Living without Roland... well, it simply wasn’t possible.
Right now, though, the muscles of his stomach were defined in a way they usually weren’t, and I seemed to recall Tris once saying to a knight that meant he wasn’t drinking enough water.
Admittedly, it mostly made me want to trail my fingers over it, to see how his skin felt against my fingers and—wait. “Why aren’t you wearing your shirt? You’re too pale, you’ll burn.”
He smiled sweetly at me, then reached up and gave a tug to... to the cool, wet object on my back. Roland’s shirt.
He’d been using his shirt to help my back. I winced. “How bad does it look?”
“Bad. I . . . you can’t change, can you?”
I considered for a moment. Since my first few times changing back and forth, it had been a relatively simple thing to do. I had sort of just grabbed the form I wasn’t in, and... tugged on it. So I reached for the dragon, and pain lanced through my entire body, making me arch backward, which made the pain in my back spike.
“Shh, shh, no, don’t try anymore,” Roland’s voice whispered, breaking through the pain. “Don’t hurt yourself. You’ve already done enough. More than enough. You saved me. It’s my turn now.”
Reluctantly, I let go of the dragon, collapsing into Roland’s arms.
They were tense. His whole body was tense.
When my back finally stopped hurting so much that I couldn’t move, I slowly eased myself back and really looked at him. “What... what’s wrong?” He gave me a funny look, like I was being deliberately obtuse, so I shook my head, albeit gingerly, so that I didn’t re-anger my body. “That’s not what I mean and you know it. What’s wrong with you?”
He winced, looking away, and before he even said a word, I knew. It was the blood. He needed blood. He neededmyblood, because there were no other dragons available. Just the thoughtmade me feel a little queasy, but it only took me a second to realize that it wasn’t because I was thinking of Roland as like Vidar.
It was because I’d lost so much blood during the flight back to land. Because I wasn’t sure I had any extra to give.
Still, this was Roland. If I had died and he’d had to ride my body back to Atheldinas like a macabre raft, I’d have accepted that without question. He’d have been the one horrified by the idea of using me. Just like now, he was the one who would be hesitant to use me.
And I wasn’t sure I had the strength to convince him it was fine.
Instead of talking, I pulled my wrist up, ready to make a cut... but with what? I couldn’t summon my dragon, and my weak, pitiful human body had no claws. For a moment, I just stared at it, blank as a fresh sheet of paper. Finally, I found my words, looking up to Roland for help. “I don’t...”
He pulled my wrist away from me, cradling it against his own chest and shaking his head. “No. Absolutely not. I would never ask that of you, Aderyn, even if you hadn’t already lost so much blood saving our lives yesterday. Not ever.”
I fell against him, my eyes wet, even though I didn’t remember wanting to cry. “I love you,” I whispered into his bare chest, the words falling out of me like a confession in the night.
He tugged me even tighter against himself, burying his face in my hair and whispering back, “I love you too, Aderyn. More than anything else in the world. More than Llangard.”
He said the words like they were something shameful, and I understood why. He was the king of Llangard. He was supposed to put the land first, before all things, and certainly before anything he wanted for himself.
I turned my face upward, looking him in the eye, before pressing my lips lightly against his. When I pulled back, I methis eye steadily. “I will never make you choose. Not ever. You can have us both.”
And then we collapsed together and stayed there, on the beach, right where the grasses met the sand, for a long time.
23
ROLAND
We couldn’t stay on the shoreline forever. As much as I hoped that the Destovians weren’t pursuing us—and Aderyn had kept a steady pace as he’d flown away, so there was no reason for them to think we hadn’t already made it back to the Spires—we had no guarantees. Aderyn was hurt. I needed to get him somewhere safe.
If Destovia had been our goal, that meant the ship had drifted vaguely south, and Llangard had wide, fertile plains between Aronfort and the sea. If we were especially unlucky, we’d have to find a river crossing before we made it anywhere near Atheldinas, and I didn’t have the slightest sense of where we were. Maybe luck was on our side.
Given how things were going, I doubted it.
“What are you doing?” Aderyn asked once I’d gathered the last of my things, pulled on my boots, and dropped one knee on the ground.
I stared at him, eyebrows high. “I’m going to carry you.”
His teeth puckered his bottom lip. “You don’t have to.”
