“One thing you can smell.”
She sniffed and found it beneath the tang of her fear and the iron on her own skin. “Oil.”
“Good,” he said. “It means the pulley has been tended. Climb.”
She climbed. The top came, sullen and then sudden, like most victories do in the last foot. She swung a knee over and rolled onto the wall’s wide lip and lay there, lungs gripping air as if it might flee. The sky above her was more expansive than any roof deserved to be. Her laugh came out strangled and bright.
Below, Thorne’s voice floated up, edged with the smallest approval. “Again.”
She groaned to the sky. “I hope you are allergic to joy.”
“That would be inconvenient,” he said, and she could hear that near-smile again. “For both of us.”
She climbed until her forearms trembled and her gloves were dark with the salt that leaks from honest work. She climbed until the thread in her chest felt like a companion, not a leash, until, once, she almost forgot to be afraid and had to remind herself as a courtesy. When she finally slid down the rope and landed with a stagger and a laugh she could not stop, Thorne looked at her as if the sun had just surprised him by rising.
“Enough,” he said. “You will undo our work today by asking for more too soon.”
“I could go again,” she lied.
“You could,” he said. “We are done for today.”
She stood very still then and felt her body hum with a music she knew, the hymn of day’s end in a room that smells of heat and steel and water. She had not shattered anything. She had not drowned. She was so tired that the stones beneath her looked merciful.
“Thank you,” she said before she could stop herself.
He flinched the way a man flinches when a blade glances off mail, and the body remembers a wound that is not there. “Do not thank me for expecting what you already had.”
“Then for letting me see it and pushing me to do more,” she said, uncharacteristically gentle.
He looked away at the broken mouth of the dome where evening’s first star had set its tiny tooth. “Tomorrow will be harder.”
“I suspected,” she said dryly.
He nodded toward the arch. “Go before I remember the other drills I meant to give you.”
“I will run in my sleep.”
“It will count,” he said, almost solemn, and she snorted, then swallowed the sound because something inside her still believed laughter could wake a storm.
He left by the far corridor that led to the officers’ walk. She watched him go. The ring was empty except for the ghosts of motion and the smell of work. She gathered the staff and cleaned them. She coiled the rope the way she had been taught to coil a hose in a village.
Night lifted from the valley in a slow tide. A breeze slipped through the cracked dome and stroked her hair away from her damp temples. Beyond the mountain’s shoulder, a silver shape wheeled and vanished and returned, the way a vow returns each time it is tested and found intact.
She looked at her hands. The gloves were salt-stained and ugly. When she peeled them away, her palms were mapped with old burns and new blisters. She flexed her finger, and the ache sang up her forearms like praise.
“I am not broken,” she whispered to the ring that had once tried to be a sky. “I am learning where I bend.”
Tomorrow would be harder. Good. She would be there when it arrived. She left the Scorchfield, as if closing a door behind a day that had behaved. When she reached her narrow bed, sleep did not fight her.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
The dragon flying fields shimmered under the weight of morning heat, though the sun had barely crested the eastern ridge. Thaelyn stood with one boot on a stone outcrop, the other planted in the soil, her breath rising in pale plumes. She wore the regulation black flying leathers, fitted and reinforced at the shoulders and hips, with silver-stitched dragonbone clasps that gleamed faintly under the rising light. Her bow was slung diagonally across her back, the carved wood resting just below her braid. A long, dark cape, fastened at her collar by a simple clasp, fluttered in the wind.
Beside her, Thorne adjusted the twin swords strapped across his back, the hilts glinting with faint red inlays. His leathers matched hers, though his were worn in places from use. He cut a formidable silhouette against the dawnlight, all hard lines and quiet presence, the wind tugging at the ends of his cloak.
Commander Dareth and Princess Aerisya, Thorne’s sister, stood beside them. Princess Aerisya was a sight to behold in her white and silver-scaled armor and ivory crest. Her long blond, almost silver hair was braided and wound on her head beneath her crown. She was a very skilled dragon rider, one of the best in the royal army. Her dragon, Arauthator, was already on the field. His presence radiated control and power. She quickly mounted him. He was a rare lunar white, enormous, older dragon. He was King of the White Ice Dragons. His wings broad, mane dusted with frost, eyesthe blue of storm-lit skies, with rebirth and death looming behind them.
