“Oh?” He sounded intrigued. “So you have some sense of her?”
He looked almost pleased, which, given my frustration, felt unbearable.
I held a finger to my lips pointedly. “You could help by being silent for once.”
Then I closed my eyes, hoping a lack of distractions would help me open myself to my dragon.“Are you there? Why won’t you speak to me?”
There was no answering voice.
But I felt a tumult of emotions: frustration, anger, a sense of being trapped.
The word landed before I could move past it.Trapped.Was it mine or hers?
I had felt trapped since Fear forced me to go with him to the Trials. Trapped in this world I did not understand. Trapped by the queen, by Fear, by the plots that had woven together before I was even born. Trapped yearning to be one of the Bismyth shifters and not sure I ever would truly be. Even before that, I had felt trapped in the hopelessness of trying to take care of Tay and protect Lidi’s magic.
This sense of being trapped was immense.
“Are you trapped?”I asked.“Can I help?”
The question felt ridiculous as soon as I asked it. The presence retreated. But it was still there, a strangeness in my mind, an awareness of something else, as if there were a shadow lurking in my peripheral vision that disappeared when I turned my head.
I opened my eyes. Fieran’s expression had shifted, his gaze troubled, as if he saw something in my face that worried him.
“Lightbringer.” He sounded exasperated as he looked into my gaze, his face different as if he were lookingthroughme to the dragon. “Stop throwing a tantrum and talk to her.”
I frowned at him. “Has irritating me worked so well that you thought you’d try it on a dragon too?”
“I know a little about how Lightbringer thinks. I might as well be direct. She doesn’t respond well to being finessed. Among other things you two have in common.” He said it lightly, almost to himself.
I had no way to know what it meant, what the history in it was, what had passed between him and a dragon I had apparently been meant for since before I understood the word destiny.
“You always think you know everything,” I snapped. “It’s one of the many things I hate about you.”
I felt a flicker in my mind of something easing. An almost-amusement, brief and wary.
“Lightbringer is my dragon’s?—”
“Mate. I know,” I cut in. “But maybe you don’t know Lightbringer just because you know him.”
He studied my face for a moment.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said without deflection. “I’ll be quiet and let you and Lightbringer come to an understanding.”
I tried again. The emotions swirled but didn’t resolve.
“Maybe,” Fieran said, after a while, quietly, almost to himself, “it isn’t Lightbringer.”
He had staked everything on bringing back Lightbringer. He sounded calm, but I would bet he was afraid. He had paid so much for this plan and forced others to pay too. Tesa had been lost, his friendship with Ander broken. How many others had died for this plot?
He had to be afraid that the plan was wrong in a way that couldn’t be fixed, and I didn’t think he had decided to let me see it so much as he hadn’t been able to prevent it.
I didn’t have an answer for him that felt adequate.
Only that sense of being trapped, the dragon’s emotions and mine coiled together in a way I couldn’t separate. The worst of it was that I couldn’t tell where she ended and I began.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe we were going to have to figure that out together.
We stood in the alcove, and the ceremony continued in the chamber beyond, and the dragon didn’t speak, and I carried the wordtrappedin my chest alongside everything else I was carrying, and I did not yet know what to do with any of it.
