“No … I’ll wait until you get back.”
“Alright then.” And with that, he slipped down the tree and into the shadows.
Valenna sank onto the floor and hugged her knees. She wished she could remember how to cry.
Chapter twelve
Evander
Sitting in Hera’s stall with the truth spread out in his mind like evidence on a magistrate’s desk, Evander tried to pinpoint a specific time when he should have guessed Valenna’s identity but overlooked it. She was temperamental, but always ran at the hint of an argument. She never, ever cried. Strange scratches and stings appeared on her arms, her explanations never convincing.
Hera dozed beside him, her right neck curled around his body. He draped his arm over her and rubbed her scale-slicked head.
“Did you know?” he whispered. “Very rude that you didn’t tell me.”
Hera huffed, blowing his hair. His head pounded, and he missed the days when he could stir a pinch of wyvern bone powder into his tea and sleep without pain. But with the powder growing thinner every day, he had to be careful. He would take some before he left for the plains.
Leaning his head against Hera, Evander wanted to jump up and run back to Valenna’s room, wrap her in his arms, cover her with kisses and tell her that he didn’t care who her parents were, or how dark her magic was, because he ached for her, wanted her and only her, every day and every night and every second in between. And it didn’t matter that she was Cadmus’s witch child; she was also the woman who was at his bedside when he awoke in hospital, the woman who argued with the physician about hisprognosis, the one who never let him miss a dose of his potion. Valenna was comfort, healing, loyalty.
But now that he knew the truth, he needed to either tell her his story or distance himself from her so she would return to Largotia, unaware how close she’d brushed heartbreak. It was cruel to love her, crueler still to tell her so. And even if he did throw away caution and sense and run to her, she would never take him back. He’d betrayed her.
The dracorium stirred—dragons crying out for breakfast, underkeepers shuffling through the barn. Evander glanced out the window and realized he was late for his duties.
“Not up yet?” Samara leaned over the stall door, grinning like a mischievous child.
Evander squinted at her, the light sending shards of pain from his eyes down his neck.“You should be mucking the stalls,” he said, getting up and brushing the hay off his clothes. “I need to change and pack.”
“Still not up?” a second voice asked.
Evander winced as Valenna appeared, haloed in glowing light. Fitting as it felt for her to glow, it wasn’t natural, and his stomach sank. He was going to have a raging headache on his expedition.
“We'll have to be careful out there. I hear from the traveling party that they lost the dragon in a forest on the edge of the plains, and they have gawper tubers out there,” Samara said.
“Just what I needed—” Evander groaned—“to have to dodge a carnivorous plant days before the paddocking.”
“If you come upon one, can’t you simply cut it down?” Valenna asked.
Samara looked scandalized. “Don’t you take the oath in Largotia?”
Valenna’s brows pinched. “What oath?”
Samara pushed up her sleeve and showed a tattoo of a dragon chasing its tail around her arm. “It’s a tradition in Cobblepine. We take a binding oath that we won’t harm any magical creature, no matter the risk, or suffer banishment and disgrace. If I ever break the oath, the tattoo will fade.”
“Evander has too much sense to take an oath like that …” his voice trailed off, and she whirled on him. “Wait … that’s not what the band on your arm is for, is it?”
Valenna had seen his tattoo first when he was in hospital, and several times after. A dragon trainer with a dragon tattoo was no rarity at a dracorium, so she’d never asked and he’d never explained its significance.
He grimaced.
“Vander!” she cried. “Why? You’re not even from Cobblepine!”
A wicked little grin spread over Samara’s face. “Oh, he spent a few weeks in Cobblepine when I was a child. Yes, he made himself very popular—throwing the dragons into a tizzy, upsetting the brooding females. Our governor kicked him out.”
“Did he?” Valenna said, staring coldly at Evander. “I didn’t know.”
It was as though her voice was coming through a fog bank. Evander pulled his glasses from his vest pocket and slipped them on. They didn’t help.
“We need to go,” Samara said. “Haldir is ready.”
