I just needed a plan.
"I'll let you rest." I stood. "But I'm coming back tomorrow, and the day after. You're stuck with me now."
He sighed. "You always were relentless."
"I've learned from the best."
I just needed to remind him who the best was.
33
IDRILIA
“Myth is born when the world presents a riddle and refuses, for a time, to yield its answer.”
—Professor Lou Haldren
Isat in the back of the hover-car with my satchel on my knees and watched Tarina's countryside pass by. Half an hour into the drive, the terraced pastures, goat herds, and the stone-walled fields gave way to urban dwellings, and we entered the outskirts of Tarina's capital city.
It was called Margada, after Tarina's first queen, the one my mother had been named after, but to call it a city was an act of generosity. Catonia's villages were larger than that.
Thinking of Catonia and Cardilia's upcoming betrothal still twisted my stomach two days after she'd confided in me that the former heir of Catonia was being retired to Tarina as her husband because of some unspecified injury or illness.
What made me most uncomfortable was that Cardilia was grateful to have a broken prince for a husband. As if she wassome second-class princess and had to be satisfied with the discards that no one else wanted.
Cardilia was the future Queen of Tarina, which was an honorable position even in a poor province like ours, and it carried a lot of responsibility.
I hadn't been able to put the conversation out of my head since.
The shameful little flicker of relief I'd felt when she left, the thank-Elurion-it-wasn't-me. The guilt and unease made me restless, so I'd done what I always did with feelings I didn't know what to do with. I'd buried them in work.
The trouble was that my work had hit a wall.
The Silver Princess was alive and stable thanks to the chiller, but that was all she was ever going to be. Stable. Dim. Surviving and nothing more. I could keep her like that for years and learn nothing, because everything worth knowing about her lived in the mineral-veined slope where I'd found her, and that slope was across a border I'd promised never to cross again.
I needed help, but the only person who'd written anything about her was dead, and he'd died before completing his research.
Even if I broke my promise and went back for a second specimen, I could only hope for a repeat of what had happened with the first, since I didn't know enough to make it thrive. The best and probably only solution was to build a research station in its natural habitat in the Elucian Mountains, which was as likely as me becoming a dragon rider.
As absurd as the thought was, a wistfulness settled over me. I would have loved to fly on the back of a dragon, but I didn't have any Elucian blood in me, so my secret obsession with the magnificent beasts would have to be set aside.
The only time I'd flown on a dragon was when my team and I had been rescued after the avalanche that had claimed the livesof two porters. I'd sat behind the rider, strapped in, but I'd been so weighted by the tragedy that had befallen our team that I hadn't enjoyed the ride as much as I would have under different circumstances.
Not that there would be different circumstances. The only time a civilian sat on the back of a dragon was during a rescue operation, and I had vowed never again to put myself or the people working for me in the kind of danger that would require a rescue.
"Should I deliver you to the Botanical Department as usual, Your Highness?" Raufel caught my eye in the rearview mirror.
He'd driven me to and from the university for years, and most of the time the Botanical Department was my destination, but not today.
"I'm meeting someone at the university café, the one by the science library."
His eyebrows shot up, and I watched a grin spread across his face in the rearview mirror. Raufel was old enough to be my grandfather, and when we were alone, he treated me as if I was one of his many granddaughters.
"Meeting someone, are we?" he said. "A new fella?"
"Don't be ridiculous." I gave him my flattest look. "I'm not in the market for anyone new. I'm with Gavon."
"Mm." He let that single syllable carry an entire editorial.
