She’s always waiting back on the beach before the other dragons return. If they know she spends all of her time with Riot, they don’t say anything. At least not within my earshot.
Ryuji is less predictable in his visits—the first at the end of the week, the next only a few days later. The second time, he arrives in the middle of the day when I’m sleeping and I hear afterward that the keeper fielded all of Ryuji’s questions that day. After that, Ryuji only visits at the beginning and end of the night when I’m awake. We drink tea, but he doesn’t ask me any difficult questions.
As for returning the panthers to their elven forms, the keeper seems to be tightly controlling his frustration. Neither Rumble nor Strife appear keen to let him try out his magic on them again, and Riot actively avoids all attempts, so the keeper takes to testing his magic on an old tree stump. He tries all sort of combinations of illusion and dark magic.
By the end of the third week, the tree stump has sprouted new leaves and starts to bear fruit in shapes oddly reminiscent of rabbits.
But I’m not sure if he’s any closer to helping the panthers.
At the end of each night, I meet him at the hut by the pond, where he pulls down the dark screens that block out the growing daylight and eases my muscles in ways that send my senses into a spin, tempting me to step over the boundary I’ve placed between us.
Dark saints, I want to step over it.
In the space between choices, I nearly convince myself that I can remain in control. I may have been taught that sex is about power and manipulation, but I tell myself I’m strong enough to stay detached.
Oh, but then his hand slips between my legs or his tongue strokes me or his power trickles through to my core and I know, without a doubt, that control would be an illusion.
Perhaps he’d lose control too, but I can’t know that for sure.
So the boundary remains.
By the start of the final week, my back is much stronger, but I’m still nowhere near ready to fly and it’s starting to scare me.
Lucian does his best to calm my fears. After all, I can’t expect my body to adapt within a month, not after decades without using my wings.
As for combat training, that’s where things are going well—and it also provides a way to take out some of my frustrations. I’m now putting Anarchy on her butt and she seems happy about it.
Even so, I sense a growing tension in her as we approach the end of the final week, and, after I perform a successful sequence of moves that forces her onto her back foot, I say, “Out with it.”
She blinks her pale-blue eyes at me. “Out with what?”
“Whatever’s bothering you.”
She sighs, a soft exhale nearly drowned out by the rushing waves in the distance. “When you made your plan to take down your father, you didn’t mention your biological mother.”
I stiffen, but she arches an eyebrow at me.
“You started this conversation, Veda. I’ll back off if you want me to, but you can’t ignore the threat Galeia could pose to you.”
“No, it’s…” I shake my head as I reach for one of the little cloths lying on the floor nearby, using it to wipe the sweat from my forehead and neck. Taking a moment to gather my thoughts.
“My father told me the only reason he didn’t kill me when I was unconscious is because he wants to know where she is. He thinks I know. When I couldn’t tell him, it created confusion. I can use that confusion, that uncertainty. If I go looking foranswers—if I go looking for her—I’ll only be giving him answers too. I sure as hell don’t want to do him any favors.”
“But what if she comes for you?” Anarchy asks.
I look the dark elf straight in the eye. “Why do you think I’m training so hard?”
Some of the tension leaves her shoulders. “You’ll be as strong as you can be to face whichever of them you have to.”
I give a single nod. “If I thought I could have asked Ryuji for more time, I would have.”
She chews her lips, picks up her cloth, and wipes it around the back of her neck. She’s tied her hair up in a topknot—a style I’ve found useful too—but some of the strands have come down during training.
“What about the woman who was in the prison with you?” she asks softly. “Do you wonder who she was?”
“It’s impossible not to wonder.” I grit my teeth against all my uncertainty. “I don’t know how to feel toward her. She can’t have chosen her fate. Nobody would choose to be imprisoned and die in a place like that. So it follows that she never would have chosen to look after me there. She was cursed, for fuck’s sake. Hell, even her facial expressions, her smiles, the way she spoke to me could have been part of the curse. I’m nearly certain that she would have been cursed to have my biological mother’s memories. She probably even believed that she’d given birth to me.”
I press the back of my hand to my forehead and Anarchy doesn’t interrupt me.
