“You never got your chance to go to the monastery, not really,” I told him. “And then after what happened with your father and the war and Athelstan being a monster, it makes sense you were blocked.”
He winced at that, hunching his shoulders a bit, like he wanted to be smaller than he was. “The most powerful mage ever in our family.”
“But then I was injured and I couldn’t get us home, and there was nothing else you could do. You hadn’t even tried to do magic the entire time I’ve known you. You did it because you had to.”
He blinked, staring at me for a moment, then down at my unblemished arm once more. “The dragon blood?—”
I slashed a hand through the air, cutting him off. “Was only ever an obstacle. Yes, it was a cheap, easy answer for people who had no innate magic, but no Cavendish has ever needed dragon blood to be a mage. You certainly wouldn’t.”
He reached over and took my hand, squeezing it, then running a finger along the skin he’d healed. “Cousin Nicolas had no magic.”
“Nicolas and his whole line were awful. I don’t count them.”
That made him giggle, almost like when we’d been children together, and there, like that, was when I realized something even more important.
My back didn’t hurt anymore.
I sat up straight, flexing the muscles there. Strictly speaking, they had never been the problem. They had never been injured. But since a two-legged form had no wings, there had been an ache, a sort of referred pain from flesh that was hidden away. And now? Now there was nothing.
Lifting my free hand from where I’d had it resting in my lap, I stared at it a moment, reaching out to touch the dragon and thinking of my claws. As easily as ever, they came to me.
“Healed,” I whispered. “You healed me.”
His smile was the brightest I’d ever seen on his face. No holiday or celebration or anything at all had ever made him happier than me being healed. But he didn’t say the obvious; that now I could return us to Atheldinas immediately.
But then, I knew he wouldn’t.
I had known since before we were even in this situation; for as long as I had known Roland Cavendish, what would happen in a situation like this. His next words, much though I loved and hated them at once, weren’t any kind of surprise.
“Well then, as soon as we take care of the situation with the Destovians, we can fly home.”
Because of course.
Roland could love me more than anything, even Llangard, but he would never, not in a thousand thousand years, or in twice as many awful situations as that, leave his land or people alone to face any threat he was there to help them with.
The Destovians wouldn’t leave, especially now that we’d been forced to kill the one who had come for us and seen me. So we would have to find a way to deal with them before we could go home.
29
ROLAND
Dylan returned to the village ahead of us. Aderyn assured me that he was better, but I was in no great rush to test him.
Or perhaps I was just avoiding testing myself.
I kept waiting for the hunger to return, that strange, bloated feeling that came with the rising moon that promised scales and claws and a twisted monstrosity that was so very different from all the dragons I’d ever known.
It didn’t. I no longer felt like I was going to shudder out of my skin.
Maybe healing Aderyn had healed something in me, because more and more often, I found myself forgetting how afraid I’d been of someone finding out about my need and how far I’d fallen. I’d been terrified of looking into Aderyn’s eyes when he realized how lowly I was.
And there he was, beside me in the mornings with a gentle smile, delighted to feed Carys’s chickens.
It was only a couple of days, but now that I could take a full breath, I realized how tense I’d been before. For years. Since before I’d taken my father’s crown.
“You’ll come back before you fly to Atheldinas?” Carys asked, squeezing Aderyn’s hands as he took off his shirt and folded it up for the bag I was carrying.
“We will,” I promised. “We have to tell you how it went.”
