Her emotion-shredded voice makes mine even rougher. “You were the first person in centuries I wanted to spend time with and confide in. And that brought me other people too. The Elite Wing. Stuart and Sybil. You gave me that.” I clear my throat, the words sticking. “I don’t even know when I fell in love with you—over the course of decades, probably—but as soon as I started thinking you might have feelings for me, too, it was like an avalanche inside me. Powerful, unstoppable, and so incredibly dangerous for us both because it made me hold on to you tighter when I knew I was supposed to let you go.”
She rolls her lips in, her mouth trembling. “Your groveling isn’t terrible,” she says with a sniffle. Her back is still stiff, her expression hard, but hope jerks painfully inside me for the first time in nearly two years.
“It’s all my fault. You asked for your story so many times, and I didn’t give it to you. I pretended I didn’t know. I did fear your reaction for your sake too. The facts are awful, violent and full of loss, and I didn’t know if living with the truth would be harder than living without any truth at all. But now I know that wasn’t my choice to make. I’m sorry, Sunshine. I was selfish—am selfish. I kept you from your kingdom so I could keep you in mine.”
A sad smile lifts her lips. “Sunshine.” She sighs. “Not anymore.”
I take a cautious step forward. The cold wind snaps my cloak around my legs as it whips over the mountain, and Idallia shivers, moving closer to Fyrestar. Rimblaze and Embersol close in, phoenix warmth for her and a barrier against me. I created them, but they’ve been hers since the day I put them in the same room together and the place instantly turned incandescent with devotion like I’ve never seen.
Maybe she and Fyrestar somehow knew they carried the same blood. Hers was all over that scale.
My breath shudders audibly. I love them so. I love them all. “Did Rimblaze tell you what I said?”
She shakes her head. “He just told me I should listen to you and meet you this time. That I’d want to hear what you said.”
My heart starts to pound. What if I give her false hope? It’ll be like lying to her all over again. I still have to try. “Do you still have Rannigan’s sorcerers who used the magic in my scale to protect his raiders against firebreath?”
Her eyes narrow. “Most of them. Some had to go on spikes.”
I’m well aware of her propensity for heads on spikes. Incongruent with the Idallia I knew, but she brought the entire population of Bloodwold to heel in a year. I would’ve tried diplomacy and failed. “They did something to coat raiders individually and temporarily. It worked, but it would wear off. It was just the magic from one scale for sometimes dozens of vampires. And the sorcerers had to keep the enchantment going from a distance.”
“We know this.” She shakes her head, starlight splashing across her furrowed brow. “What are you getting at?”
“Do you think it would be possible to take the magic from a phoenix feather—maybe one from each of yours—and imbue it with the same kind of spell? Your birds’ magic is still strong, even if rebirth is probably gone forever, and they’d shield you with their lives. There’s love in that magic—for you. To protect you. If just one of my scales could protect dozens of vampires I’d have rather seen dead, maybe three feathers from birds who adore you could let you walk in the sun.”
She stares at me. I hear her swallow even above the whistle of the wind. “I don’t know if that would work, but it’s not up to me to take my birds’ feathers.”
“I would give you any feather,” Rimblaze tells her, letting me hear. “A hundred if you needed them.”
“Love you.” Embersol simply leans into her hip.
“Only the best for you. Closest to the heart,” Fyrestar says.
She drops to her knees in the middle of them, gathering them close. Her sob breaks my heart. Tears flood my eyes.
“Will you try it?” I beg her.
She looks up, her beautiful face streaked with tears. “I’ll try it. I’ll let you know if it works.”
All I can do is nod. It sounds like she’ll send me a letter when my ardent hope was that she’d come to me herself and we’d fly out over the mountains again, all five of us in the sun.
A fool’s hope.
She doesn’t approach me, and I don’t think she wants me to come closer. “Can you ever forgive me?” I rasp. “I love you. I would do anything to regain your trust.”
She stands, wiping the dampness from her cheeks. She climbs onto Fyrestar’s back, something about it so final that my heart grows heavy and sinks. “I don’t know, Bale. And if this spell idea doesn’t help, you live in the day, and I live in the night. It doesn’t work.”
“I’d make it work. I’d rather never see the sun again than never see you.”
Do her features soften? I almost think so.
“You live in Drayke Mountain. You’re the Dragon King. I live in Blackrock Keep. I’m the Vampire Queen.” There’s no part of her voice that says she likes her Bloodwold home, and I have a sudden idea.
“We can live here. This can be our mountain. We’ll build a new home for both of us that touches both our kingdoms.”
She looks around, seeming a little shock-dazed by my bold suggestion. The landscape isn’t as wild and jagged as in central Torridaig, but the peaks are high, the forests are green, the lakes are plentiful, and the rivers run with frothing rapids and jumping fish. The hunting is good.
“There’s no city here,” she murmurs.
