Chapter 171: Twisted secrets

Nyx’s POV

We reached the base of the volcano with Vera, three of the senior guards who had followed despite not being asked.

Rydstrom, who had apparently traced in from Ashvara sometime in the last hour. He fell into step beside Caelan without sayi b anythinv. Caelan acknowledged this with a single look that communicated several things none of them needed to say out loud.

The climb was not steep but the heat radiating off the rock was unusual given that the volcano had been dormant for centuries. It is Dragon heat.

Drakthar was running warm through the stone beneath us. Tbe air temperature climbed as we went higher and somewhere around the midpoint Vera caught my arm and pointed.

He had turned his head. Those gold eyes, enormous from this distance were looking directly at me in a way that meant he had been tracking me since I entered the forest. He had known we were coming before we reached the base. He had probably known when we traced into Noctharys.

I lifted my hand. A greeting, nothing else. He held my gaze for a long moment then returned to looking east. He was FURIOUS. But why?

“He’s not going to come down, is he?” Vera said quietly.

“No.” I kept climbing. “So we go up.”

The rim was wide enough to stand on without it feeling precarious which was fortunate because I needed all my focus on Drakthar rather than my footing. He was even larger up close.

He always was. The scale of him something the mind had to keep remembering because nothing in ordinary experience prepared you for it. His folded wings alone were the size of the castle’s east wing. His tail curled around the far side of the rim and disappeared over the edge.

I walked toward him until I was close enough that his breath came over me in waves, hot and dry and then I stopped and stood there and waited. Caelan was a few steps behind me.

I could feel him not reaching for my hand, the restraint of someone who understood that this moment needed to be mine first. Drakthar looked at me.

The gold of his eyes had always been warm. Even when he was being difficult or dry or intentionally unhelpful in the way that was actually his version of humor. His eyes always has warmth in them.

Right now they were gold but the warmth was buried under something I recognized with a sick lurch in my chest. He looked the way I had felt in those early weeks in the tower, when the anger was easier to hold onto than what was underneath the anger.

I said his name fhrough the bond softly. He exhaled. The heat of it rolled over me and I let it.

Then he spoke and when he did it was not inside my head. It was out loud, his actual voice filling the air above the volcano like thunder from a specific direction. Everhone on the rim heard it.

—“You have all been wrong about her,” he grunted.

Nobody moved as we waited.

—“Not mistaken,” he continued, his voice low enough that you felt it in your chest before you heard it properly in your ears. “Wrong. I watched it happen and I said nothing, which makes me complicit in it, which is why I am sitting on this volcano instead of my cave.” He turned his head and his gold eyes found Caelan with an accuracy that made Caelan go very still. “You especially.”

“Drakthar,” I said out loud.

“No.” His eyes came back to me and the gold in them was weird in a way I had never seen before. “She was not innocent. She was not misunderstood. She was not pushed into her choices by impossible circumstances. Nymeria knew exactly what she was doing to everyone she touched, including me and she made those choices with full awareness of the damage they would cause and she made them anyway. And I have watched the story change. Watched everyone in the Lore slowly revise the history into something more comfortable. Something that makes her the tragic victim and Caelan the fool who couldn’t see past his own pride and I am done watching it.”

The volcano was quiet except for the wind. Caelan’s voice came from behind me, measured and careful. “Then tell us.”

—“Oh I will.” Drakthar looked at us both for a long moment and then at Rydstrom, at Vera, at the guards who had frozen halfway up the slope and were very sensibly staying there. “But not in words. Words can be edited. Words can be shaped into the version the speaker wants the listener to receive.” His enormous head dipped toward me. “Take the memories. All of you. Touch my scales and take them directly. See what I saw.”

“Drakthar,” Caelan said again and this time there was something different in his voice, a hesitation that was not doubt but something closer to bracing. “If this is what I think it is —”

“It is worse than what you think it is.” Drakthar’s gold eyes moved to him. “I know that is not what you want to hear. I know what it will cost you to see it. But she—” his gaze came back to me and it was everything I had ever trusted about him. The ancient agreement and the dry warmth and three hundred years of waiting he had done before I touched his scale in a cave, “—she deserves to have people around her who know the truth. All of it. The real version. Not the comfortable one.”

My chest ached. “Okay. We’ll take the memories.”

Behind me, Caelan let out a slow breath. “Send for the Moravia.”