And beneath it all, her own vulnerability. She was younger than I'd assumed. Barely an adolescent in dragon terms.
"Aren't you too young to bond?"
"I became eligible this year."She launched from the roof."Just in time to make you mine."
The force pressed me back in the saddle, the wind screaming past my ears. The Citadel fell away beneath us, the mountains opening up into a panorama that took my breath away no matter how many times I saw it. Peaks stretched to every horizon, draped in snow and aurora light, and the sky above was so vast and deep that I felt I could fall upward into it and never stop.
Veynathei climbed higher, riding a thermal with instinctive grace, her wings barely moving. The bond between us pulsed, her exhilaration intertwining with my own until I couldn't tell where her joy ended and mine began.
This was what I'd crossed borders and lied and fought and nearly died for. This moment. This sky. This bond.
For the first time since my mother's letter had arrived, the knot in my chest loosened.
"Isn't this wonderful?"Veynathei asked.
"Spectacular."
She banked northwest, giving me a view of the distant lowlands where Eluria sprawled beyond the mountain barrier. My home. The place my family wanted to drag me back to.
"Not today,"Veynathei said, reading the thoughts I'd failed to shield. It should have been alarming but instead felt incredible. At least some of my burdens were no longer my own. I had a partner to carry some of the load for me."Today, we fly."
We flew.
She showed me how to shift my weight to guide her turns, even though I had rehearsed it countless times with my flight instructors. Every dragon was different, and I needed to learn her. She instructed me on how to lean into a dive and trust her to pull up, how to read the air currents through the subtle changes in her wing angle. She was patient and merciless at the same time.
"Stop trying to calculate the trajectory and just feel it. Flight is mostly instinct."
"I'm a strategist. Calculating is what I do."
"Calculating is what you hide behind. Flying requires trust."
She wasn't wrong, and she reminded me several times during the flight that she was never wrong, and that I should remember that.
I was starting to understand why riders described the bond as the most important relationship of their lives. Veynathei had been in my mind for less than an hour, and she already knew me better than anyone except Kailin, maybe even better in some ways, because Kailin had to interpret my expressions and words and silences, while Veynathei simply read the truth beneath all of it.
It was terrifying.
It was wonderful.
It was freeing.
3
IDRILIA
The Silver Princess is more than a botanical curiosity. If Professor Haldren's analysis of the dried specimens is correct, the root compounds interact with neural pathways in ways no synthetic drug can replicate. A living specimen could open doors in pharmacology that we haven't even thought to knock on. Some will call this expedition reckless. I call it necessary.
—From the journal of Princess Idrilia of Tarina
The air thinned noticeably as we pushed past the fifteen-hundred-meter mark. Denna's breathing had gone ragged, and Palel had fallen quieter than usual, which was saying something. The porters were managing well enough, their mountain-bred lungs handling the altitude better than the university-educated flatland researchers. The medic had distributed mild stimulant tablets to anyone who wanted them.
I had declined. I wanted my senses unaltered.
Sorel. That was the medic's name. I was glad that I finally remembered.
The landscape was changing. Below the boundary, the slopes had been covered in alpine scrub, tough, wind-stunted bushes and hardy grasses that clung to the thin soil. Up here, vegetation grew sparse and peculiar. Mosses clung to rocks in patterns that seemed almost deliberate, interspersed with tiny flowers that had faintly shimmering petals, as if reflecting light that wasn't visible to the naked eye.
The magnetic fields were strong here, enough that I could feel a faint tingling in my teeth.
