Heavy as my limbs were, I made my way not to my quarters, but to the aviary. With Aderyn’s hoard room empty, this was the place that?—
Well, it felt the nearest to him.
I sat on a low wall and watched a peacock strut by and wondered if Aderyn would ever see it again, and if I should save its feathers for him.
Would sending them to him make all of this worse? Perhaps it was best I left him alone entirely, but I’d still instruct the servants to set them aside. I’d?—
I’d build a hoard of my own, if that was all it came to. I couldn’t stomach the idea of discarding even the smallest feather.
As the sun went down beyond the glass dome, servants came to light candlesticks for me, but I stayed still as a statue, trapped and empty. Even those flickering lights held no appeal, until with a rustle and a grunt, they disappeared.
Someone had thrown a black bag over my head and jerked it backward, upending me as I shouted and scrambled to break free.
But I’d been sitting there too long, and my limbs were too stiff to fight them off. It was too late to draw attention.
And I was hefted off my seat and hauled into the air by two people, bucking between them as they held my arms and feet.
“Damn it all, let me go!”
They didn’t care to listen, and I knew they wouldn’t.
This wasn’t my first time taken.
16
ADERYN
The Summer Clan village was quiet when we arrived, which was unusual for them. Not that a tiny mountain village was ever especially loud, not like Atheldinas, constantly bustling with thousands of people in the streets, but the Summer Clan was... well, they were a busy people.
Rosalyn and her forge, Halwyn and her sheep, the twins running through the streets, playing and shouting. Things were rarely entirely quiet.
And yet that was the state of things when we arrived.
There was a hush over the whole mountainside.
Rhiannon, my sister’s namesake, was the one who came out to meet us, looking pale and wan, something that didn’t seem right at all. Rhiannon was a vibrant, happy dragon, constantly full of energy and fun.
She was also usually at the Hudoliaeth.
Bowen swept his cape around himself, looking around, and met her eye. “What’s happening?”
So clearly, I was not the only one who had felt the sheer wrongness of whatever was happening.
Rhiannon frowned, looking behind her, then back to us, her voice a bare whisper when she spoke up. “The twins are sick. Sidonie and I flew here as soon as we heard. There’s been... well, they thought it was just a sort of winter illness. The sniffles, that sort of thing, you know? But then the twins caught it, and... it’s so much worse than that.”
I blinked at the thought, and had to cringe at my own selfishness when my first thought was of how this affected me.
Roland’s “line of succession” wasn’t so simple after all, if the twins were at risk.
It was unheard of. Dragon children didn’t get sick. Even living in squalor and near-starvation for most of my childhood, I had never been particularly sickly. So the twins, plump and hale and hearty as they had always been, very much the children of their enormous, brawny father... well, it seemed impossible that they would be at risk for anything at all.
Still, as much of a jokester as Rhiannon was, this wasn’t the sort of thing anyone would jest over. Children being sick was a dragon’s worst nightmare. Children were a rare thing, each to be cherished and held dear.
So we followed her in silence to the cave Maddox, Gillian, and the twins lived inside.
Gillian was hunched over a cauldron on the fire, and Maddox was curled up between the two children, who looked pale and feverish. It was like something out of a nightmare, seeing two people I loved like my own siblings laid low by an illness.
So we all, as a family, fell into a pattern we always followed when unexpected things went wrong. We circled up and took care of our own.
