I didn’t slow down.
I didn’t think of the platform, or the feast, or the music likely still drifting faintly from the island.
I thought only of the terrified little girl reaching for help, and of the moment Veskor caught her instead of letting her fall.
I beat my wings harder.
“Hold on,” I whispered into the wind. “I’ll get you back.”
I flew north into the fog, chasing a monster and the child who made him hesitate.
I wouldn’t return without her.
Chapter Thirteen
VESKOR
Iknew I’d lost the red draken when the scent trail scattered in the fog and frost. Good.
The red draken—fast, desperate, reckless—had vanished in the white murk behind me. I flew until my wings burned, until the storm-thick air scraped against the membranes of my wings like sandpaper, and until the child in my arms whimpered and curled smaller against my chest.
Only then, when the world grew quiet and the wind smelled sharp with pine and snow, did I descend from the sky into the northern woods.
The child wriggled in my grasp the moment my claws touched the white snow.
I folded my wings, tucking the child close as her tiny claws caught on the silver scales of my breastbone. She trembled—fear, cold, exhaustion, all tangled together in her small body.
I could have killed her and ended whatever crazed, ill-thought out plan this was.
That was the truth.
She was leverage, I supposed: a test that exploited the wards and proved that Lyoness was soft, trusting, and vulnerable.
I didn’t know. Time had blurred over the years. All I could remember was pain, suffering, and survival. I didn’t remember my own childhood.
I crouched beneath a fallen tree, the hollow beneath its roots forming a crude shelter. The child blinked up at me, pupils wide, already shivering in the cold.
Her voice came as a tiny, trembling chirp.
I froze.
I hadn’t thought she was draken enough to make a distress call. Drakling distress calls were impossible to ignore. That I did remember. Even feral males would respond. My research had taught me that, since I couldn’t remember living alongside another draken in my life. And yet, instincts older than speech stirred in the marrow of my bones at her pathetic warbling.
“No,” I growled quietly, more to myself than to her. “Do not do that.”
She chirped again, small, trusting, yet in pain and cold. And probably hungry. Her little hand reached toward my jaw, fingers brushing my scales.
I went still.
Her warmth seeped into me, settling in places that had been cold for so long they barely remembered feeling anything.
“What is your mother?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
She grinned as if I’d answered a hard question no one asked. “Fire witch.”
Ah. Well, at least she wouldn’t freeze to death.
“Come on,” I said instead.
