“Heida.” I said her name the way I would’ve spoken to a spooked animal back home. Then I led the way into Bismyth’s rooms. She followed me, and I closed the door, knowing it was futile to try to shut out the Nightwalkers. “Where is everyone?”
She set the tray down. Poured a cup for me. I took it from her, because what else could we do.
“The clans are gone, and half the servants are dismissed except for the crew that always stays on to serve any shifters who return. Until the next Trial.”
The thought that we would do this again next year—an endless churn of new shifters, the same monsters, the same bodies—filled me with dread. “And Nightwalkers are everywhere.”
She paled and glanced around as if just naming them might summon their attention.
“Are you done working here for now, Heida?”
She nodded. Then, in response to my unvoiced question, she added, “I wanted to see you. Some of us were nervous after…trying to watch the Trials. When you weren’t there.”
I hadn’t been visible in the mirrors to the arena. It felt like a relief to have that confirmed in someone’s voice that wasn’t Fear’s.
“I was hurt.”
“Are you all right now?” Her eyes widened.
“Well as can be.” I must be picking up the shifter’s knack for lying because the words came so easily.
“There were stories after,” she said with relief, clearly taking them as untrue now that we were face to face.
“What kind of stories?”
Her gaze flicked up to mine. “That it was all a trick. That you aren’t truly anything more than a mortal. That you weren’t what he thought you were.”
He. Fear was so important that he didn’t even need to be named. I despised that. “What’s wrong with being mortal?”
Disappointment tightened her features before she covered it.
I understood in one blinding flash that she needed me to be more than mortal. That all of them needed me to be more than mortal, and yet not something else entirely.
The mortals needed to believe.
“We have more power than you think,” I told her.
She nodded, but her face was still closed.
Mortals losing faith. Nightwalkers holding every exit. Fear’s carefully molded plans, cracking down the middle because of me.
What would Fear say? What would he do?
“Can I tell you a secret?”
Her eyes brightened.
“The queen is afraid of me.” I spoke the words softly, intimately. A secret that, if she were like everyone I’d known in Stonehaven, would spread. “She set a trap for me in the labyrinth. That’s why I wasn’t there. We had to outsmart her. She’s trying to destroy the bond between Fear and me.”
“Fear,” she repeated, her eyes shining. He had been a legend long before me, and I realized, suddenly, that now it felt as if he belonged to them, to the mortals, because he belonged to me.
“But nothing can destroy the bond. It’s not just a bond between a mortal and a shifter but a bond between our two dragons.”
Something stirred in the back of my mind, something ancient and hard to read. I tried to focus entirely on Heida’s face and on the story she needed to tell.
“So it’s true. You were claimed.”
When I nodded, her face lit with joy.
