Page 211 of Feralheart

I’d spent years watching elite dragons fail, telling myself it was breeding. The cost of domestication.

I was wrong.

They weren’t fading because of what they were. They were fading because of what had been put on them.

My palms blazed bright enough to throw light on the grass.

“Every bonded dragon.” The words scraped up my throat. “Every single one. The collars are slowly killing them all.”

Selira turned toward Aristus. Whatever passed between them had no words. She made a low sound I’d never heard before.

Mine. Hurts.

Fen shifted his feet on the ground and desperation flickered across his face. I’d seen that look before, the one you got when you had to find a way out, when you kept turning something over, hoping it wouldn’t hold up.

It did.

His hands twitched at his sides. That was what frightened me most. I could handle rage or denial, but he’d gone absolutely still. He gazed down at his hands like he wasn’t sure they were his.

“Fen.”

He didn’t answer.

“Talk to me.”

“I knew something was wrong.” His voice came out even, the tone of someone holding a cracked thing very carefully to keep it from falling apart. “So many healers. Months of telling myself it was training stress. That he just needed rest.” He turned his hands over, looking at the palms now. “I knew, and I kept choosing not to.”

He laid his forehead on Aristus’s neck.

I remained where I was. Some things needed to be done without witnesses.

When he stepped back and faced me, his face had been scraped bare.

“Take it off.” His voice cracked. “Whatever it’s doing to him⁠—”

“You know what they teach us. Break the band, break the beast.” I made myself hold his eyes. “Maybe that’s one more lie. But if it isn’t, and I pry that thing loose with magic I barely control, in the middle of the race, with nothing left in me after that trial, I’ve killed him myself. I won’t gamble him on maybe.”

“Can you fix it then?” he asked. “Do something to keep it from killing him?”

The misery in his voice stabbed through my chest.

“I don’t know.” I studied the collar that had been slowly strangling him for two decades. “Maybe. If we weren’t in the middle of a fates-damned race designed to kill us.”

“After, then.” Fen’s jaw locked. “When this is over. You can fix him.”

The certainty in his voice hollowed out my insides.

“That’s your wish. You’re not here for glory or to prove yourself. You want to save Aristus.”

“I’ll do anything,” he said quietly. “Trade anything. The crown, my title, my life. Whatever it takes to help him.”

My hands were still glowing, the red lines pulsing beneath my skin.

Tolross was dying.

So was Aristus.

Only one of us got the Oracle’s wish.