Page 238 of Feralheart

She didn’t speak or offer reassurance. She just pressed her palm over my knuckles, her fingers finding the gaps between mine, and holding on.

Aristus’s heartbeat pulsed through both of us.

Tears trickled down her cheeks.

I turned my hand over under hers so our palms met.

“I’m here,” I whispered to her and to Aristus. “I’m right here. I’m not leaving you.”

I’d broken too many promises. Never this one.

Eradin’s other hand reached for the collar.

Her light touched the metal, and the collar resisted, the runes flaring. I thought it was going to hold. Nothing would change. The pillars would win, and Aristus would die wearing the thing my mother called sacred.

Then her magic pushed deeper.

Aristus screamed, the sound slamming through the canyon.

The bond between us exploded.

Pain hit me, and my vision darkened. My grip on his neck slackened. I couldn’t breathe. There was only agony and the bond stretched too thin.

And then the darkness became something else, and I saw…

A hatchling, barely old enough to fly. Small and vulnerable. Spelled stone under its talons. The bonding chamber, decorated for a ceremony. And at the edge of the memory, blurred the way things are when a dragon has no reason yet to care about them, a boy. Small. Waiting to be blessed.

Brought before a man in formal robes who held a collar of metal inscribed with runes. The man’s hands shook as he fitted it around the hatchling’s neck.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, so quietly only the dragon could hear. “I’m so sorry.”

The collar sealed with a flash of blue light.

The hatchling screamed, the same sound Aristus made now.

And the man who’d fastened the collar, whose hands had trembled with guilt even as he’d sealed a hatchling’s fate, looked up.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

My father’s eyes stared back at me.

And the vision released me.

My bonding day. The morning I’d never been able to remember no matter how hard I’d reached. Because it hadn’t faded. It had been taken. Aristus had carried it for both of us under the metal they used to make him forget himself.

My father had been there. Close enough to touch me.

My hands were still on Aristus’s scales, his heartbeat too fast under my palms. Too uneven. The same heart that had been beating since my father’s hands had fitted the collar around his neck and whispered an apology to a hatchling who couldn’t understand.

He hadn’t been weak.

He’d been guilty.

And someone had buried him here, in a story that made his son spend twenty-three years trying not to be just like him.

“Fen.” Eradin’s voice cut through, sharp with worry. “Fen, I need you.”

I dragged myself back.