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She’d failed. As a witch. Then as a scale rider. Meira was as good as dead now. They’d be prepping a stage to set flames upon her. She’d sooner fall upon a sword than let the city watch her burn.
For years she’d hidden the power inside of her. Her memory gave way to passing time as she forgot how to do little things that had come naturally as a child. Only after waking did she let herself dip back into that power, did she play with the thrum of magic in her veins. None of it was good enough to get her out of this prison cell. Not unless she used the last of her energy to start again. She wasn’t sure she could even do that with the lingering effects of whatever drug they’d pumped into her veins.
It was tempting though. The urge to start over and hope for a different outcome.
The glowing light of a torch returned. She couldn’t lift her head to see who it was. Exhaustion kept her still. Shadows passed over the walls of her cell. The bit of light was enough to reveal two stone walls and more bars between her prison and the next. It revealed a hunched form tossed into the cell next to her. Another click of a lock and then the light receded.
The constant wheeze of someone else’s breath was loud compared to what she’d grown used to. They’d walked themselves into the cell but it didn’t sound as though they’d moved since landing in their bed of straw.
“Meira?” A rough whispered voice.
She stiffened. “Remis?”
He let out a long slow breath that broke off into a fit of coughs and a groan. Him in a cell next to her didn’t bode well for her theory of his betrayal. He didn’t exactly sound as though he was at peak health either. So where had he been?
“Thought I might find you down here.” He exhaled, along with the shuffle of his movement. Meira imagined his face pressed against those bars. His beautiful features would be quite the contrast to their dingy surroundings. “How are you?”
Meira could laugh at the simple way he’d asked such a polite question but that would require energy she didn’t have. “I’m alive. For now. Where were you?”
“In another cell much better than this one. They had me locked up in a room for hours. Questioned me for a while…” The way he trailed off suggested they did more than question him. They’d hurt him. “They’ve decided that they’ve found me guilty of consorting with a witch. We’ve got until the morning.”
And exactly how many hours was that?
She pulled herself forward. Straw stuck to her palms as she crawled closer to the sound of his voice and found his hands clutching the iron bars. They were running out of options. “I can go back in time, bring us back to the house and we can run.” Or she could go even further than that, but she wouldn’t know why she’d done it then either, she might not have time for her memories to catch back up again. Then they’d somehow be right back in this position again. That’s not even to mention if she could lose herself to the witch’s sleep again.
“Would you remember if you went back?” Remis pulled her hand through the bars and pressed a kiss against her knuckles.
“No,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure if the curse would be removed either. Did this travel with her through time and space?
“I hate that you don’t remember.” He pressed her palm against his cheek and leaned into her touch. “I hate that there is a time with you that I have not experienced.”
The cool kiss of metal supported her head as she leaned against the bars. Silence was easy between them. It held all the things she wished to say, the emotions she wanted to admit to. The quiet held her love for a man she barely knew but felt nonetheless.
“Could you go back to a time before the curse? Could you forget me?”
Meira sighed. “I’m not sure. I can’t travel more than perhaps a few months back and the energy it would consume would make me ill. Bram said I’d been in bed for nearly a month this time. And I don’t know if the curse would follow. Considering I woke up with it, it’s likely safe to assume that it would.”
Remis squeezed her hand. He’d let her go if it meant she would live. That’s what he was getting at. She’d let him go once and though she wasn’t quite certain what had been the deciding factor, she hated the idea of doing this all again.
There might be one other way to escape their impending fate. A chance that she’d remember everything they’d shared and refuse the end the Empire would want of her.
“Would you like to know how scale riders bond with their Bold Wings?” Meira asked. Remis let out a slow breath and she took that as her cue to continue. “We share blood. A rider will find a Bold Wing when they are still fresh from the mother’s nest, young enough that they can be overpowered and outsmarted. Not yet flying either. The rider then makes a cut along unarmored flesh. Between their claws, just below their ears, or more dangerously just underneath their snout. We prick our fingers; you only need a little blood anyway, and rub it against the wound we’ve inflicted. Mrithun left scars from our bonding.
Then all of us wrestle our Bold Wings to the top of Mountain Ridmond. And we jump. If our Bold Wings take to flight for the first time and catch us on our descent the bond is solidified.”
She could remember every torturously scary moment of her bonding with Mrithun. Not all riders made it, not all dragons bonded. Some dragons took flight and didn’t bother to save their potential rider. Others died alongside the rider. All of this happened at the young age of ten.
Mrithun hadn’t yet darkened into her onyx scales when she’d been that young. The diamond-shaped scales had appeared almost violet under the midday sun. Meira had also found it so interesting that she was farther away from the other Bold Wings that were huddled around each other. An outsider. Just like her, she’d thought.
Mrithun put up one heck of a fight too. Threw Meira off her back at least a dozen times. Another child had seen and told Meira to find one who was more submissive. But no, even then, Meira knew Mrithun was meant to be hers. Even when the young Bold Wing had bitten into her arm, threatening to tear the meat clean off her bones, Meira had refused to give up on her.
“You jump? From the top of a mountain?” Remis sounded skeptical.
“That is the tradition.”
There had been several long minutes of falling through the haze of fog and cloud where Meira had convinced herself that she wasn’t going to be chosen. That perhaps Mrithun was too stubborn to take a rider or she simply had found Meira as an annoyance. Then she’d seen the rock terrain coming plainly into view, and as she’d prepared for impact, Mrithun had swooped up under her. Colliding with the dragon's spiked spine had been painful and she might have yelped if the breath wasn’t knocked from her lungs.
“There are no mountains for us to readily jump from,” he said into the darkness.
