I would lose that last part of my sister, and the only possibility for us to ever add to our number.
So when I woke in the night and the fire was worryingly low, with no wood to add to it, it was my responsibility to fix it. Quickly, I started to breathe fire on the egg.
It would exhaust me quickly, staying in my larger form and using that much fire. We had some remaining stew from the last bits of the enormous fish Bran had caught, so it wasn’t terribly likely I would starve to death. At least, not right away.
But what was the alternative?
I couldn’t let the egg die, and it needed heat.
So I sat there, breathing in as deep as I could, then slowly letting it out, trying to keep the egg as warm as I could. I was already getting wheezy and pitiful when Blake came up next to me, casually leaning his body against the bulk of my body. He looked at the egg, then at the fire, frowning. “I’ll go get more firewood.”
I didn’t have time to explain, I had to keep breathing on the egg, so I let him go. When he came back, clearly, he understood. He looked pale and serious, and leaned hard into me.
“There is no firewood, is there?”
I shook my head, even as I continued breathing fire into the fireplace. I glanced behind him, considering my bed. It wouldn’t give us much, but it might buy us a few days if I broke it up and burned it piece by piece.
I had no idea how I would get another, since it wasn’t as though I had any skill at building such things, and we had no sheep for the wool, but . . . well, this was an emergency. The egg mattered more than my comfort.
When he nudged me, I realized, startled, that Blake was talking. “—just a little to the left.”
When I stared at him blankly, he waved his hands in the universal “get out of my way” motion. Normally it was a rude gesture, and I’d have taken offense, but he looked so earnest.
He always looked so earnest.
How was he even human? Humans were never so . . . good.
Actually, come to think of it, dragons were rarely as good as Blake. Maybe it wasn’t about his race at all, but about Blake being unique among all beings. Was it truly possible for anyone to be that good?
I knew I was not.
“If you move just a little over there. It’ll be okay. I promise.”
Promise.
No one had promised me anything for my own sake in . . . well, not since my childhood.
My mother had disappeared from the ranks of dragonkind hundreds of years earlier, when I was still a hatchling, so I’d been raised by a friend of hers who had sometimes made promises. We’ll have venison tonight, or of course you can swim in the stream later. It was, perhaps the last time in my life anyone had promised me anything.
No, that wasn’t quite true.
We’ll take care of each other, Andreas. We don’t need other dragons, because we’ll always have each other.
Even in dragon form, my eyes stung at the reminder of my sister’s promise to me when we’d left our father’s enclave. It had felt wrong, a place where our father was in charge, not just because dragons were usually matriarchal, but because our father had been a terrible leader.
It wasn’t Eilonwy’s fault, though, I finally, truly accepted.
She’d never intended to leave me alone.
She’d have never chosen that.
I let Blake push me out of his way, too numb to even think clearly. He turned to the egg, and I recognized the change immediately—the air in the room stilled.
Then it seemed to . . . to bloom, like there was somehow more air than there’d been before. He turned to me. “One more time, please, breathe fire on it.”
I’d always been rather good at following orders, and in this case, it seemed the sensible thing to do, so I did what I was told, and breathed another slow stream of fire onto the egg. As I did so, the whole cave seemed to fill with the warmth of it, circling around and around, like the air itself was a warm blanket.
How was he doing that?
