"If the court of Catonia formally demands that Elucia release me, I will be released, but if they demand that I be reinstated later, Elucia might put up conditions that the court would have to abide by later. The problem is that my family will never demand my reinstatement. If they get me back, they'll never let me go again."
Kailin was quiet for a long moment. "Maybe your destiny is to save Aurorys as a prince of Catonia and not an Elucian rider. Maybe you were always meant to go back home."
The words were like a punch to my gut.
How could she say that? How could she let me go?
If the roles were reversed, I would do everything to keep her from leaving. I loved her. But I was a selfish man, and I wasn't a great believer in prophetic dreams even when they came from Kailin. I didn't put much stock in her visions of my death.
What she'd dreamt about me was not the same as what she dreamt about Podana. She hadn't seen my death through the eyes of the small creatures whose consciousness she hitched a ride on. Her nightmares might have been a natural reflection of her waking fears.
"I don't want to leave you," I said. "I love you, Kailin."
"And I love you." She reached for my hand, her cold fingers intertwining with mine. "That's why I'd rather lose you than see you die."
"I'm not going to die."
"Alar—"
"No." I pulled her toward me, cupping her face in my hands. "I'm not leaving you. I'm not abandoning everything we've built together because of a dream that might be just a reflection of your waking fears."
"It's more than that," she insisted.
"I know it felt real to you. But even if it had a prophetic element, which I doubt, prophecies can be interpreted in many ways. My death could have been a symbol of my old self dying and being reborn as a rider and savior of Aurorys."
"You're grasping at straws because you don't want to face the truth."
The accusation stung because it wasn't wrong. I was grasping at straws. Still, what I'd said was valid as well.
"I will not base the most important decision of my life on a dream, Kailin. Not even yours."
She shook her head. "I can't believe you are saying that after you witnessed me saving Podana."
"That dream was different, and you know it."
"It was, but that does not invalidate the others." She lifted a pair of pleading eyes to me. "I'd rather have you alive in Eluria than dead in Elucia."
"And I'd rather die in your arms than live a thousand years without you."
We stared at each other, both of us stubborn and scared and unwilling to bend.
"There has to be another way," Kailin finally said. "Some way to change what I saw without you leaving."
I thought about the dream as she had described it. A training exercise. A solo flight. Something going wrong, the dragon banking too hard, me losing my grip and falling.
"What if I never fly solo?" I said. "The dream showed me on a solo flight. What if I refuse to do those? What if I always fly with a partner, someone who can catch me if I fall?"
Kailin's eyes became even more haunted. "In this nightmare, you died by falling off a dragon. In the two previous ones, you died in my arms, in the Citadel."
She'd admitted to having nightmares about the Citadel being attacked, but she hadn't told me that I'd died in her arms duringthose nightmares. No wonder she'd been so distraught by them. But the fact that I hadn't died the same way in her various nightmares only proved what I'd suspected.
"Don't you see?" I cupped her cheek. "If the dreams were prophetic, I would have died the same way in all of them, but I didn't, which means that these dreams were just a reflection of your waking thoughts."
"You still died." She swallowed. "And the same phrase repeated in each dream."
"What phrase?"
"Some fates can't be changed," she said in a small voice.
