Page 78 of Connor and the Dragons

“Then so be it.”

“Delsy,” I whispered. “How? What about Emberrick?”

“You have spent this entire life being useful to me, and I have loved you for it. And now you’re too much of a coward to ask for the one thing you’ve truly needed in all of these centuries. It’s embarrassing.”

“That is unkind.”

I thought about the basket, about how easy Connor’s voice had been, telling his brother he was not in love with us, and how I had hung in the dark holding two men over an ocean and listened to it happen. An hour after that I stood on a rock and took a fire dragon apart for carelessness, which was a thing I knew how to do.

“But how will you find your love?” I whispered.

She let go of me.

She smiled with her mouth shut and her chin up, the smile she had used often over the last twenty-nine years, and she blinked several times.

“I had hoped that Oallian would be the one to find Emberrick, but Oallian is not for me. He’s yours, and he is Connor’s, and he belongs by your side,” she said. “I cannot make you sacrifice your loves to find mine. It would be the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

“Worse than the battle of—”

“Far worse,” she interrupted, nodding. “Kessrin, you are the only person other than Emberrick in this entire realm that I love. I would not have you be unhappy for my sake or for his. He is alive, I know that. Which means he can come back to me.”

There was a great deal I could have said. I said none of it, and she circled back around the table and moved a weight off the corner of the map and carefully rolled it up.

“So. Have you tested the mirror?” she said. “Do we even know that it works?”

“Not yet.”

“Mm. Is that how you fight for them?”

I still didn’t know what that meant.

“Do what you must. You are dismissed.”

I could not think of how to argue with her about this, but I silently vowed to do everything in my power to find her king again as I left, striding down the hall. I did not go back to my rooms.

I couldn’t shake Delsy’s question. Does the mirror work?

The mirror was down in the lower hall wrapped in a horse blanket, and as far as I knew, the Grey Guard was still patrolling a small fortress in a field in Clovermere around the spot where the mirror should be. A librarian had told Sky and Moerrven that there would be a plink, when a portal was connected through a weak spot in the fabric between worlds.

And I needed the answer to Delsy’s question enough that I undressed in the lower hall and folded everything into a neat pile in the order I had used for four hundred years, and I took longer over it than I needed to, because this morning I wanted very much to do one thing correctly.

Does the mirror work?

The mirror was still sitting on the dolly the guards had used to roll it in, so I rolled it right back out, into the courtyard, and no one was around to say a thing as I transformed, clasped the heavy thing in my claws and took off.

It was at least four hours to Clovermere on a swift horse, but a dragon could do it in fifteen minutes with a good tail wind. It took me substantially longer, because the mirror was three hundred pounds of glass in a gaudy gilt frame that didn’t seem sturdy enough for my claws to truly grip. It was the worst possible shape to carry, wide and flat, like a heavy sail. Oallian had carried it across the ocean in a basket with a man sitting beside it, because I had left it on a rock for him to carry, which I had told myself at the time was not a decision. It must have been far more torturous than I’d imagined. I had to hold it out and away from my body the whole distance, which was not how an ice dragon was built to fly.

My shoulders burned, muscles still sore from the ocean crossing, and to make everything worse, my body still carried the low insistent pull it had carried since Liminia, the one that made me want Connor and Oallian inside me and nothing else.

The encampment rose up out of the green far more slowly than I’d expected it to, a high stone wall in a wide field and the tents inside it and a few small figures on the wall who turned to watch me land. I could still see the scorch mark Oallian had burned into the spot where Connor had landed. I dropped my shoulder to circle. I had it planned. I would set the mirror upright on the marked spot and shift and dress and go and speak to whoever commanded the detail, and then I would fly home and I would let Connor know his passage home was secure.

I was swooping in, dangling the mirror several feet over the grass when the mirror stopped.

It did not slow. It did not catch on anything, because there was nothing there to catch on, only air over grass. It simply stopped with a small plink, and set itself in place, floating in the air, with no regard to my flight path or my momentum.

My claw caught on the mirror’s frame as it stopped, and I was spinning, slamming through the top portion of the stone wall, fighting to right myself. I hit the field shoulder-first at a speed I had no business hitting anything at. Then I was rolling. A dragon does not roll well. I took out forty feet of wall with my hip and three tents and several barrels full of apples with my tail and I stopped on my side in a furrow of turned-up earth with one wing folded under me in a shape wings do not fold in, and the whole field settled slowly back down out of the air.

It hurt. My shoulder hurt, and my chest hurt when I pulled air into it, and the wing under me hurt. The mirror hung over the scorch mark, perfectly upright, working.