Tears choked her, and she instinctively swallowed them, then checked herself.
Why not grieve? She wasn’t her father’s pawn anymore, and she could cry if she wanted to.
Valenna let out her breath and opened the door of her heart. Sorrow crept over the threshold, touching her charred banisters and dry-rotted walls. The tears came slow at first, then like steady rain, and then in a torrent. She let them drip, warm and sticky, down her cheeks, and felt as though someone was washing away years of grime.
She wept until she ran out of tears, then, her throat raw and her chest aching, she uncurled her arms and legs and leaned against the bed.
Wisteria dripped from the bedroom ceiling, soft moss and tiny violets carpeted the floor. A flowering tree with weeping branches grew in the corner, snowing white petals on the vanity.
At first, Valenna thought she was dreaming. Then she reached out and touched a family of white snowdrops clustered around her feet. The petals were velvet-soft and cool against her fingers.
This was not her magic, surely? There was no blight or venom in violets and snowdrops.
Scrambling to her feet, Valenna turned round and round, a little frightened, searching for a bramble or an ire iris, but the room was crowded with ferns and flowers, toadstools and willows.
Her heart sped. All this time—all this time, buried under her rage, her mother’s magic waited. Her father had not shut her in her room out of simple cruelty; he had not forbidden her tears because they were ‘the sign of an untethered will.’ It had all been calculated to make her magic ferment and turn to poison.
Tears stung her eyes again. For two years, she’d imagined her father and her past were the truth, and Evander and their lovewas a beautiful lie. Now she wondered if her past was a lie, and Evander was the reality.
Like a seed planted in dry earth, her pure magic was not dead; it was waiting for rain. And spring was on the horizon.
A chill breeze curled through the window, carrying the distant wail of a bird. It echoed from beyond the ocean, melodic like a mourning dove, deeper than a nightingale.
Running to the window, Valenna leaned out and looked toward the gray, sparkling sea. The breeze blew the pines below the manor house. A finch sang in their branches. All the ordinary sounds of a spring evening.
Just as she turned back to her room, the song reached her again. It was a thin melody, barely audible, but something inside her rose to it, like a lost child hearing the voice of her mother.
Chapter forty-four
Evander
“Giles, do not lean over until the downward beat!” Evander shouted over the concussion of the dreadnought’s four gigantic wings.
Evander had told Giles this as they walked from the mess hall that morning. He repeated it as the boy buckled on his harness, and then said it a third time before the dreadnought mounted into the sky, its wing beats bending the tall grass into a flattened carpet and sending marsh birds squalling.
And yet, after all that, Giles leaned over too early, reaching for the cannister release.
The heavy wing whistled upward.
“Giles!” Evander yelled, launching across the dragon’s shoulders and catching the boy’s harness. He yanked him back, and Giles narrowly avoided having his head cracked. Evander, however, couldn’t stop his momentum, and he slid over the dragon’s slippery side and plummeted downward, lurching to a stop at the end of his tether. He dangled in midair, swinging below the dreadnought and questioning every choice he’d made since leaving Ashkendor.
Haldir, the upcoming mission to Scathmore, the conscripts and their refusal to heed him, and now Valenna. It was too much. He was going to buckle like a dragon carrying too much weight.
His interaction with Valenna at the war council tormented him. She didn’t look herself with her hair slicked and her eyes paintedwith dark powder. Her thin satin dress annoyed him—not warm enough for that freezing manor house. He’d read her expression, and he knew she was worried that he was angry at her. He ached to wrap her in his arms and kiss all her doubts away.
But until they left for Scathmore, she was outside his reach.
The conscripts hauled him up and dragged him onto the dragon’s back again. Giles crouched at his station, looking chagrined.
“I didn’t hear you,” he mumbled.
“All four times,” Evander said, the wind carrying away his voice. “You didn’t hear me all four times? Do you want to crack your skull?”
Giles dropped his head, but Evander caught the shimmer of tears.
It’s a crazy man who tries the same thing over and over and expects the results to differ. Berating the conscripts wasn’t working; if Evander didn’t figure out another way to reach them, they would all die. Himself included.
“Giles,” he said, clapping his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s alright. Try. Again.”
