He grunted in annoyance, muttering,“Gods, you’re a dick,”as he pushed off the table and drew nearer.
In the training pit, I had felt something shifting beneath my skin, something strange and dry like a bluster of windswept sand scouring my flesh. I had kicked my brothers’ asses so easily. And moved fast…almost as if I hadswifted. I knew I hadn’t moved through the void Nelle used toswiftbetween places. I couldn’t use them because I wasn’t dead, nornot-quite-living.Yet I’d moved faster than I’d ever done before.
A soft voice cut through the tension in the room. “What do you know?”
Jett and Caidan shared a sharp look that, out of all of them here, Penn had been the one to ask. It made sense, as she wasn’t aware of the full intricacies of our ancestors’ relationship with wyrms. She sat straight in her high-backed chair, her posture perfect and expression brimming with inquisitiveness. “I don’t understand how it all works. This wyrm and tamer.”
“A tamer is there to act as a point guard to the wyrm to direct it in battle,” Kenton explained as he wandered toward her. “All knowledge of how our family tamed wyrms was buried, lost, or simply destroyed an age ago. We know only the basic dynamics. The tamer trapped and tamed the wyrm, and somehow the two bonded, with the tamer holdingswayover the beast.”
“What’ssway?” Penn asked.
“It’s the tamer’s will,” I replied before Kenton could.
Penn turned her attention to me, her brows drawing together. “You can control a wyrm withsway—your will?”
From what I’d learned from scraps of information scattered throughout the library, I knew the theory of it, just not the practicalhowof it all. “A tamer can use theswayto influence the wyrm and bend it in the direction it’s needed.” I huffed an emptylaugh, shaking my head at the ridiculousness of it all. “But it’s a fucking wyrm, much like a willful dog—”
“An enormous, willful dog with wyrmfire and a poison-tipped tail, amongst other deadly things,” Caidan interjected, grinning broadly.
Penn frowned. “And the bond is?”
Trust, I imagined. When the wyrm submitted and placed its trust in the tamer. “There is a connection between the two of them. Without it, the wyrm will turn feral.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
No, it sure as hells didn’t.
I thought about it while cozy warmth wrapped around my body from the fire popping and crackling in the background. Taking a deep drag off the blunt, I blew a cloud of swirling smoke across the table, the whitish vapor curling about the brass lamp with frosted-glass. I cleared my throat before answering Penn. “It could attack anyone within range, even those under the protection of the tamer or members of our House.” I’d found a brief description in a crumbling book of a broken bond after a skirmish between Houses killed a tamer. The frost-wyrm had laid waste to everyone. Many Crowthers had died that day, shredded with ice, including the heir to our Great House. “It could lay siege to the land and burn everything and everyone to the ground. It could simply leave everyone unharmed and fly away. Pretty much, the freed wyrm will do anything it wants.”
It was my sister who pondered this aloud. “Howdoyou bond with a wyrm?”
Penn answered lightly, clearly not thinking about how it would be received. “I expect in this case you’d bond with Nelle since she’s human.”
It was such an innocently posed statement.
Silence descended upon the library.
The air grew thick with curiosity and warning.
Every single one of my siblings fixed their gazes on me. I was surrounded by them all, boxed in as if I held all the answers.
“How the fuck would I know?” I replied to their silent question, keeping my voice calm but edged with vexation.
Hidden beside Flossie, I stretched my hand wide against my thigh, then clenched it. I was off-kilter, but I couldn’t let them see that. I had to let them see what they wanted to see. And that was me—cold, loyal, hateful.
My siblings had no idea I’d already forged a connection with Nelle. I didn’t know if it was the full bonding of a wyrm and tamer or if there was more to it than what I currently experienced. I felt her emotions under my skin. It made sense to me now that this was one way a tamer could keep one step ahead of the wyrm if the beast lost its temper, wanting to strike out and take a bite out of me or anyone else.
“You’re the Tamer,” Jett replied, his mouth curling downward, as if annoyed I wasn’t sharing vital information.
“That’s right,Iam.” A smug smirk curved my lips as I pointed a finger with the hand holding the blunt at him. “And you’re not.”
I’d been the first tamer born in over five hundred years. My father, with his eyes a shade of violet so shadowed they bordered on black, had been on the verge of becoming a tamer himself. Unlike the degree to which I experienced it, my father could feel a faint vibration coming from Draxxon’s body lining the Great Hall. And while I carried full wyrmblood in my veins, he carried the barest trace of it too.
I tried not to bristle. The fact that they were even bothering to understand something that was of no use to them fucked me off. And even more irritating, they were messing with my private affairs. I took a puff of the blunt, blowing out a stream of smoke before placing it on the ashtray. The leather beneath me whispered as I rose, Flossie jumping onto the seat I’d vacated.Stalking around the table, I leaned between my brothers to snatch up the bottle and refill my tumbler with whiskey. “All of this conjecture doesn’t matter,” I gritted out. “We’re using Wychthorn to get into the Witches—”
My sister cut me off, stabbing the table with a finger to emphasize her point. “It matters tousif she can influence you in the meantime.”
Kenton interjected. “Ferne’s right. You’re so territorial you won’t letusin the tower.” It was lucky that he thought it was the territorial tamer side of me that refused them access to the tower, not the truth, that I wanted to protect Nelle from them.
