“Do you think letting Hera go gangrenous is better?”
His needle punctured Hera’s skin, and she nipped at him with her left head. He batted her away, nearly falling, but he caught himself and continued.
“Get down!” Valenna ordered. “I’ll do it.”
“It’s alright; I’m almost finished.”
Hera grunted, snapping at his shoulder irritably as he stitched.
“No more of that,” he scolded, squinting at the needle. “Or you won’t get another cabbage.”
Hera bent her right head around and nudged his ear.
“I mean it,” he said. “Bad hydra don’t get cabbages.”
Torsten shook his head and took the brace of rabbits from Valenna, then strolled inside to prepare for supper.
Tying off the stitches, Evander slid to the ground and kicked a cabbage up on his toe, then into his hands, like a ball. He ran his hand down Hera’s neck. “I used to be the most powerful dracomage in Ashkendor. I was more powerful than my father, even, but since Scathmore, my magic is so weak.”
Guilt and self-loathing rose in Valenna’s throat like bile. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I always wondered how it worked. Can you control any dragon, or only one you’re touching?”
“Before, I could calm and command dragons I had a connection with—ones I’d raised and or ridden or petted. I could command them from a distance. Now, I must be very close. Even Hera, I have to be within a few yards.”
The sun was setting, and the trees pulsed with blue, green, and purple bioluminescence, the poison in their sap lighting them up from the inside. Evander sat on a broad stump in the wild garden and rested his elbows on his knees, rubbing his hands together.
“How did you escape Ashkendor?” Valenna asked.
“After Scathmore, I wasn’t ...” He glanced at her, picking his words with care. “I wasn’t in the best of health, and my father, who was also not in the best of health …”
“Wait, did he survive Scathmore?”
“Um, well, no.”
Valenna pinched the bridge of her nose. “Vander, stop trying to save my feelings and give me the bloody details.”
He shrugged and flicked a hissing caterpillar off his shoulder. “Alright, fine, but don’t go acting guilty and growing bleedingthorns around my feet.”
His accent grew thicker with each sentence, and Valenna was only partially curious about his story; mostly, she wanted to hear him talk. The accent was lovely, and if he was attractive before, he was magnetic now.
“My father was dead, and I was very near it. My mother wanted my father’s crown, so she was going to kill me, except Torsten convinced her to wait, saying if I died from the magic, then she wouldn’t have my blood on her hands. If not, she could do what she liked.”
Even Valenna, raised in her own hell, was shocked by this. “Your own mother tried to kill you while you were already dying?”
“Ashkendor is like that. Power and dominance are everything. And I have a strong suspicion Marwenna isn’t my birth mother, but that’s a tale for another day. Torsten snuck me out in the night, and we took Hera because her magic wards off Raska.”
“Oh, that’s why you need Hera.”
Valenna sat beside him on the stump and twined her fingers in his. “How long were you in Cobblepine?”
“Only a few weeks, and then I stayed with a friend from school until I was able to think straight again …”
“How long was that?”
With a short, irritated laugh, he said, “You do love to torture yourself, don’t you?”
