He leans down close enough that if I surged upwards, our mouths would meet. “You mean before you begged me to take you?”
“If that’s how you remember it,” I say, not backing down.
His mouth is a pretty smile. “I think you should ask me what my elahi is.”
I tilt my head. “Why would I think you have one?”
“I told you I was special.”
My mouth twists into its own little smirk. “What’s your elahi, Ozias?”
He pins me with his amber eyes, glittering and alive. “I do believe that’s the first time you’ve said my name. It sounds lovely coming from your lips.”
I lift a brow and wait. He’s as smooth as one of the farmhands on delivery day.
His mouth twitches in and out of a smile. “Aside from replicating magic, I can see potential bonds between draconem pairs.”
I close my eyes and draw in a deep, slow breath, then open them again. “What, exactly, is a bond?”
Ozias grins. “I’m so glad you asked.” He draws away and pours himself another finger’s worth of liquor, then motions that I’m welcome to help myself to more. I don’t.
“Bonds are sacred, cherished among our kind.”
I tuck my hair behind my ears in an attempt to ignore the rippling under my skin at hearing his words. Ozias gives me a sidelong glance, pausing long enough that I take in a few controlled breaths to calm myself. He sets down the decanter and looks out to the open sky.
“Dyeus doesn’t allow bonding, but draconem here will—though we can’t make use of its true purpose. The bond is what keeps us whole, for lack of a better word, when we collect souls. For every soul a draconem collects, their partner is supposed to cleanse.” He picks up a decanter of water and pours it into the glass of amber liquid until it runs clear, spilling over onto the table, down to the floor. “But, if the second half of the pair isn’t there…” He fills up the glass again, this time with the alcohol until the liquid turns the clean water brown, the smell overpowering, the cup running over the edge.
“And because Dyeus doesn’t allow bonding, the draconem out there collecting souls are turning savage and dying. Without a bonded partner to purge the impurity they take from a soul before it can be granted to the gods, they’re consumed by it.”
“Are all souls filled with such malaise?”
“Most have a little, some are teeming with it, and a very rare few have nearly none. Without cleansing from a bonded partner, it stays in our bodies. The dragons you’ve slain, the ones you thought were rogues, are those diseased dragons—the ravaged, we call them. They, as much as you, didn’t have a choice in what happened to them. They arethe boys they’ve forced you to surrender. The ones they’ve stolen from us. They are the draconem they’ve deemed less than.” With every word he says, I wrap my arms tighter and tighter around my middle, my fingers digging into my ribs. I don’t want to believe it, but how can I not? I’ve witnessed them take and take and take and seen the meager rations we get in return and have been out in the Sere to cut down the creatures they supposedly protect us against. I don’t want to hear anymore, but Ozias doesn’t stop. “And when one of them dies, another draconem, or someone who was meant to be, dies too. Someone they had potential to bond with.”
It takes a moment for me to register his meaning. If all of us in Nevoba are supposed to be draconem then…my mouth falls open. “The deaths in Nevoba.” Ninon’s mother. All the others.
He nods, his expression grim. “Here, too. And in Dyeus we imagine.”
I cannot undo what I’ve done. I know that, and yet I recall every dragon I’ve taken from the sky. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment. “Can they be saved?”
“We’ve never had access to one to find out. What we do know is that the deaths are happening among our weakest shifters. Among those who don’t have an elahi. You will be safe, as far as we can tell based on what we’e seen from your energy output, but…I cannot say the same for your friend. She’s taken a long while to acclimate to the transition, and none of us feel an elahi within her.”
I hang my head and press the heels of my hands against my eyes so tight that colors dance behind my closed lids. Ninon’s always worried that her fate would match her mother’s. And now…she might actually be right. My ears buzz and my head swims.
Ozias’s hand lands on my shoulder near my neck. “We can’t change what’s happened. We can, however, change what will be.”
I shake my head, and when he moves to pull his hand away, I grab his wrist, clutching him tight. I lift my head, heavy and reluctant until I meet his eye. “How? You’vebeen stuck here for over a century. What change can happen now that hasn’t already been tried?”
Ozias kneels down so that we’re eye to eye. “I told you I can see potential bonds. And now, because you’re here, there’s something new we can try. Something that has never been done before. Something only you can do.”
My heartbeat thrums. “What I can do?” Is he telling me he saw a bond between us? That his elahi and whatever mine is can accomplish something together? Or perhaps my elahi on its own can help.
He keeps his gaze locked with mine, making sure I hear him, making sure I understand. “You can bond with the Sar Dyeus.”
My ears ring and I’m suddenly dizzy. I suck a deep breath through my nose. I couldn’t have heard him right. “What?”
“I saw it yesterday, Kaisa, clear as day, when the two of you were in the same space. I saw the line connecting you.”
I can’t fathom a reason he would lie about this. I curse Erenmaag, the god of fate and agency, to have laid this burden upon me. I press my lips into a thin line. “Is there no one else?”
