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She got, up out of the seat and down through the crowd toward the arena floor. Auren stayed where he was and breathed. The arena roared around him, and the world went on. He would be all right. Not today, and not tomorrow, but in time, because he was Auren. Auren endured, and endurance practiced without bitterness was its own kind of grace.

He stood, straightened his shoulders, and went to find work. Work was reliable, and work was the practice of continuing when the heart would rather stop.

CHAPTER 12

*** ATHENA ***

She reached him on the arena floor before the healers did, and got there first on purpose.

He was still on his feet, which was its own kind of stubbornness, because he had no business being on them. He was bleeding from the rib, from the long rake down his right arm, and from a scatter of smaller wounds that mapped eighteen minutes across his chest. His left wing was held tight against his body where the membrane had torn. His amber-gold scales were dark with blood and dust, and he was breathing in the careful, measured way of a man holding himself upright on will alone.

When he saw her come through the crowd, his face did the thing.

She had seen the edges of it before, on the ridge and in the cave, the guard coming down for a moment before it went back up. This was not the edges. This was the whole of it. The wall came down all the way, every layer of two years of practiced distance. What was left underneath was open and unshielded, so nakedly glad to see her that it should have been hard to look at but it was not. It was the best thing she had ever seen on another person's face.

"You absolute fool," she told him. Her voice was shaking, and she let it shake.

"Yes," he agreed.

"You could have died."

"Also, yes."

"I am going to kill you myself. Slower than Khrelan would have, and I am going to take my time about it."

"That seems ungrateful, given that I just fought to keep you alive." His voice was rough with dust and exertion and something underneath both. "But I respect your commitment to the principle."

She kissed him, in front of the Colony, in front of the D'Karr, in front of four thousand Weredragons. It was brief and fierce, and it tasted of blood from the split at his mouth. She did not care about any of the people watching or what it meant for the alliance. She cared that he was alive. She cared that he was standing. She cared that the bond was strong between them, carrying his heartbeat and his pain and the plain astonishing fact of him, still here.

She pulled back. "Medical. Now. This is not a request."

"I'm fine."

"You are bleeding from six places and your wing is torn and your arm may need work. You are not fine. You are upright, which is a different measurement, and not one I accept." She took his uninjured arm. "Walk."

He walked. He let her lead him out through the eastern arch and into the corridors. The whispers came up around them. “The exile. The human. Did you see? He won. She kissed him on the floor.” Athena ignored every word of it with the thoroughness of a woman who had spent a year caring about the Colony's opinion and was now completely finished.

* * *

The healers took one look at him and moved with the coordinated speed of people who understood that treatment and emergency were about ten minutes apart.

Athena stayed. She pulled a stool up to the treatment platform and sat where she could watch every wound cleaned and closed. She did not leave when they suggested, mildly, that she might be more comfortable waiting outside. The rake across his ribs was the deep one, the wound that had turned her hands white during the fight, and closing it took time and care. She watched all of it. She had decided, somewhere on the walk down, that she was not going to look away from any part of what he had spent on her.

He did not complain. He did not flinch where anyone could see it. He sat on the platform with his jaw set and his eyes on her. The only place his pain showed was in the bond, sharper now, each spike of it registering in her own chest like an echo.

"You can react to it," she said quietly, when the healers had stepped to the far bench for fresh sealant. "I can feel it through the bond anyway. There's no one here to perform for except me, and I already know the truth."

"I've been performing for two years. It's a difficult habit to put down on short notice."

"Put it down. I'm not going anywhere."

Something loosened in his face. It was not a large motion. His shoulders came down a fraction, and the rigidity went out of his spine. The bond carried the change to her, the strange relief of a man who had been braced against pain so long that releasing the brace was its own kind of ache. He let himself feel it, because she had told him he was allowed to, and because she was willing to feel it with him.

The healers finished. They cleaned their instruments, exchanged a look that said they were aware of the shape of the room, and made a professional decision to be needed elsewhere. They left.

The chamber went quiet. The amber moss-light pulsed its slow rhythm on the stone. Somewhere above them the Colony was still working through the aftermath of the arena, the debates, the recalculations and the political math that follows any real event. Down here there were two people and a bond between them.

Athena stood and crossed over to him. She stepped between his knees and put her hands on his face, and his scales were warm under her palms. His jaw was hard and strong, and the contrast between the hardness of the bone and the openness in his eyes was the most intimate thing she had ever held.