And Valeria stopped.
Gasping, Evandaine opened one eye. Valeria stood over him, brambles winding around her body, rooting her to the ground so she wouldn’t be blown away by her own zephyrs. The thorns cut through her pants, and the blood dripping from the punctures stood out brilliant red on the glossy dragon scales.
For an instant, Evandaine thought it might be over. That she would walk away and let him live to mourn his father.
But she raised her hands again. Nauseous and reeling, Evandaine managed to gain his knees. When he reached out with his mind, trying to summon his dragon with his magic, it felt like a cord in his head had snapped. No more than a weak, shaky consciousness. No connection.
He threw himself to the side as Valeria released another wave of scalding wind, and he drew his cutlass. Pitching forward, he swept the blade across her torso. She shrieked, clutched her stomach, and fell to the ground, where she lay still, blood pumping over her fingers.
His mouth tasting of copper, Evandaine collapsed. The battle had begun to dissolve, Ashkendoric soldiers running past. A small detachment gathered the king’s body and bore it away. They ignored their prince, curled in the dark. Alone.
Evandaine’s head ached like he’d been pierced with a pike. Blood poured from his nose and ears, and a strange, high-pitched humming rang in his head. He stumbled to his feet, looking down at Valeria as she bled on the sand.
She wasn’t dead—he could tell by her rapid breathing—but unless someone helped her, she wasn’t going to survive.
He froze in an agony of indecision. She was his enemy—the daughter of the man who had just murdered his father. Ashkendoric religion taught him to drive his cutlass through her chest and then cut off her head.
The Only would say he shouldn’t be part of this miserable war in the first place.
Evandaine loved to distort his mother’s religion every chance he got, and pity and guilt racked him. Or maybe it was just his bleeding brain playing tricks.
Before he could question his motives, he fell to his knees, snatched a fallen Sennaliath standard from the littered ground, and bound it around Valeria’s stomach. She groaned. It was dark, and he couldn’t make out her features, just the flashing whites of her sunken eyes.
He had barely finished binding the wound when an overwhelming dizziness washed over him, and he sprawled on his back in the sand beside the witch. He could hear her ragged breathing as she rolled over, then the weight of her body as she climbed on top of him and pressed a knife under his jaw.
“I’m supposed to kill you,” she said, her voice raw.
“Do it,” he rasped. “Better to die on the battlefield with my father than be murdered in my bed by my mother.”
The cold blade lifted, and she sagged onto his chest, her head falling onto his shoulder. He lay his hand on her back, pressing her body against his, and for a bleary, fever-dream moment, they breathed in rhythm. She smelled of sweat and leaf rot, and her breath was hot against his neck. Then she slid off of him and scraped in the sand, crawling away. The world blurred, the pain overtook him, and he thought his mind had tricked him, and the witch was a nightmare.
He awoke to handsdragging him across the field.
“You’re a simpering fool, Evandaine,” a gruff captain said as he pulled him onto a dragon. “That woman will be the death of you.”
Evandaine couldn’t keep his seat. The pain in his head crescendoed to a roar.
She has already been the death of me,he thought as the world faded to black.
Chapter four
Valenna
Largotia Royal Dracorium; Kingdom of Allagesh
Five Years Later
The dragon master at the renowned Silvanlight dracorium had been eaten.
Valenna Castanaia overheard the news while wobbling on a precarious stepladder, inspecting a sturdy land dragon’s flaking scales. Two underkeepers were gossiping below her while playing with a slithering armful of dragon pups, and Valenna, a head keeper, knew she should shout at them to return to their work, but she decided against it. She’d spent countless golden afternoons in this same aviary with Evander, playing with his pet hydra when they were supposed to be picking mites from the fighter dragon’s horns.
She inhaled sharply. Thinking about Evander was like swallowing scalding tea—it burned all the way down to her stomach.
Put him out of your mind, Valenna,she told herself. He isn’t worth missing.
“The wars aren’t going in Sennalaith’s favor,” one of the underkeepers whispered. Valenna couldn’t recall her name—she wasn’t close with anyone at the dracorium. Evander had been her only friend, and when he left, she’d become solitary, secretive.
Valenna—formerly Valeria, the daughter of Cadmus of Sennalaith —didn’t give away her trust easily. The reason she’d trusted Evander was because he was secretive too, and so when they encountered the shadowy corners of each other’s pasts, they simply backed away with their hands in the air and returned to the safe spaces with the neatly arranged furniture.
