Chapter 69 Chapter 69

Chapter 69 Chapter 69

Isla's POV

There are things you train for and things no amount of training actually prepares you for.
I had been training since I was old enough to hold a blade properly. Longer than most. Harder than most. My father had insisted on it before he died in the particular way fathers insist on things when they have a daughter they need the court to take seriously, when they know the world is going to ask her to work twice as hard for half the credit and they'd rather she be ready for that than surprised by it. 

I had listened. I had trained. And by the time I made general I had put in enough years that training wasn't even something I thought about anymore. It had just become what my body knew how to do.

I was still doing it now. Still tracking exits. Still watching the treeline. Still calculating distances and angles and what kind of cover meant what kind of protection and which direction the wind was moving.

None of that was helping with what was circling above us.

It had followed us for the better part of an hour. Staying high, staying just at the edge of visible, never coming lower than the tops of the trees. I kept tracking it between gaps in the canopy, that massive dark shape moving with the kind of slow patience that predators had when they weren't in a hurry. When they knew you had nowhere to go they were interested in.

That was the part that was getting under my skin. The patience of it.

When Twilight's breathing told me she was about to hit a wall I started looking for somewhere to stop that gave us some kind of advantage. I found it twenty meters ahead, a ravine cut into the hillside, narrow enough at the top to break line of sight from above and deep enough to put solid stone between us and whatever was up there. 

I pulled them both toward it without asking and we dropped in and for a moment the only sound was the three of us catching our breath.

Devonye put her back against the wall and closed her eyes and went somewhere else in the way she did. Reading the place. Whatever that actually meant for her. I had stopped trying to understand exactly how it worked and started just trusting that it did.

Twilight bent over with her hands on her knees and I watched her breathe and tried not to watch her too closely. That was a thing I was always doing around her, managing how much I looked. In the camp it had been necessary for survival, James had eyes on both of us and he was always looking for something he could use. Here it was different but it was still a habit I hadn't been able to shake because the things that kept you alive long enough tend to stick.

Her arms were still wrong. The markings had gone dark when she touched the egg and they hadn't come back and I hated that more than I wanted to admit out loud because what those markings connected her to was the one thing I was certain would keep her alive through whatever was coming and seeing them look like that made me feel like the floor had been removed.

"Talk to me." I said, keeping my voice low.

"I don't know what it is." She said.

"You have a guess." I said. "You always have a guess."

She straightened and looked at me and I watched her put things in order. That was Twilight all over. Most people panicked or shut down or started moving without thinking. She sorted. Even here, even with dark markings and a creature the size of a building circling above us, she sorted.

"Ryaknorg has a counterpart." She said slowly. 

"I've been thinking about it since the Isle. The protector and the destroyer. Two sides of the same original bond. When Krutah died Ryaknorg sealed himself away because there was nothing to protect anymore. But the other side, the side that didn't protect, the side that just took..." She looked at her arms.

"Something had to seal that too."

"The egg." I said.

"The egg." She said.

"The destroyer." Devonye said from the wall, not opening her eyes.

We both looked at her.

"That's what this place is remembering." She said. 

"Something that existed before the first bonding. Before humans and dragons found each other. It was already old then. It tried to bond and it couldn't because bonding requires something it doesn't have. So it just consumed instead.
Took everything it touched and left nothing behind." 

She opened her eyes. "It was sealed because killing it outright was impossible. And the thing wearing Isma's face knew exactly what was in there."

"She used me." Twilight said. Not a question. Just saying it out loud so she could look at it directly, because that was the other thing about Twilight, she didn't let herself look away from things just because they were ugly to look at.

"She needed your bond with Ryaknorg to crack the seal." Devonye said. "Nothing else would have been strong enough. She didn't lead you to the egg to stop you from getting there. She led you to get you there."

The silence that followed was the specific kind that meant everyone in it was working through the full size of how badly we had been played
.
"Where is she now." I said.

"Gone." Devonye said. "She ran as soon as the crack appeared. She got what she needed."

I looked at Twilight. She had that expression again, the still one, and I recognized underneath it what it was actually covering. Not just anger. Something more specific. The way a person looked when they had been made to feel stupid by something they should have seen coming and they were deciding whether to be hard on themselves about it or to use it.
Knowing Twilight she would use it.

"She can't control it." I said. "She released it but that doesn't mean she has a leash on it."

"No." Twilight agreed. "Which means she released it for something it would do on its own."

"What would a destroyer do on its own." Devonye said, and the way she said it made it clear she was asking because she already knew the answer and wanted one of us to say it first.

I said it. "Destroy."

"Aretia." Twilight said quietly.

There it was.

The kingdom that had driven us out. The king who had put Twilight in the camp and kept her there and built walls around what she was so it couldn't grow into something he couldn't manage. James, who had stripped my rank and called it justice and looked pleased with himself doing it. The court that had watched and said nothing because saying something cost too much.

Whatever was wearing Isma's face wanted Aretia destroyed. And it had needed Twilight to make that possible. Twilight, who was the direct blood of the king, who had every reason to let it happen.

I watched her face while all of that sat in the air between us.

"We have to go back." I said.

She looked at me for a long time. Long enough that I felt the mate bond doing what it did, that steady current of awareness, knowing her before she spoke.

"I know." She said.

She didn't say she wanted to. She didn't say she forgave them or that what they had done to her didn't matter or that going back was anything other than what it was. She just said she knew, and that was enough, and I felt something in my chest settle in the way it only settled when we were on the same side of something.

"We go back." She said again, like she was making the decision in real time. "But we go back smart."

"Agreed." I said.

Above us the creature made a slow circle and the shadow of it swept the top of the ravine and was gone.
We had time. Not much. But some.

We stayed in the ravine long enough for Devonye to be satisfied the thing above us had moved off. 

Not gone, she said. Just not immediately overhead. She said it like there was a difference and I supposed there was.

While we waited I sat across from Twilight and watched her work at the connection to Ryaknorg, pressing her fingers to the inside of her wrist where the darkest of the marks sat. It was a habit I'd noticed before, that particular spot, the way she pressed there when she was reaching for him. I had never asked about it because some things between people don't need to be explained, they just need to be seen.

She looked frustrated. Not panicked, Twilight didn't do panic, but the frustration was real and it was the particular kind that came from being blocked on something you relied on without fully knowing you relied on it until it was gone.

"Still there." She said, to herself more than to me. 

"Just muffled."

"Give it time." I said.

She looked at me. "We might not have time."

She wasn't wrong. I didn't say so out loud.
The markings on her arms stayed dark but while I watched, one of the smallest ones, a thin curling line along the back of her left hand, flickered. Just once. Like something seen through thick water, moving but faint. She felt it too because she went very still and stared at it and the line flickered again and held for a second before fading.

"There." She said softly.

It wasn't much. But it was something.

When Devonye said we could move, Twilight stood and rolled her shoulders and her face went back to the expression I recognized from the camp when she had decided on a direction and was done deliberating. Not hopeful exactly. Just decided.

"Aretia." She said. Like naming it made it real.

"Aretia." I agreed.

Devonye looked between us the way she sometimes looked at us when she thought we were being unbearably significant about something. 

"Can we walk while you two do that."

"Do what." Twilight said.

"Whatever that is." Devonye said, gesturing vaguely at the space between us. "The silent communication. The meaningful word repetition."
"We're just talking." I said.

"You're doing more than that." She said flatly, and turned and started walking north and left us to follow her.

Twilight caught my eye for exactly one second. I looked away before it led to the bed and then we would never get to Aretia.

We followed Devonye north.

"Do not look for what is not lost." Ivy's word played at the back of my mind.

Look where that got me.