When he left, he took her last spark of trust with him.
Perhaps it was for the best. When she was with Evander, she was a different person: gentle, nurturing, and entirely absorbed with him. In their time together, she’d abandoned her ambition to topple Cadmus’s crown and restore Olivette to her position as heir. But since Evander left, she’d ventured into the forest every night to strengthen her magic. She no longer noticed how the thorns pierced her skin, nor how the nettles burned her ankles. She reminded herself that she was really Valeria, the witch of Sennalaith, not a sweet-tempered dragon keeper.
Nevertheless, Valenna had changed in five years; she was no longer gaunt and sunken. Good food and a healthy lifestyle plumped her body and painted a fresh glow on her cheeks. She wore romantic dresses and rose-tinted lip stain and let her hair fall in soft waves around her shoulders instead of yanking it into a tight knot.
“… King Cadmus put in an order for a hydra …” the under keeper said.
Valenna nearly toppled off the step ladder. Evander had a pet hydra; a rescue, he claimed, from a bog on the plains where he’d been raised by a poor woodcutter.
Or at least he’d said he was raised by a poor woodcutter. What was a woodcutter doing on the plains, where there were few trees? Still, she never questioned him about his childhood. There was something of myths and riddles about Evander; it was what made him so intriguing. At first, anyway. Later, it was hisevergreen eyes and quiet voice, and the way he only ever smiled at her. It was the taste of him, his lips warm on hers, the last time they kissed, the night before he left.
“… but …” the under keeper continued, her voice hushed with morbid excitement, “the dragon master at the Silvanlight dracorium was eaten!”
Valenna gasped and dropped the jar of salve. It struck the gossipy underkeeper on her blond head, and the girl squinted up at her, indignant.“I’m sorry!” Valenna cried, climbing down. “It slipped out of my hand.”
“That hurt,” the girl replied, picking up the jar and handing it to Valenna.
“Did you say they had a hydra in Silvanlight?”
“That’s the rumor,” the underkeeper grumbled.
Then Evander must be in Silvanlight. He’d gone down there to join the battle dragon training program. He’d always been ambitious, and he was brilliant—more than he knew. He was probably positioning himself to be dragon master.
Valenna’s chest tightened. What if he was the dragon master? What if that awful, three-headed horror finally ate him? He’d raised it like a kitten, and she always told him it would bite his hand off someday.
Silvanlight was the only village in Allagesh where Valenna hadn’t searched for her sister. It was impossible to get into the dracorium, not because they were particular about who they hired, but because they were chaotic and poorly managed, so her inquiries went unanswered. She’d followed Olivette as far as Largotia before she met Evander and spent a whole year bathing in his gentle mystery and the thrill of falling completely in love. A thrill so potent, even revenge quests and wars and contested thrones fell away. When he left and she returned to her senses, Olivette’s trail had gone cold. Silvanlight was her last hope.
Then an idea came to Valenna. Perhaps an answer to years of searching and sleepless nights.
She ran her fingers through her hair and smoothed out her skirt.
Valenna was proud of her reputation for overdressing. While the other keepers wore sensible trousers or simple brown dresses, Valenna never went a day without a lavender dress or a skirt embroidered with flowers, songbirds, or dragonflies. Today, she was wearing sage muslin decorated with pink wildflowers, paired with white kid boots and her favorite straw hat.
After years as her father’s witch child, stuffed into tight dragon scales with her hair like a helmet and her fingernails blackened, fashion meant freedom.
Since the night she ran from Sennalaith, Valenna had accidentally built a lovely life for herself. She’d chosen a new name, a new home, a new profession. She shopped too much, owned too many clothes, and read too many novels. She drank tea with cream and sugar twice a day, ate whatever she pleased, and cared for dragons instead of riding them into battle.
Of course, the dragons she cared for were doomed to see battle one day—the Allageshan economy primarily relied on the dragon trade with the two warring kingdoms. At least she didn’t have to watch them break their necks on the smoldering grass, and that was a comfort.
She’d slowed and found this life because she’d fallen in love with him instead of focusing on her ambition to find her sister, to her shame.
When Evander left, the loneliness was suffocating. No amount of pretty dresses or cream tea could replace his steadying presence, the way his smiles lit her like a pixie light, the longing, so powerful it ached like a broken bone, to bind him to her. A fixture. A limb.
Valenna had lost so much time pining after him, she didn’t know where to begin her search again. She had no idea where Olivette was, or how to overthrow her father. Bolstered by her rage at Evander’s abandonment, her magic grew stronger and more wayward every day, as the scabs and scrapes on her arms bore grim witness.
Valenna found the master dracologist in his cedar-paneled office. He sat at his desk, hidden behind a massive pile of paperwork that listed to the left, shedding sheets onto the floor.
Typically, he wore a powdered wig, but he’d removed it and tossed it onto the windowsill, where it lay like a little dog taking a nap in the sunshine.
“Do you know how much paperwork I have to do when someone gets eaten?” he said as Valenna closed the door softly so she wouldn’t topple the precarious paperwork tower.
“It would appear a great deal,” Valenna replied.
“Bloody Silvanlight, always in some bind. That place is chaos, but they know how to train dragons, and there’s an order for three dragons, a wyvern, and a hydra in from Sennalaith. Bloody Cadmus doesn’t know I can’t send him a wyvern if there aren’t any left to send. I didn’t even know we had a hydra, but when I asked the dracologists in Silvanlight, she danced around it, saying they can’t sell a hydra, that it’s a pet, all this tosh …”
Valenna’s heart did a somersault. The underkeeper was right. There was a hydra, so Evander was there. He had to be. Who else was mad enough to keep a pet hydra?
No, she wasn’t looking for Evander. She didn’t want to see Evander. She was looking for Olivette.
