Page 84 of To Touch A Silent Fury
I hesitated, my balance wavering and then resettling, as I had the horrible awareness that my words, whilst taunting, were also something else. There was a hint of wilful mischief in them. Even flirtation.
And yet, I knew better than to take them back. If he interpreted my disdain as flirtation, that could only help my cause. He had to believe that I would accept his hand if this was ever to work.
I glanced over at him to check he hadn’t noticed my unease. Instead, his eyes looked clouded, his head tilted. A moment later, he blinked, and the focus was back into his gaze.
“Did she just speak to you?” I asked, without stopping to check myself. “Chaethor?”
He narrowed his eyes, and then nodded. “She is close.”
“Your eyes glazed over,” I explained. “As if you were lost in thought.”
I don’t know why I felt the urge to explain myself, or why I felt so on edge. But it was painful to speak to him whilst being so many things at once. His most mortal enemy, pretending to be another of his enemies, whilst positioning myself as his potential wife. My head hurt already, and we hadn’t even left the forest.
After another pause, he spoke. “You might find that your values and thoughts shift. Another perk of the bond.”
This pricked my interest. “How so?”
He glanced up to the skies, and both of us heard the smooth thump of wings approaching. “It is hard for me to know sometimes where my temper ends and Chaethor’s begins. But I know both my father and I are prone to a draconic covetousness.”
Strangely, I found myself smiling. “Have you considered that perhaps it isyournature to take things which do not belong to you, and not your dragon’s? Is that not what kings do best?”
He lowered his eyes back to mine. There was something dark there, hidden away. “Careful.”
My humour dropped, and my body chilled beyond the power of any cool winds. He was right, I had overstepped. Completely. Something about him made it hard not to, he had a face I could not help but argue with. It was distinctly satisfying to make any emotion flare behind that mask of his.
But that was a dangerous game, and one I should not be playing injured in his barracks. I could only blame my lack of sleep over the past nights.
I had to get a better rein over myself.
I opened my mouth to apologise again, when the soft thump of wings beat stronger, and I raised my arm to protect my face.
It was hard not to be terrified at the sight. Huge red wings, dark brown in this limited light, her head lifted proud as her legs came down to squelch into the mud. Still, I did not think to retreat nor hide from her, even as the edge of her wide right wing settled mere feet from me.
I only had the power to be in awe, as her neck curved graciously, and her hazel eyes took us in with enviable confidence.
“She is beautiful,” I whispered.
The prince beside me laughed.
I whipped my head around to him, the noise the first one that had surprised me in days. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh since Eavenfold, when I’d commented on Chaethor’s hunger.
He seemed surprised by it, too, and he coughed to cover it up, sobering and avoiding my eyes.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he replied, all traces of that laughter gone. “Nothing at all.”
I gritted my teeth, holding back the retort I wanted to unleash. I had spoken too much this morning already. He walked straight up to his dragon, touching the skin where her neck curved into her chest. I watched them, cradling my own dragon.
Chaethor looked at me sharply then, studying me more acutely than before. She flexed her wings and shook out her tail, and I flinched. I saw in her gaze the same ferocity that had melted men where they stood, that would meltmeif I stepped wrong. I remembered Brascillan as he offered me his favour, and then, in my imagination, his skin bubbled and dripped from his bones like wax until he was nothing more than a skeleton. It took everything in me not to shudder.
I assessed she must be half the size of Vellintris. Yet she carried the same regal bearing, as if she knew she was far too good for the likes of us.
Chaethor lowered her right wing, spreading it so the joint up to her back was closer to the ground. Holding onto the scales beside her neck, Langnathin pulled himself up, and then climbed onto her back, where a thick hide saddle awaited him.
Then he looked at me. “Are you coming?”
I swallowed. Was I truly about to get onto Langnathin’s dragon? The same creature who believed she had burned my hopes and ambitions to the ground? I knew now the depths of a dragon’s feeling; her emotions were as thick and deep as any root or lake.
