I smile and touch my forehead to hers. “As you wish.” Pulling back, my gaze falls to the boy. “Will you be well?” I don’t have to say more for her to understand my meaning. I let the back of my index finger feather across his soft, round cheek.
“Thrace will care for him. And it won’t be the last I see of him, either.”
I can’t help the worried pinch of my brow, but I do manage to stay silent.
“Ninon,” Kalixta says, “my hands are full. Would you help me?”
Ninon huffs a soft laugh and reaches down to smooth the center of my brow with her finger like Kalixta usually does when my face tightens.
I stifle my grin and pull my head away, softening my features before focusing again on my sister. “He might not be a shifter.”
“He will be,” she says, gazing down at him, tone resolute. Even I can’t deny that she’s right. I want to say more, to tell her not to expect so much of Thrace, the sire of her children, elite shifter, and, as far as anyone can tell, the Sar Dyeus’s closest confidant. I don’t want her suffering a broken heart like our mother. I don’t want her turning into a husk of a person without his presence. Being with her for the term of her pregnancy helped us heal some of our past wounds of my own making when I’d battled the confusing bout of jealousy I had when she was chosen. I won’t lose her again with a set of careless words. Not when, in the end, she will lose Thrace and the boy in her arms, too. I vow to be here for her when it happens.
I press a lingering kiss to her forehead. She tastes of salt, the smell of birth still heavy around her, grounding me.
“Rest,” I tell her.
“Run wild,” she says in return, bringing the sharp sting of tears to my eyes.
Ninon and I leave the birthing chamber and begin winding our way through the labyrinthine caverns of our home. The network of interconnecting tunnels is a result of an underground river long since dried out. Above us lies a barren, rock-strewn surface that goes on for miles and miles until the sea. Ninon’s never seen it, that wide, unending expanse of blue, but when I go to Dyeus, the kingdom in the sky where all the dragon shifters live, I see it. I’ve stared at the sea for hours and hours until my eyes burn. I want Ninon to see it someday. I want to take her there.
“Where are you?” Ninon asks, breaking my reverie.
I scowl, not wanting to share a wish that I can’t give her. “Leaving all this behind,” I answer, giving a variation of the truth.
“Would you?” she asks, an uncharacteristic high note seeping through her usual calm monotone.
I frown. Where is there to go? The sea is impossible. According to the fishermen, the boats they use can only go so far before the rough waves destroy the vessels. Attempting to cross the mountains to places unknown is a death sentence unto itself with its impassible jagged peaks. Human men from the lands beyond have made it over to our side, but once they crest over into Dyeus’s territory, the dragons take them to the farmlands, so even if there is a path, there’s none on ours. The only place left is the Realm, which is no choice at all. Though we’ve heard quiet rumors of some of our people leaving here to venture into the mists. I’m not certain of the point in that – once you enter, you become the very beasts we slay.
Ninon seems to anticipate what I’m thinking. “That is, if there were a secure way to get to someplace safe.”
“Do you know something?” I ask, quirking a brow.
A smirk tips her lips. “I know many things.” I laugh, knowing all too well how right she is. “You haven’t answered my question, though. Would you?”
A sigh drops my shoulders, and even before the words leave my mouth, my head is shaking. “Kalixta would never leave here, especially now that her son will go to Dyeus. And I can’t leave her.”
Ninon nods, slow, thoughtful. I drop my head, trying to catch her eye as suspicion creeps up my spine. “Would you?”
She looks to me, her eyes containing a certain desperation that has my heart racing.Don’t leave me, I want to say.Where would you go?She opens her mouth, but then we hear a sob, followed by the low reverberation of voices ahead and we’re both on alert.
“Why?” The echo carries to us as more words tumble down the cavern. “Why does this keep happening?” Ninon and I pick up our pace until we round a corner, hearing the next part of the conversation more clearly as they come into view. I recognize them as two of the older carremai who’ve already completed their duty, their daughters around eight or nine years of age, both their sons admitted into Dyeus as dragon shifters.
“And during a birth,” Antir replies, her voice stronger and steadier.
The first speaker, Massa, says, “I wonder if the healers know anything yet.”
“With what little help they get, of course not,” Antir says with a note of disgust. Massa shushes her, eyes casting around until they land on us. I don’t think I imagine her relief that she sees us instead of one of the more outwardly devout carremai. “That’s two of us in as many months,” Antir goes on without concern.
My heart skips a beat. They’re talking of another death—random and unexplained. There’s no reason why these women, for the most part healthy and young, should die in their sleep or on their feet, without any warning.
I start toward them, ready to ask questions, but Ninon stays me with a hand to my wrist. “We’re running out of time.”
She’s right. Alixor has waited to call on me, but as much as I hate to admit, it won’t be long now. My hand forms a fist as Antir meets my gaze. In her eyes I see the same fire, the same frustration I often see in my own. Ninon tugs me down the hall that leads to the stables, her touch relaxing my fist.
As we near the end of the corridor, the musty odor ofthe stables greets my nose, the alluring tickle of the open air just beyond that. “We’ll make it back in time? Before the hoard comes?”
Ninon enters the open stables and goes to her horse while I tend to mine, a lively and somewhat difficult mare I call Aspa. When I was young, I once asked why the horses simply stayed when there was nothing tethering them in place. Wouldn’t they run free, if they could? I knew what I would do. My instructor’s response was a simple truth, but something about what she said struck a chord within me. “Why would they leave? They have food. Safety. Comfort. And, they know as well as we do the dangers that lurk beyond.”
