Page 103 of Feralheart

Aristus was here in front of me, his scales solid under my hands, but part of him was elsewhere, with something I couldn’t see or sense.

What if I lose him?

The question was a blade I swallowed daily. It cut on the way down and kept going, dealing slices with every breath I took. He’d been mine longer than I’d been my own person. If he died, what would be left of me?

Now I stood next to him and felt like I was shouting across a void.

I looked at my hands, noting the tremor running through my fingers, the first physical crack in the control I’d spent my entire life perfecting.

I couldn’t stand in this stall watching him suffer with no way to fix it.

That made me the worst kind of coward. The kind who loved something and abandoned it anyway because staying hurt too much. My mother had taught me a hundred ways to endure pain. She’d never taught me how to sit with helplessness.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. “Rest.”

As I left, he turned back to the opening, staring out.

The fortress swallowed me back into its embrace.

A guard passed me in the main corridor and nodded once. “Your Highness. All’s quiet tonight.”

“Good,” I said.

But I could hear the mines working and a faelight dying in a nearby cage and Aristus’s uneven breathing echoing in my head, and none of that sounded quiet to me.

I only made it three corridors before I had to stop. My hand found the wall, the stone cold under my palm. I stood there breathing like I’d run the length of the fortress.

Aristus was dying. Dragons could live a hundred years—in the wild. Why didn’t ours live as long?

My hand curled into a fist against the stone.

I taught him to fly when I was seven—or he taught me. He was a hatchling. Neither of us knew what we were doing. My tutors said the bond would guide us. That I’d know instinctively how to command him.

They were wrong.

For weeks, every flight ended with both of us bruised. Frustrated. I’d cry at night where no one could hear, and he’d keen in his stall.

Then one morning, I stopped trying to command him. I asked. And he answered. That’s when I learned the bond wasn’t about control. It was about trust.

Yet I was losing him, and all the trust in the world couldn’t save him.

I made myself keep walking.

An older servant was replacing a burned-out orb near the east stairwell, standing on a low stool, her back to me. She stepped down from the stool and turned, startling when she saw me.

“Your Highness.” Her bow was automatic. “Forgive me. I didn’t hear you coming.”

“It’s fine.” I stopped. “You’ve worked here a long time.”

“Thirty-one years this winter, Sire.”

“Do you remember the last Scorching?”

Fear flashed across her face so fast I nearly missed it. “I do, Your Highness.”

“My father competed.”

“Yes, Sire.”