Silence. The villagers exchanged glances, and I saw it—the calculation behind their eyes. The wound-walker. The strange woman at the edge of the village. The one who swallowed sickness and walked alone.
Someone would point. Someone always pointed, when it came to giving me away.
I saved them the trouble.
"That’s me. I'm Lena."
The woman's gaze found me immediately. Something flickered across her face—assessment, approval, maybe relief. Up close, she looked younger than I'd first thought. Younger than me, probably, though the marks on her skin and the weight in her eyes suggested she'd lived more than her years would indicate.
"I'm Kara," she said. "Bonded mate of Davoren, the Fire Master." She gestured to the dragon behind her, and the beast dipped its enormous head in what might have been acknowledgment. "We've been searching for you for weeks. You're not easy to find."
"I prefer it that way."
The corner of her mouth twitched. "I imagine you do. Listen—" She stepped closer, lowering her voice, and I caught a scent like woodsmoke and something sweeter. "I don't have time to explain everything here. But the Dragon Lords face a threat unlike anything in recorded history. Something that could unmake the world—not metaphorically, not eventually. Soon."
I held her gaze. "What does that have to do with me?"
"Everything." She pulled something from her belt—a small scroll, sealed with wax that shimmered in seven different colors. "The Dragon Lords need a wound-walker for a ritual. Something that's never been attempted before. We've searched the entire continent. You're the strongest wound-walker anyone's found."
The strongest.
I almost laughed. What a thing to be known for. The best at swallowing other people's pain.
"How do you know I'm the strongest?"
"Because you're still alive." Kara's eyes softened slightly. "Most wound-walkers burn out by your age. The ones who don't . . . they learn to stop caring. They take less, do less, protect themselves. You don't. Every village we visited on the way here had a story about you. The woman who cured the uncurable. Thehealer who never turns anyone away." She paused. "The one who walks home alone, after."
Something twisted in my chest. Was that what the stories said? The woman who walks home alone?
"Please." Kara's voice dropped further. "We're running out of time. Whatever's coming—it won't spare this village because you stayed. It won't spare anyone."
I looked back at the cottage I could see from here, just barely, through the mist. The cold hearth. The empty chair. The bed where I slept alone every night, wondering if this was all there would ever be.
I thought about Bram's father holding his son. About Dessa's hands pulling away from my skin.
I thought about twenty-seven years of being needed but never wanted.
"What happens if I say no?"
Kara didn't flinch. "Then we find someone else. Someone weaker. Someone who'll probably die in the attempt." She met my eyes. "But you won't say no. I can see it in you. Whatever else you are, Lena—you're not the kind of person who lets the world burn because it didn't love her back."
The words landed like a blade between my ribs. She was right. Damn her, she was right.
I looked at the dragon behind her—at those intelligent, ancient eyes watching me with an emotion I couldn't name. At the villagers pressed against their buildings, already shrinking back from me, already calculating how quickly they could forget I'd ever lived among them.
I looked at Kara, with her marks of golden flame and her eyes that knew what it was to be claimed by something larger than yourself.
"When do we leave?"
Her smile was like sunrise.
"Now."
Twodaysondragonbacktaught me that flying was nothing like the stories made it sound. The stories talked about freedom, about wind in your hair, about touching the clouds. They didn't mention the cold that seeped into your bones, or the way your thighs cramped from gripping scales, or how small the world looked from so high up—small and fragile and breakable.
Kara rode in front of me, steady and sure against the bronze dragon's spine. During the long stretches of flight, when conversation was impossible over the wind, I held onto her waist and wondered at the strangeness of my life. Three days ago, I'd been pulling vegetables from my garden. Now I was hurtling through the sky toward a fate I couldn't imagine.
We stopped twice—once at a waystation carved into a mountainside, once at the edge of a crystalline lake where the dragon—Davoren—caught fish and roasted them with his own breath. During those stops, Kara and I talked.
