Page 201 of Feralheart

I stripped off my leathers in the dark, the laces fighting me. After tugging on one of Father’s old tunics, I lay down on my bedroll. I closed my eyes, shutting out the night and the world around me.

My body remembered things my brain couldn’t sort through yet. The desperate way he’d kissed me in his tent. How his hands had smoothed through my hair. The broken sound he’d made when I told him I wanted him.

How sad and alone he’d looked by the fire.

Outside, I heard him settle onto his bedroll. He released a quiet exhale that might’ve been from pain in his shoulder or just plain being tired.

I was hyperaware of every sound. The pops of the fire’s dying embers. Distant dragon breathing. Fen moving again, trying to find a position that didn’t make his wound ache.

He’d left everything. Walked across the boundary in front of the elite and spread his bedroll on the ground beside a commons fire like it was something he’d been building toward for weeks.

Maybe he had been.

Maybe I had been too, and I hadn’t let myself see it.

I’d spent a lifetime figuring out how the elite responded to things they didn’t like. His mother wouldn’t let this go. Queen Valindra would hear about this before dawn, if she hadn’t heard already. She’d calculate consequences and political damage. She’d decide what needed to happen to a son who’d chosen someone over the crown.

My family might pay for it too. They’d become leverage the moment Fen sat beside my fire, tools to force me away from him or punish him for choosing me.

The thought sat in my belly like broken glass.

I’d ruined us both with one kiss. Except I couldn’t make myself regret it.

I wanted him. The admission scared me more than the race. Wanting him meant losing him, and I’d already lost too much.

Outside, Fen’s breathing evened into something that might’ve been sleep. I tried to match mine to his, but mine wouldn’t settle.

Selira’s awareness brushed across my mind. Here. Watching. Sleep.

But I lay there, listening to him breathe six feet away from me, and tried not to think about how his pinky had felt curled around mine.

How doomed we were.

Eventually, my eyelids grew heavy.

I drifted into a dream of…

Screaming reached down into the dream and yanked me back into consciousness.

CHAPTER FIFTY

ERADIN

Iwas up before thought caught up, stumbling out of the tent in just the tunic. One shoulder had slipped down while I slept, exposing my skin to the pre-dawn cold. My bare legs hit frigid air.

Dragons shrieked, the sound drilling through my skull until my teeth ached with it. These weren’t rage-shrieks but terror, the kind that said predator in a language older than words.

The ground beneath my feet moved. The meadow rippled like skin twitching off a fly, and I understood with a sickening lurch that we weren’t standing on ground at all. We were standing on something alive. Something massive that had been sleeping and had just now woken up.

Fen was already on his feet, blades drawn, his hair wild from sleep. His eyes scanned for threats.

The ground rippled again, a long, slow wave that rolled from one end of the meadow to the other. Where it passed, the grass flattened, down from below, not above.

A dragon screamed and bolted, snapping its tether, its rider barely catching the saddle as it launched skyward. We had minutes. Maybe less.

No herald, door, or warning. The next trial had started.

Fen’s gaze hit me and stopped.