Chapter 70 Chapter 70

Chapter 70 Chapter 70

Twilight's POV

We traveled for three days before we crossed the border.

Three days of moving mostly at night because the creature was easier to lose in the dark even if the dark was harder on us. Three days of cold food and less sleep than any of us wanted and conversations that stopped and started and never quite finished because there was too much to say and not enough of it felt safe to say out loud yet.

On the first night Devonye told us everything she knew about what she was calling the Void Dragon, which was more poetic than accurate but more accurate than anything else we had for it.

She talked while we moved, keeping her voice low, and I listened and added what I already knew and between the two of us we built a picture that was not encouraging. An entity older than the kingdom. Older than the bonding. Something that had existed in a time when dragons and humans weren't what they were to each other yet, when the world was still working out what it was going to be. It had never bonded, never been tamed, had only ever consumed. 

The sealing had taken twelve dragons working together and the life of three riders and even then they hadn't killed it, just put it somewhere it couldn't reach anything worth reaching.

Until now.

Until we handed it a way out.

On the second night I tried to reach Ryaknorg.
He was there. I could feel him the way you can feel someone standing very still on the other side of a wall, present, aware, but separated by something solid. When I pushed toward him the wall pushed back. Not aggressive, just immovable. Like whatever the egg had taken from me had settled between us and hardened.

I pulled back and Isla was watching me from across the small space where we'd stopped to rest and I could see her not saying anything about it with considerable effort.

"I'll get through it." I said.

"I know." She said.

"You don't have to watch me every time I try." I said, though not with any real heat in it because I knew why she watched and I didn't actually want her to stop.

She looked away. "I know." She said again, quieter.

My mind went back to that day at the tower when we were together. When they wanted Ryaknorg’a power, kissing.

James had used it against us. The king had used the threat of it as a leash on Isla for years before any of this started. And even out here, even three days past the border of anywhere anyone from Aretia could easily follow us, we still kept the distance because some things you don't unlearn just by leaving.

But our mate bond didn't care about law. It never had. It pulled regardless and I had stopped fighting it at some point and started just managing it, which was a different thing, which was exhausting in a way that had nothing to do with physical tiredness.
On the third morning we crossed into Aretian territory through a gap in the ward line that 

Devonye had found on her mental map. The wards were old here and patched and one section had been damaged and never properly fixed and we slipped through it without anything announcing us.
Aretia on the other side.

When we left Aretia, I had everything in check now, I felt lost.

I had thought it would feel like something. Coming back. I had thought the land itself would register differently now that I knew what I knew, who I actually was to the kingdom that had tried to make me nothing. But it just looked like land. Hills going south, road cutting through them, the smell of rain a day away. The same as it had always been. The world didn't reorganize itself around your revelations. It just kept being what it was.

"How do you want to do this." Devonye asked.

"Carefully." Isla said, before I could say anything.
I had been about to say something else. Something that involved less strategy and more walking directly to the throne hall and letting whatever was going to happen happen. Isla knew that because she'd gotten there first deliberately and I closed my mouth and accepted that she was right because she usually was when it came to this particular kind of thing.

"We need a footing before we move on the court." I said. "People who were with Isla before James consolidated everything. People who were already unhappy with the direction things were going and didn't have anyone worth being unhappy in favor of."

"Prati." Isla said.

"First thought for me too." I said. " And whoever Prati has pulled close since we left."

Devonye knew the area better than either of us, which was useful because her knowledge came from a completely different history with the place than ours did. "There's a waystation east of the main road. Prati used it last campaign season as a forward point."

"Let's go there first." I said.

We went east and kept off the road and the creature stayed absent. I didn't know if it had followed us across the border or if the wards, damaged as they were, meant something to it. I didn't trust the absence either way but I accepted it because I wasn't in a position to do anything else.

The waystation looked exactly like what it was trying not to be, a building that wanted to look empty and didn't quite manage it. The windows were dark and the door was old and weathered and there was nothing outside that said people, except the ground around the well was soft in a way that meant someone had been drawing water that morning.

I knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again. "Prati. It's me. I know you're here because your horse drank from this well this morning and you've always been bad at making things look abandoned."

Silence. Then the sound of something being moved. Then the door opened and Prati's face was in the gap.

She looked older than I remembered. Not old, just more worn, the way people looked when they had spent time being quietly vigilant instead of openly active. She looked at me the way people looked at things they had hoped for but stopped letting themselves count on.

Then she looked past me and saw Isla.
Something crossed her face that I wasn't sure I was supposed to see. Relief and loyalty and something older underneath both of them. She had served under Isla for years. The kind of years that made people loyal not out of obligation but out of the particular respect you only built one way.

"General." She said.

"Not anymore." Isla said.

"You are to me." Prati said. And she opened the door.

Inside was warm and small and careful. A fire burning low and smokeless. Six people I recognized in various states of trying to look like they hadn't been waiting for something specific. Two I didn't know but who looked at Isla the same way Prati had.
I sat down and started talking and I didn't stop until I had given them all of it.

I told them about the camp and what the camp was actually built for. I told them about the king's papers and what was in them and where the copies were hidden. I told them about James and what James was and what James had been promised and what the king had never intended to deliver. I told them about the egg and what came out of it and what was circling somewhere above us and what it was going to do to Aretia if we didn't get back there before it decided to move.

There were things I trusted Prati with and there were things I didn't, not because she was untrustworthy but because some information was a weight you gave people only when they needed to carry it, and right now they didn't.

Isla sat across the room through all of it. She didn't add much. She didn't need to. Every time I said something that needed weight she let her silence put the weight there and these were people who had served under her long enough to know what her silence meant, so it worked.

When I finished the fire had burned down and no one had moved in a long time and Prati was looking at the floor in that particular way she looked at the floor when she was working something out.

"You came back." Prati said finally. Not accusing. Just noting it. Just acknowledging the size of it.

"We came back." I said.

"Even after what they did."

I thought about that for a second. About the camp and the years before the camp and everything that had been taken and withheld and weaponized against me specifically. 

About the king who had known who I was and built a cage for me anyway.
"It's not about them." I said. "It's about what's coming for the people who live there who didn't do any of it."

Prati looked at Isla then. A long look.

"Is she always like this." She asked.

Isla's mouth did the thing it did sometimes, not quite a smile, the thing that came before a smile. 

"Usually." She said.

"Alright." Prati said, and slapped her palm on her knee and stood up. "Tell us what you need."
I told them.

By the time we were done the room felt different. Not hopeful exactly. More like purposeful. Like people who had been sitting still with no direction to move in had finally been given a direction.
Outside, in the deep dark past the waystation's single window, something swept across the stars. Slow and massive and patient. I saw it and I didn't say anything and when I looked at Isla she had seen it too.

We looked at each other for one second.

Then we both looked away, because that was what we did, that was the constant careful management of something that had no safe place to exist in the world we were trying to fix.

But the awareness didn't go away. It never went away.