The weather worsened as they rode, and the plodding hydra slipped on the muddy grass, grumbling. After her third near fall, her left head turned and glared at Evander until he clicked at her and pushed her nose away. Spidery fingers of lightning lit the sky. Valenna shivered, her coat soaked through, and Evander wrapped his arms around her and pressed his chest against her back, their bodies sharing warmth. Gradually, his head dropped onto her shoulder, and his breathing grew even and slow.
Somehow, despite the rain and the thunder, he had sagged asleep. Valenna leaned her ear against the top of his head, and her heart swelled. They were slipping into their old familiarity as his curated coldness thawed. She realized now that the ache forhim would never leave her, only fade like a broken wrist stops throbbing until you flex it again.
Valenna scolded herself. She was a warrior, a princess, a survivor—she could get over Evander Trevelyan.
Evander’s arms tightened around her, and she glanced down at him. His eyelashes were soft against his high cheekbones, and she could make out the shadow of freckles across his nose. He was beautiful and familiar, and he felt like hers, even though he wasn’t and he couldn’t be again.
Oh dear.
Who was she fooling? Get over him? He was Evander. Her Evander. All her cherished dreams of overthrowing kingdoms and finding lost loved ones dissipated the instant she looked into his solemn eyes.
Hera slipped in the mud, then found her feet with an indignant chuff. Evander stirred.
“I think we’re here,” Valenna said, pulling Hera to a stop.
A line of grim, scraggy forest stretched before them, so tangled in underbrush that she couldn’t see through the trees.
Evander stretched and slid off Hera, and Valenna followed him before he had time to help her down. Still, he caught her hand as she landed. They were chest to chest again, and her traitorous eyes found his. He gazed at her, his brow furrowed and his jaw tense, the rain dripping out of his hair and off his chin. For the second time that night, she was struck breathless with the intense desire to step up on her tiptoes and kiss him under the wild, raging sky.
Lightning cracked, white-bright and blinding, and they broke apart.
“In we go,” Evander murmured, taking a heavy cutlass from the pack on Hera’s back and cutting the first tangle of underbrush.
“Do you normally bring that with you?” Valenna asked. He carried bags of oats and strangely woven nets, and today, he had a jar tucked into his shearling-lined leather coat that strobed an algae green, but she’d never seen him with a cutlass.
“I thought I might, just this once,” Evander said as he chopped at a mess of gnarled briars, “with you along. I didn’t make an oath not to harm highwaymen … or Haldir, if pressed.”
Valenna watched him chop away the brush with growing suspicion. Evander handled the cutlass with a little too much ease for a simple country boy from nowhere. If he’d flourished it more, tried to show off, she would have assumed he’d made a hobby of swinging one around as boys often do, but he was trying to act clumsy. Like a skilled singer can’t hum out of tune, he didn’t appear to know what an awkward swordsman looked like. She wondered again if he had been some kind of mercenary in his past. Much as she goaded him, she was fairly certain he had been to war. He knew too much about dreadnoughts for her to believe otherwise, and in the past, she’d glimpsed strange scars on his arms and chest. He passed them off as dragon training scars, but she recognized the difference between a tooth or claw mark and a laceration made by a sword or a scattershot pellet.
A few steps in, Evander paused. A flash of lightning lit a round clearing where the underbrush had been trimmed away as though by hedge clippers. In the center of the clearing stood a single gnarled tree, bent and folded over upon itself, like an animal that had died standing up and then sagged over.
“This looks perfectly natural,” Evander said wryly.“Nothing sinister at all about that tree.”
Their knuckles brushed, and Valenna twined her fingers in his. “Why don’t you have a closer look, then?”
He made to take a step into the clearing, but Valenna pulled him back. “I was being facetious! Are you crazy?”
He raised one eyebrow. “Absolutely. Are you just realizing this now?”
With that, Evander took the jar of green light from his jacket and held it aloft. It was crawling with bioluminescent caterpillars and lit the ground around his feet.
“Vander,” Valenna hissed, “be careful!”
He shrugged and crept past the strange tree. Exasperated, Valenna followed, her skin pricking. She kept darting looks behind her, half expecting some clawed monster to jump at them.
Evander stopped and crouched down. Valenna peered over his shoulder and drew a startled breath. In a coagulated mess on the forest floor shone a puddle of blood and shredded entrails. Evander let out a pained groan as he lifted a scrap of leathery wing from the gore. Nothing else remained of the lost dragon.
“Poor baby,” he said.
“What could have done that?” Valenna whispered.
A rustling sound sent an electric shock through Valenna, and she looked over her shoulder toward the stump in the center of the clearing. It was still, the forest silent except for the hum of rain, but the hair on the nape of her neck prickled, and she had the eerie sensation that someone was watching her.
Evander smoothed the wing in his hands, shaking his head. Knowing how deeply this saddened him, Valenna squeezed his shoulder.
“What kind of dragon would you say this was?” he asked at length.
Valenna took the piece of wing from him.It was cold and sticky, and as soon as she picked it up, she wanted to toss it away in disgust. “From the thickness, I think it might be a wyvern.”
