“What?”
“Eloise has the fortress’s location. The shadow dragons created the prison and the fortress—can you move them, too? If she turns up and there’s nothing that she promised the others, I’m sure they’ll keep themselves busy with in-fighting.” Her voice was choked with bitterness.
“The fortress was built generations ago. We maintain it, but it’s an automatic process.” The terminology, which he’d learned in the outside world, was a strange fit for the magic of his ancestors. But it was accurate. “I do not have the necessary knowledge to change the enchantment like that.”
“Hmm.” Francine’s eyes flashed, but she was staring within herself, already discarding her first idea and racing to find another. “Then we can’t do the equivalent of demolishing the entranceway, either, so they can’t get in.”
“No.”
She cursed. “There has to be something!”
There was. The solution he’d come up with the moment she told him the fortress was under threat. The one he had thought he might be able to avoid, and was now the only way out he could see.
For her. Not for him.
But he couldn’t tell her that.
“We can’t conspire on empty stomachs,” he said. “Come. I’ll show you more of the fortress.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Dragon-sized kitchens?”
It was strange, seeing his home through Francine’s eyes. The way it was designed to suit dragons and humans both.
“You spent most of your time in dragon form?”
“Why walk when you can fly?” he said absently. Food. Now he’d mentioned it out loud, his stomach was growling. Hunger was another feeling he thought he’d become numb to. And here it was again, just in time for him to die.
“Most of the rooms we’ve seen are too small to stretch your wings out. You must have walked through the tunnels, not flown. And you wouldn’t have fit in these smaller rooms at all.” She frowned. “Why have human-sized rooms, if—oh.” She recovered, but not quickly enough that he didn’t notice her pause. “Shadow dragons’ mates aren’t always shadow dragons themselves. Of course. The space must have been designed with that in mind.”
He'd never considered an alternative. Or what it meant for the fortress to have been built this way. Growing up, it had been normal. When he was a hatchling, still testing his wings, he’d explored the human-sized rooms; as he grew, he spent more time in the dragon-sized areas, until he could no longer fit in the other rooms without shifting.
“We used to fly down the central stairwell,” he said. “With our wings tucked almost flat against our sides, spiraling faster and faster.”
“And trying not to crash-land on the ancient enemy of your people at the bottom?”
“Precisely.” He blinked. “We’re here.”
Outside the kitchens in his family’s wing of the fortress. He hesitated on the threshold.
Francine touched his arm. “I’ll go in first.”
“There’s no need—” he began, but she had already slipped ahead of him. She pushed the door open—it was dragon-sized, but it moved as easily as though the hinges were freshly oiled. His chest clutched as she stepped through.
“There’s nothing here,” she said.
“I did not expect there to be,” he said, his voice unexpectedly rough.
“I know.” Her eyes caught the light, gleaming soft gold. “Your sister and brother-in-law will have … faded. But there’s no sign of anything else, either.” She pulled the door further open so he could see past her. The kitchen and dining area were tidy. Untouched. Exactly as Francine had said: no sign of a struggle.
No half-eaten last meal. No ransacked cupboards and smashed crockery.
He swallowed. Would it have been easier if there had been some sign of his lost family, instead of this aching nothingness?
“If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him for you.”
The gold in her eyes had sharpened, and the sight of her protective anger eased something inside him. “I thought you were here to escape your violent former self?”
“I would make an exception.”
