“It’s not the curse? From the Trials?”
He gave me a strange look. “Almost no one believes in the curse, Cara. It’s just superstition and active imaginations.”
He moved past me, quick and curt, to continue saddling the horses. I wasn’t offended. He had revealed a vulnerability to me, and now he was annoyed at us both.
But I thought about his words as the landscape changed over the course of the morning. The nightmares had been proof of the curse, and the curse had driven me into the Trials. It had to be real. I’d felt as if I were burning alive before I stumbled into the Trials with Maura goading me on.
Unless…unless I’d been tricked into the Trials.
Fear’s arms were around me, and I wished I were not haunted by the possibility of who he was at his worst.
The road, such as it was, had stopped pretending to be maintained somewhere around mid-morning. There were no more mortal villages, no sprawling Fae mansions hidden behind high walls covered with ivy that rippled in the wind.
Kiegan, riding ahead, had gone quiet. Kiegan’s usual quiet was comfortable, the silence of someone who didn’t feel the need to fill space. It felt companionable to me, reminding me of working in the garden alongside my family or reading beside Tay in the firelight.
This was different.
I watched him from the horse. His shoulders had tensed.
“He must have grown up not far from here,” Fear said quietly.
I thought of Stonehaven with an ache, even though I’d never particularly appreciated the village. I wondered if he felt the same, especially knowing he could never come back—not truly. Not with his father seeking his death.
I looked at Kiegan’s back. The breadth of his shoulders. It was strange to think that his family looked at him and saw the shifter when the shifters always saw the orc.
“A dragon will claim him, won’t they??” I asked Fear, looking up at his face as much as I could from this angle. I couldn’t read his eyes, and even if I could, Fear lied to me with ease.
I hoped he was done lying now. I could not bear the thought of more deceit between us now there was no reason.
“I believe so.” His hand gripped my hip, his fingers resting lightly on my thigh, and I doubted very much he was unaware of the effect. “The orcs fought against the dragons long ago, but Shadowbane believes one will choose him.”
A dragon looking at Kiegan would see the body that announced his lineage before any other introduction was possible. The dragon blood was invisible. The orc blood was not.
“I’ve been afraid I would not be chosen because I was mortal.” But my fear was about what I lacked. Kiegan’s was what he had inherited from a man he hated.
Different fears. Same shape.
“Lightbringer has a tender spot for mortals,” Fear assured me. “Perhaps no other dragon would claim you. The queen has done what she can to make the Amber dragons afraid for their shifters’ sakes. But the very best one will.”
“Why are there no other dragon-marked mortals?”
“I imagine the queen would send her Nightwalkers if she had the chance to cut down a dragon marked mortal,” he said.
The vision of Nightwalkers emerging from the shadows in a cottage like mine sent a chill down my spine, and his arm tightened around my waist as if he had felt it.
“But they aren’t born, that I know of. Shifters are enchanted so that they cannot make a child with a mortal.”
I looked up at him sharply. “So I am the result of a failed enchantment?”
“Or a decision,” he said simply.
“Do you know which?” My voice came out sharp.
“Yes,” he said, and my entire world rocked on its axis. “You were not the result of a failed enchantment, but of love. You were a decision. A rebellion. A gift.”
I scoffed. “My mother does not rememberlove.”
“I don’t know their story. I only know that I heard you existed, and I’ve sought you ever since.” His lips brushed my temple. “And to me, you are a gift.”
