to it. Show some respect.”
Alaric opens one eye. “You’re just mad because the baby dragons are already tougher than you.”
“Bigger doesn’t mean tougher,” Lucien mutters, but there’s no venom in his words.
Sevrin plucks another honeysuckle and twirls it. “It’s kind of incredible. Three out of four of our hatchlings are male. That means the whole lava-bath theory worked. And if it worked for our group, I bet there’s a whole bunch of female dragons that had male dragons from the Island of Dragons.” He flicks the flower at me, and it lands in my hair.
I let it stay. “Which means there’s hope for dragon-kind.”
“And the peace between our people will last,” Sevrin says, giving me a sweet smile that makes my heart ache.
Alaric props himself up on one elbow. “I’m still amazed Ebron has any interest in parenting at all. The guy’s spent his whole life flying solo. You’d think he’d be less invested.”
Sevrin shrugs. “He seems like the fatherly type to me.”
“You think that will happen to us? We’ll just go from a bunch of guys to dads just at the sight of a baby?” Alaric asks.
Gareth makes a noise halfway between a snort and a sigh. “I don’t know that I’d leave you alone with a puppy, no less a baby.”
The conversation floats above me, easy and loose. I let it drift, let the sun cook the insides of my eyelids. After a while, I tune it out entirely and listen to the dragons. Ebron’s roar is sharper than the others, a brass bell above the baby shrieks and the flutter-thud of young wings. Sylvara and the others croon encouragement from their perch, tails hanging over the ledge. Even from here, I can tell when one of the babies messes up: there’s a pause, a collective inhalation, and then a burst of laughter, or what could describe laughter from a dragon, when the poor sap crash-lands in a tree or spins out over the ocean.
I feel a hand trace my jaw, soft and insistent. Sevrin, always gentle, even though he looks so tough. He leans over, presses a kiss to my cheekbone, and then rests his forehead against mine.
“Thinking too much again?” he whispers.
I shrug. “Only a little.”
“Want to talk about it?” he asks, drawing back.
“I was just thinking about that day on Gore Rock.” Because that seems to be where my mind wants to go today.
We don’t say anything for a minute. I can tell he’s remembering, too. The moment it looked like we were all going to die. When Ebron was able to convince the dragons of Gore Rock’s riders to join our cause, and when the Gore Rock riders got free of the dungeons and came to help. All of the many things that led to us surviving the most frightening moment of our lives.
Alaric is watching me now. He has that look, the one that means he knows exactly what I’m feeling, even when I don’t want him to. “At least they executed that bastard Elder Thorne.”
“I’m not usually in support of executions,” I say, “but I didn’t shed a tear for that man.”
Lucien sighs dramatically. “Can we stop talking about dead men and focus on the future? It’s much more interesting. Also, less likely to kill the mood.”
“The future does sound better.” A thought flickers in the back of my mind that makes me smile.
Sevrin shifts to rest his head in my lap, using my thighs as a pillow. The sun highlights the scars on his neck, the ones that never quite faded after the fight. I run my fingers through his hair gently, thankful every day that he’s alive.
Ebron shrieks again, and the baby dragons loop in a wild, clumsy circle above the cliff. One of them, the blue one, gets it right, catching an updraft and soaring higher than the others. The rest follow, flapping like hell, determined not to be outdone.
The conversation drifts back to baby dragons. Lucien wants to know what the parents plan to do if one of the kids turns out to be a troublemaker. Gareth suggests dropping them into the ocean, and Alaric counters that they’d just swim back, strongerthan ever. Sevrin proposes letting them fight it out and crown the last one standing as king of the hatchlings. By the end, we’re all laughing.
Lucien grins. “If we ever have kids, I hope they’re not as much trouble as baby dragons.”
Alaric gives him a look. “You’d be lucky to have a kid half as cute as those things.”
“What? Our kids are going to bewayfucking cuter!” Lucien exclaims.
Gareth turns to me, sudden and intense. “When do you want to have kids?
