Too fast, I pulled away from him.
Sleepily, Aderyn blinked up at me, woken by the movement. Uneasy, I forced a small smile, and I leaned in and kissed his forehead.
“It’s all right,” I whispered. “Stay here and sleep more.” I tucked a loose blond strand behind his ear. “I’ll see you after my morning meetings, all right?”
Dazed, Aderyn nodded and nuzzled into the warm pillow I’d left behind.
I dressed, leaving my messy small clothes out of the picture for later.
When I slipped into my chambers, they weren’t empty. Rhys stood at the doors to my balcony, a sympathetic smile on his face.
“I thought you might struggle tonight,” he said softly.
When he lifted his hand, he held a goblet—not by the stem, but by the top, his palm spread over the wide opening.
I knew what he’d done before I saw the flash of gold on his palm, the thick drip into the cup.
“It’ll be worse as Penrose waxes past this middle stage,” he said softly.
Mindless, I crossed the room in a blink and snatched the goblet from his bleeding hand, and when I drank it all, my tongue licked into the bottom curve, desperate for every drop.
6
ADERYN
It was hard to sleep again when Roland had gone. His warmth, curled against me, had been relaxing in a way nothing else ever was.
Sometimes, when we were traveling and I had trouble sleeping and the nightmares were strong, my sisters used to use me as a bed, all climbing atop me like I was a baby dragon nest. That, too, had been comforting. It had almost always helped me sleep, even when my brain didn’t want to let go of the scattered bloody images of the Battle of Windy Pass. Sharp spurs in my side. Vidar, my stolen feather beneath his armor, his cruel black eyes closed forever, his whole face covered in blood.
I’d hated him, yes, but his death was still the stuff that fueled my nightmares.
Sometimes, I dreamed that Roland had been the one to die that day, and it was his lifeless, blood-covered face I saw in my nightmares. His curls limp and covered with the bloody, shitty mud of the battlefield.
Those had been the worst, but at least they had only happened when we were away from the Spires.
Not that I ever told Hafgan that. He cared too much about us, and he’d have been heartbroken that his compromise of traveling had failed me in any way. He’d spent so much time, so much effort, trying to make everyone happy.
That was how I’d learned that compromise didn’t always work. When people didn’t all want the same thing, someone wasn’t going to get what they wanted. Maybe everyone wasn’t. Sometimes, that was okay.
Sometimes, it hurt.
But really, what did I have to complain about? I didn’t live in a cage anymore, bleeding to feed Vidar’s men my magic. Men who didn’t have the patience, or maybe the talent, to go to the Hudoliaeth and learn magic the right way, so he decided for them that they would trade their humanity to steal mine.
No one cut me every day. No one fed me rotting food not fit for the dogs. No one called me “Dragon” instead of using the name I’d chosen.
My life was in every way better than it had been.
Complaining would be silly.
Still, sleeping in a room that was about Roland, in my heart, without Roland there? It simply wasn’t going to happen.
So a while after he left, I sat up, reaching for my clothes, which were strewn around the room. I was still redoing the ties on my tunic when I reached the hallway, sleepily smiling to myself.
I would see Roland at breakfast. We would share a secret smile, and I’d blush, because in my human body, I couldn’t keep my skin from flushing bright red at the slightest provocation. I’d duck my head, and he’d give me that enormous smile that always seemed, to me, a combination of Tristram’s pure joy at mere existence, and Bet’s sly amusement when he knew more than everyone else—which was always, of course.
Roland’s parents had been Reynold and his wife, neither of whom I’d ever met, but it seemed to me that all of his personality had come from the men who’d taken him in after his father’s death.
“You have the king’s ear,” a voice said, interrupting my thoughts and making me jerk to a stop in the middle of the hallway. I didn’t like it. It reminded me of some of Vidar’s vassals, the ones who had agreed with him on everything, and then said cruel, slimy things to and about each other when he hadn’t been present.
