Curious, I gestured at the elegant length of wings. “They look too sleek, too light to carry them into flight.”
“They spin squalls to keep them aloft.”
My lips parted in surprise. The reason my dark magic harnessed wind. There were so many answers I needed to know. “Were there many of them?”
“Wyrms were rare, even back then.” Dragging the messy locks of hair from his forehead, he thought about it more. “A few frost-wyrms in the northern tundra of Russia. Like those that bathed in moonlight, their fire was cold as ice.”
And my wyrm had both ice-shredding fire along with its heat-melting flames, an unusual combination.
This wasn’t quite all of Draxxon either. His protruding body would have taken up all the space in the Great Hall. Instead, his remains had been shaped into a gigantic relief sculpture emerging from the stone. I craned my neck back to gaze up at his massive head twisting outward from the wall, with the antelope horns sweeping back from his forehead and his maw gaping wide to bare his teeth. I blinked at the length and width of each tooth. It was a mouthful of fangs, rows and rows of them. Enormous.
“Are his bones beneath the body?” As soon as I asked, I felt stupid because why would they?
Graysen crossed his arms over his chest, Draxxon capturing his attention once more. “They’re in our treasure trove. Most of them anyway.”
“Most?”
He brought his gaze to mine, and a cold feeling coiled within my stomach to see cunning lurking in his dark eyes. “Later…when we play our game of trading an answer for an answer. You can ask that one then.”
Ah, he’ll make a game of it later. Of course.
I swiveled my body to face him fully, with a hand on my hip. “And your sword was forged from Draxxon’s bones,” I stated, rather than questioned, because I knew that.
“Besides the sword, there are other weapons that were forged by the Blacksmith and handed from Wyrm Tamer to Wyrm Tamer. Those ancestors in between can use them as my father did, but he couldn’t touch the cursed sword. Only those of us who have the wyrm tamer genes can wield it.”
Wyrm tamer genes.
“How do you know you have the mysterious wyrm tamer traits?” I asked, curious to know. What made it obvious that he was a tamer?
He uncrossed an arm to point to his eyes.
I raised my brows.Seriously?
I waved my hands about, palms outward, mocking him.“Oooo… You have black eyes.”
His jaw ticked and his gaze was still level with mine, but there wasn’t a shred of hardness in it. Amusement shone bright and true. He liked my bite. He always had.
I snorted, then jabbed a finger toward his face. “That’s your only clue? Black eyes?”
He shifted his weight, his sparkly boots scraping against the stone. He angled his head and tried to tame the grin that teased his mouth. “Every so often the black shows up amongst the violet that’s prevalent within my family line. And there have been none for over five hundred years.”
My jaw slackened, and my limbs grew lax. “You’re the first tamer in five hundred years?”
“Yep,” he said, rocking back on his heels.
How curious.
And I was born after him.
I didn’t know whether there was a connection. So, I stored that snippet away in my box of puzzle pieces that were Graysen and the Crowthers. “And youknow nothingabout wyrm taming,” I scoffed, shaking my head at him as I took a couple of steps closer to the long table where Sage had padded off to investigate dropped scraps of food.
“Fuck all,” Graysen muttered before flashing a smile. “I didn’t have as much time as you to spend in the library. I expect while you were busy researching monsters, I was in the training pit getting the shit beaten out of me by my father as he taught me the art of warfare.”
He turned away to rake his gaze over Draxxon and the plated spines down the ridgeline of his back. “But there’s been small bits of knowledge I’ve gathered when I had time to dig around in our family library… The females mark and claim their mate during estrus.” His gaze went far away as if thinking back to his ancestors. “It must have been both exhilarating and terrifying to see wyrms warring in the skies over the right to mount the female. But from what I’d learned about them, even winning the battle didn’t ensure winning the female. She chose her mate.”
My mouth rounded into a surprised O. “They go on heat?”
“Yep. And they kept their young in burrows until they could keep their tempers in check… But as for wyrm taming…” A crease formed between his brows as he rubbed the tips of his fingers beneath his bristle-shadowed chin, deep in thought. “All I know was that it wasn’t easy to break a wyrm. One had to hunt it, capture it, bind its powers, and then get it to submit.”
