"Come to the flight fields. Now."

It was the first thing Sgaeyl had said to me directly since the battle, nearly three weeks ago now. I scrambled up and out of the bed where I'd been lying with Violet, and she turned to me as I reached for my clothes. 

"What's wrong?" she asked, but I could see by her face that Tairn was answering her. She was up and moving a moment later as well.

"They want you as well?" I asked, though the answer seemed obvious.

"Tairn said they'll need my assistance, and Andarna told him there was no way I wouldn't come anyway."

I wasn't entirely sure I liked the sound of that, but there was no arguing with dragons or with Violence when they had their minds made up. At least it meant I didn't have to decide whether to keep secrets, which would be a nice change of pace in our relationship. I helped her into her corset and she handed me my flight jacket where I'd abandoned it, despairing of Sgaeyl ever speaking to me again.

We hadn't discussed that night since it happened, and I appreciated it.

"I told you there would be a solution," Violet thought at me as we hustled through the darkened college and climbed. 

"We don't know the answer yet," I pointed out. Sgaeyl hadn't elaborated, hadn't even hung around the hill in my mind long enough for me to ask. 

Violet reached over and tugged my arm as we stepped onto the flight field, twining her fingers in mine. "Together, Xaden."

Sgaeyl and Tairn were waiting for us. The silence from her felt even more deafening up close. I bowed my head the way I had the first time I saw her. I wasn't covered in a prince's blood this time, and she hadn't killed me or broken our bond yet, so I had those two things going for me.

"Look at me," she said, and I tilted my head up. I looked straight at her, not bothering to hide my eyes. I couldn't feel her emotions through the bond, but I could feel her judgement. If she decided the only safe choice for her was to kill me, I couldn't stop her.

Instead I thought about the end of the battle. I'd replayed those minutes endlessly in the last three weeks.

For the first minute, it felt incredible. Like the first time I channeled from Sgaeyl, like the first time I flew with her.

In the second minute, it felt like I could do anything, I could black out the whole fucking valley, tear wyvern apart with shadowy teeth. I could sever the venin sage's head from his body. I could end it, end all of it, fix everything. I could have the power to fix everything.

In the third minute, my shields crumbled under the onslaught of power and I could hear intentions ringing out from one end of the valley to the other. Most of them were simple. Live. Fight. Protect. I knew what everyone was doing, what they were thinking: Violet. Sloane. Brennan. Lilith-fucking-Sorrengail. What they were doing. What they'd done.

In the fourth minute, Sgaeyl slammed her own shields down, but not before I registered her anger and betrayal through our bond.

By the time the wards came back up and the wyvern dropped like first years, I was realizing what I'd done.

Shadows dredged the river looking for the venin sage's body, but there was nothing. In the back of my head I thought that I heard him laughing.

It was terrifying. Terrifying to know I'd done it. When it came down to it, when I thought Violet was going to die, I was willing to be the monster all of them saw me me as.

It was't quite the first time. I realized it when we had to rescue her from Varrish, when I was willing to throw the revolution down myself to make sure she was safe. This was different, though. Sgaeyl supported me then, she knew Tairn's panic as well as my own. We'd discussed it. We'd had a plan.

This was not planned. The closest I'd ever come to thinking about it was when I told Violet I'd watch Aretia burn again to protect her. I knew in that minute that I was, could be, would be this selfish. I knew it, but I didn't really understand what it would feel like to make that decision and live with it.

Even five minutes later, I hated myself for it.

Now I'd been living with it for three weeks.

"You summoned me, and I came," I said simply.

There was another minute of silence, as if she was deciding something, before the bond between us opened properly. The rush of emotions from her was overwhelming: a flood of anger and disappointment, but also a thin, steady stream of love and pride and determination.

"You have not drawn again," Sgaeyl began, and there was relief there too. I resigned myself again that I would not let her down a second time.

"It has been difficult," I admitted. Sgaeyl was the one person I kept no secrets from. I never could.

"But you have done it." She nodded her head and looked back at Tairn. I got the distinct impression she felt she'd won an argument.

"I believe I have found a cure for you."

That made my heart stop for a moment.

"This is very old magic. Older than Navarre. Older than the Empyrean as we know it. We do not know that it will work. It may kill you."

"That's been true of most things in my life, yourself included, Ruthless One."

"Perhaps. After seeing Baide's fate... if the Empyrean knew, you would already be dead."

"They don't know?"

"I intend to present you as a fait accompli. But that is why Andarna is not here, so that if things go badly she will not be held accountable for any... trouble."

"There's no shortage of trouble to go around."

"What's the cure?" Violet asked, cutting off the conversation before I could get caught up in self-recrimination again.

"'Cure' is not quite accurate. 'Treatment' is a better word," Tairn told her.

"Then what is the treatment?" I pushed, feeling altogether too hollow.

"Humans bond with dragons because they cannot take directly from the source," Sgaeyl explained, lowering her head so she could look me directly in the eyes. "Since the damage you've done to yourself requires you to draw directly, you must cease to be human. Venin is the obvious and direct choice, but in the first days there was said to be the option to connect to the source as dragons do, if a dragon thinks you worthy of the offer to prove yourself."

I felt my jaw drop, but it was Violet who answered. "That's really an option? I've never read anything like it, even in folk tales."

"It would not be recorded by humans. It is painful and dangerous, and quite likely deadly. I will not pretend otherwise."

"But the other option is..." Violet looked at me.

"I'm honored," I finally croaked out. "You do me better than I deserve."

"We shall see."

The reason they needed Violet was because someone needed to actually make a potion. A potion to turn you into a dragon; it sounded fanciful.

The process involved a great number of steps, some of them using materials Kaori would likely trade an arm just to learn about. Violet was placed in charge of the treatments, instructed how to crush pieces of Andarna's shell to powder and to scrape dragon scales from the inside to produce fine shreds, given a list of herbs to collect and prepare, and all of that was just to make me…

"-receptive." Sgaeyl said. "Then the real work will begin. You have held the fates of those you care about in your hands, and they have trusted you in return. You must learn to trust them. You have accepted responsibility for the dragons as well as the humans in your nesting ground. You must understand that responsibility."

I guessed I had done those things, though I wasn't sure what she was getting at. How were they connected? What was I supposed to understand? Didn't I already trust Garrick and the others?

"Some of these ingredients are poisonous. I used Leighsorrel mushrooms when I was poisoning my challenge opponents, and baneroot shouldn't be touched, let alone ingested," Violet worried. "Tairn, are you sure this is right?"

"I trust Sgaeyl that this is the only option we have. I would not risk her safety if I didn't think it would work. Whether the cure will prove worse than the disease will remain to be seen."

"It doesn't matter. I trust Sgaeyl, and I don't want to live like this. Not when I've been presented with a solution."

"A poisonous solution," Violet pointed out.

"To a poisonous problem."

Violet turned away, looking at the ground. "What happens to us if this works?"

"We do not know what to expect in the short term. Are you worried what will happen to your love life once he is a dragon?" Sgaeyl's tone was close to amusement, and I could see Violet blushing in the moonlight.

I squeezed her hand. "As long as I live I will protect you, whatever living ends up meaning, so you just need to ask yourself what you can tolerate from me."

Violet smacked her hand into my chest. "If I can tolerate you now, like this- and I do more than tolerate you! I love you, you idiot!- then I can't imagine what would be too much."

"The lieutenant will likely need your support more even more while he is treated," Tairn said. "You may not need to imagine it."

"When the preparations are complete, you will need to go to the Vale to complete it."

"I can do that?" Violet's grip tightened and I forced myself to smirk at her. "Kaori's never going to forgive me if he hears about it."

"When does he go?" she asked.

"When he can no longer pretend to be human."

Tairn drew my attention to a bundle near his front claw. "Take this for the Silver One. You will need it for the preparations."

The bundle looked tiny next to him, but when I pick it up, it filled my arms. Shadows swept around it, holding up the weight.

Sgaeyl looked disapproving. "They've been more forceful." It's not like it was when my signet first manifested, when they responded to emotions and little else; they're still doing what I would ask of them. They were just eager.

We made our way back to the dorm room we've been sharing, and Violet and I resolved to re-evaluate the ingredients in the morning.

By the morning's light, Violet seemed more resolved to the work ahead of us. She tugged loose the wrapping of the bundle and gasped. "Xaden-"

The gift I was being given was obvious in that moment. There were scales that had to be Andarna's, based on the way they shifted in the morning sunlight, and beneath them...

"Eggshell."

Violet looked away for a moment and then confirmed what I'd guessed. "They hid Andarna's shell, when she hatched. These are hers."

Sgaeyl had blocked me again, but I sent the thought anyway. "Thank you."

Before she went to formation and classes, she showed me what Tairn had instructed her the night before: on the underside of the dragon scales, scraping with a sharp edge would pull loose the threads that made them up.

"Set them in a bowl of water to soak, and this afternoon you can lay them out to dry," she told me, giving me a kiss and a smile before she went to class.

The motion was not exactly intuitive, but once I started making progress with my blade, the shadows were there to help as if they had just needed to figure out what I was doing. Tendrils held the scale I was working on, keeping it in place, adjusting the angle. Another shadow ghosted the edge of the knife, and it seemed sharper.

It felt a bit like I still had company even when Violet was gone, and I appreciated that. I hadn't been completely avoiding people, but with Sgaeyl refusing to speak to me, I'd largely been letting everyone assume I was still suffering from the aftereffects of burnout from the battle. There had to be a reason I hadn't returned to Aretia with Brennan and the fliers, and this was the best we'd been come up with.

I laid out the damp fibers on a sheet of cheesecloth and set them in the cold January sunlight to dry.

The eggshells were not easier, but at least they were more familiar. Grinding them down to powder made sure they could be smelted and combined into alloy more evenly, and once or twice Garrick and I had found ourselves making our own batch instead of skimming off of what was already prepared.

The texture of the shell in my hand was powdery and almost fragile - it was several years old at this point, and usually they were processed much sooner than that. It took some force, but the pieces of shell crumbled into the mortar and I started grinding them down.

I could feel the magic of them, a gentle chorus that got louder as they were ground down. The physical work of grinding them was the easy part, though even in their fragile state it required most of my strength. Later, when Violet was running her fingers through the powder in the mortar to check the consistency, I explained that the hard part was avoiding the magic that sang from of them.

She'd brought food for me and as I ate she checked on the dragonscale fibers I'd set out to dry, then pronounced my mortar and pestle work "sufficient."

Violet showed me the artemisias leaves she'd been able to sneak out of the healers quadrant while visiting Sawyer earlier, and then sat next to me on the bed with a notebook and her book of poisons, writing down her observations so far and trying to remember where we could find the seed pods that were required.

I watched her write for a bit. "Isn't that one of the notebooks you found in your dad's office?"

"Yeah, it was blank so I figured I might as well use it for this."

While she focused on her book, I had nothing to do with my hands. I tried to let the solid weight of her against me ground me in the moment, but the melody of the dragon magic mixed with Violet's own, the two weaving together in a way that practically pulled me out of my body as I listened.

It was Violet's elbow in my side that brought me back. "Where'd you go? Is Sgaeyl talking to you?"

I shook my head. "No, just…the music is distracting me tonight."

"Does it always feel like that?" she asked quietly, gesturing at the mortar over the top of her book.

"I think it's harder because I'm alone in my head," I admitted. "But it comes and goes during the day. Most of the time it's like music at the edge of my hearing. Like longing, or like how you can feel a drumbeat or music reverberating around the courtyard. But it's not quite a melody, it's something different."

I could see her thinking about it, relishing the little movements in her face as her mind raced ahead of the conversation. "Like when someone's humming but it's not really a song?" she offered.

"It's a little like that. There's two different parts to it, really. There's one that I think was always there but we just don't listen to most of the time. I think it's the way the earth is supposed to sound, except that we don't hear it, like your image of humming. A parent humming to an infant to calm them, not a song but just a presence. Mostly it's just always there, always at the back of my mind, at the edge of my hearing, sometimes louder. And then sometimes it changes. Minor chords, notes that slide up or down the staff, and every so often a vicious shriek like the clarinet player said something offensive to the piper and she put her elbow in his stomach."

"What makes it change? Can you tell?"

"I'm not entirely sure, but- how familiar are you with opera?"

Violet scrunched her nose for a minute before stopping herself.

"Not your thing, hm?" I smirked. "Not as relaxing as staying home with a book, of course."

"There isn't a lot of opera being performed here or at the outposts," she pointed out.

"But you were in Calldyr too, weren't you?"

"When I was little! My parents probably went if it was a political thing? But Mom wasn't exactly a fan of demonstrating emotion, whether it was her own or someone else doing it."

"I was thinking about a particular kind of aria that's sung when someone is going mad. One of the earliest examples was in an opera about the three brothers, actually. When it's done properly, it's all minor keys and discordant notes on strings, so your ear recognizes what it should be and does the work of making it sound like a melody even though it isn't really one."

"You're not exactly selling me on opera, Xaden."

"Okay, forget about opera, that's not the point. It just sounds wrong. I can't think of how to explain why, but it does."

"Oh, maybe it's like how I can tell the difference between one of my joints being dislocated and something actually being wrong with it."

"Probably, although the way you grade your pain is always vaguely terrifying to me, Violence." I paused. "What scares me is that I'm starting to hear other things."

"What kind of other things?"

"The eggshells are the obvious example, but… I think it could be from anything with magic. The magelights have a little hum. Your pens when you're taking notes. And… I hear a song from you, too."

The alarm on her face wasn't just her own. I couldn't hear what Tairn was saying, but I could see her eyes lose focus as she listened and argued with him.

"I'm sure it's not just you, I just haven't spent much time with anyone else," I clarified, and I could practically hear Tairn telling her that was a problem as well.

"What do I sound like?" she finally asked. Always curious. I loved that about her.

"A heartbeat like temple blocks, or great bass drums when Tairn pushes through you, and then a melody of winds, high and clear like the wind in your face when you fly."

"Wind instruments," she repeated, thoughtful. "As long as I'm not a piccolo, I like that."

"I didn't realize you had a vendetta against piccolos."

"I'm small. Of course I have a vendetta against piccolos."

"Well, you're more of an ocarina, don't worry." I thought it best to change the subject. "What about the rest of the ingredients?"

"I have dried Leighsorrels left over from challenges last year, and a few other things." She showed me a tiny apothecary cabinet hidden in the back of her armoire.

"This is a uniquely you sort of battle ax." I took the cabinet from her and set it on her desk as she stood up. She pulled out several bottles labelled in her neat handwriting, including-

"Baneroot? Isn't that the one you said shouldn't be touched? Why do you have that in your room?"

She blushed adorably. "I hadn't gotten all the way to acting on it yet, but it made me feel better to have something of an idea for dealing with Varrish," she admitted.

"I didn't think your poisoning habit could get any sexier, but I was wrong," I told her. I kissed her- I wanted to do more than just kiss her, but I hesitated and she pulled away.

"I'll need to go about an hour east on Tairn to find the papaveri seed pods," she said, and left the other half of that unspoken; she'd need to go without me.

"Are you going tomorrow?" It was late for her already.

She nodded. "I'll leave early, and Rhi and Ridoc will cover for me. Maybe you can get some air tomorrow?Get a head start on the other things Sgaeyl asked you to do?"

"I'll work on it."

Once she was asleep, I slipped away from the room and went up to the burn barrel on the turret. I looked out over the valley I knew almost as well as my own mind last year; now I wasn't sure I knew either one. It looked different at night than it did in the daylight, but the darkness didn't hide the scars: the dead ground where the venin attackers had drawn, the torn grass where dragons and wyvern and gryphons had fallen and fought, the places where they'd had to build pyres for Malek on the spot because there were too many bodies to burn properly.

I could pick out every shadow in the valley in the shreds of moonlight. I couldn't always do it, but the knowledge lived in my head now. Even if I never acted on it, even if this self-control was enough, I'd know. This was what I'd be capable of if I let myself draw again.

I'd always felt like my shadows had a mind of their own, but never so clearly as I had lately. I wasn't sure how much Violet had noticed, but they moved without my direction. I could feel so much more clearly; not just where Violet was, but the gentle rise and fall of her chest so I knew she was still asleep and not having a nightmare.

I could reach so far, if I let myself. The music swelled as I thought about it, wings of shadow to carry me if Sgaeyl refused, to Calldyr where I could fully take revenge on Tauri and Melgren, and then find Aetos and tear him-

I could do it.

I wouldn't, but I could.

I seemed to be telling myself that a lot.

Instead of flying on righteous wings of shadow to bring death to my enemies, or even standing and looking out at the Iekobos River below and feeling maudlin, I reinforced my shields and I went back down to the bed I shared with the woman who loved me even though she knew what I could do at my worst.

I woke up to her returning from her ride with Tairn. I wanted to doze a bit longer, maybe drag her back into bed, but I found myself watching intently as she set up the glassware needed. There was really nothing better than watching Violet in her element, and while I'd gotten to spend time with her in the library or with her research, I hadn't had the chance to see her really get to work on her poisons before.

I noticed a clever little heating element that she set up that I hadn't seen before. "Can I see that?" I asked before she had a chance to activate it, and she jumped. "Didn't you notice I was awake?"

"I was trying to let you sleep," she admitted, handing me the disk. It was more complex than the training ones I'd seen her doing, with little adjustments to the runes for constant temperature. "Did you make this?"

"Garrick did, when I asked Imogen for help making a good one."

"Garrick's still here?" I'd assumed he'd gone back to Aretia.

She blushed a little, like I'd caught her in something. "He said he's staying until you're able to fly; I assumed you knew. I've been kind of letting him know how you're doing."

No panic. I was not going to let myself sound panicked. Not even when I noticed the shadows crawling up the door. "Does he know what it's for?"

"He knows I'm working on medicine for you." She sighed. "You should talk to him."

"I'm worried he- I'm worried he'll be able to tell."

"Well, in the meantime, he's worried. Can't you give him something? It's got to be better for you than sitting around here while this decants." It would take until tomorrow morning for the potion to be done, and while I was perfectly willing to continue sitting alone while she went to class, there were things I was supposed to be working on.

You must learn to trust them, I remembered Sgaeyl telling me. Garrick was probably the person I trusted the most.

I could at least talk to him and brace for the worst.

I hadn't been paying attention, but as soon as I was thinking about finding him I had no trouble finding that wall of a shadow. He was in the sparring gym, and honestly if I'd had to go looking for him without using my signet, I still would have started there.

I dressed and stared at myself in Violet's little mirror, trying to make myself look like less of a mess than I felt. I didn't think I was succeeding, certainly not enough that I'd fool Garrick, but did it matter anyway?

When I got there I paused in the doorway and just watched. The first years were practicing with their squads, and he was working with Liam's little sister. He'd been good at training the first year marked ones last year and the year before, and I'd wondered if he missed it once we were at Samara.

I watched him check in with Emetterio, then move on to sparring with Aaric, probably because none of the other first years were giving him much of a challenge. He'd done with same with Liam last year, but I didn't really think Alic's brother would accept… well, it wasn't my help, so I suppose it wasn't that surprising.

I ended up watching the entire lesson, just following along as Garrick moved through the space. It reminded me of last year, and it was hilarious to realize I was thinking of last year as simple. Gods.

I stepped into a shadow as the first years trooped out to avoid attracting attention, but once the room was emptied I stepped back into the light as Garrick and Emetterio spoke.

"Xaden! You do exist, holy shit!" he yelled across the gym when he finally caught sight of me.

"It's good to see you too." It really was. I'd have to tell Violet that she was right, later. "Walk with me?"

"Of course, brother."

When I started walking, he fell into place beside me. "Violet's been guarding your privacy like mad, you know. It feels like when I used to have to keep Catty off you, except it's less fun being on the other side."

I laughed at that. "I didn't realize she was being such a hardass. I kind of just assumed you'd gone back to Aretia."

Garrick brought his hand to his heart, flailing the other one dramatically. "I'm wounded that you think I'd leave you when you're fucked up that bad. Wounded."

"Yeah, I should have known better. Like you'd miss an excuse to fuck around for a couple of weeks."

"Hey, I've been busy! Bodhi's been ordering me around instead while we waited for…" He trailed off.

"While you waited for what?" I prompted him.

He glared at me for making him say it. "… To make sure you weren't gonna fucking die, asshole."

That shot me through the chest. I should have died. But then what would have happened? Fuck. I was walking on autopilot, down the stairs and the music was starting to get louder, either because I was going down or because I was distracted. Maybe both. I tried to focus on what Garrick was saying.

He looked me up and down. "You look okay, does that mean whatever Violet's doing is working?"

"It's complicated."

"So you're… still recovering?" He wasn't letting it drop. Still, he said it so hesitantly that I felt like shit for lying to him about this.

"I can't- Sgaeyl-" I choked on the words. Trust them, Sgaeyl had said. Why was this so hard?

"Hey, you take all the time you need to recover. Nobody thinks any less of you for it, even if it's up here." He clapped his arm around my shoulder and made a mess of my hair. "Do you want me to stay, brother? I know you've got Violet, but I'd rather be here-"

"I dunno, I think I need you in Aretia to keep the Assembly in line," I smirked as I said it, trying to sound normal. Wanting to sound normal.

He laughed. "They're used to waiting on you, they can keep a little longer. You and Violet must have bought us some time."

"You're more than I deserve, do you know that?" Up close like this I could hear his music, a bodhran heartbeat and the fiddle of Chradh's power twisting through him.

"It's not about fucking deserving, Xaden. You're stuck with me." We talked about what Bodhi had him doing, what he'd heard from Brennan, and he made it clear he was ready to keep carrying everything for me as long as I needed him to.

Fuck, if I didn't want to feel like a failure, it was now or not.

"Wait! Gar, there's something-" I couldn't keep going then, but when I went silent, he kept following me anyway. I couldn't imagine doing it inside the stone walls of the quadrant, so I took us outside.

We went down toward the river. My memories there were a fucked up mess and I almost immediately wished I'd gone towards the flight fields instead. There was the tree where I talked to Violence for the first time, after she'd caught our meeting. Here was the dead ground where the venin nearly killed me and where I made the worst mistake of my life- Garrick gave it a wide berth and so did I. Liam and I spent an afternoon on that rock right before War Games, while he carved and we talked about what would happen when Sloane crossed the parapet. This was the spot where the river widened and slowed and we'd fuck around in the water when it was hot.

Despite being confident Garrick had at least half a dozen daggers on his person, I pulled out one of mine and held it out to him, handle first.

He took it automatically, looking it over for nicks in the blade and testing the balance. "This is one of mine."

"Yours are my favorite. The balance is always a little better."

He held it out to return it, but I pointedly didn't take it.

"Hold on to it until you hear me out." The melody of the Source was so loud down here, weaving in and out of the river's rushing noises.

Garrick looked uncomfortable, shifting his balance and pushing his curly hair away from his face, but he didn't argue.

"I need to know that you're willing to kill me."

"Xaden-"

Shadows fell across his face, silencing him. His eyes widened. I knew he could breathe, but at the same time- I'd never threatened him with my signet before. I'd never had to.

"Let me say it, and I trust you to decide."

He nodded.

"During the battle, I didn't almost burn out. I did burn out. Completely. I was empty, and I was going to die, and I was going to lose, and I didn't know which of those was worse."

I noticed a tiny tremor in Garrick's hand, the one that held the dagger.

"I pulled from the ground."

The second I got the words out, I pulled my shadows back, and I wasn't sure if Garrick's gasp was because he could open his mouth again or because of what I'd said. He looked at the dagger for a minute and then glared at me. "Fucksake, Xaden, is this some kind of test? Because it's not funny."

"I'm not joking. This is entirely serious."

I watched his demeanor shift, ready for business, spine straight and dagger ready. It made me proud, that he could do that to me. "Who else knows?"

"Violet."

"Of course. Who else?"

"No one else. You're the only one I trust to kill me if it comes to that. I know Violet won't."

"Have you drawn again since?"

"No. It's there. It wants me to, but so far I've held out."

"Is this why Sgaeyl's been MIA? You haven't flown at all since then."

I nodded. "The bond is still there, but she's had me blocked since."

"What were you thinking? Fuck, Riorson, how am I supposed to... I should kill you. I should." He held the dagger out at me. I didn't move.

"What have you been doing since then?"

"At first I just hoped it would fade on its own if I didn't draw again. I figured I was strong enough to resist, but it's more complicated than I realized. Sgaeyl's offered a possible solution, but if it doesn't work…"

"So you're not hopeful."

"I'm still holding out, but I'm not sure what happens next."

Garrick tossed the dagger in the air like he was thinking. Caught it. Tossed it again. "Okay. I'm in."

"You're in?"

"I'll take responsibility for you myself. It's about time someone did, and honestly, if you losing your shit is an option, I don't trust anyone else. You hurt anyone, you lose control? This is going right between your fucking eyes."

"Thank you." I sagged in relief.

"Would you really just let me kill you?" he asked after a minute.

"I'd deserve it."

He glared at me. "Fucksake, Xaden, you don't say shit like that. Fuck. You're my responsibility now, I decide when you deserve to die. Got it? And the answer is,m not yet. You have too much fucking work to do, I'm not doing this without you. So you get your shit together and you make sure whatever this treatment is, it works. Understood?"

"Yeah. Understood."

I thought about asking him not to tell anybody, but it felt like an insult. Trust. Okay, I was trusting him. I'd let him do whatever he thought he needed to do. So I watched him go back inside, and I sat next to the river until it got dark and it was easier to breathe before I went in to see Violet.

In the morning, Tairn didn't even want Violet to touch the tisane long enough to pour it for me. We decided to finish it after breakfast, so I'd have some food and some rest to draw on.

I made no jokes about it how it would solve my problems either way, if it worked or if I died. I had no confidence that it would solve my problems if I did. Did Malek even accept the soulless?

If I had confidence, it was in Sgaeyl and in Violet, and they were the ones who had put this in front of me. so I tried to think hopeful thoughts as I carefully poured the first dose of the draught through cheesecloth to catch the pieces of raw materials that hadn't been dissolved. The resulting liquid was warm in my hand, the heat radiating through the glass that held it. The glass was tiny, and had the name of a bar in Chantara etched in it.

I raised an eyebrow at Violet.

"I borrowed it from Ridoc," she shrugged.  

I tipped the glass back and let just a sip of the draught into my mouth. It was disgusting, which I had pretty much expected based on Violet's reaction to the list of ingredients. After the first taste of it on my tongue, I knocked the first dose back like a shot so I didn't have a chance to gag.

She watched me for a minute as I tried not to cough. "How do you feel?"

"Fine so far."

"Get as close to the earth as you can. Underground if possible," Sgaeyl instructed. I was about to say something to Violet but she was listening to Tairn. I couldn't help wondering what he was saying.

"He's reminding her that you have to do this alone," my dragon answered.

"Is it safe for me to go that far down?"

"You tell me, Faithless One. Is it?"

Her point was made, and I winced at the title she gave me. I kissed Violet on her temple and left, walking down from the dorm rooms into the more public corridors of the Quadrant, and then out to the flight field and into the stairwell that led down to the luminary. I hadn't spent as much time down here as Garrick, but it was familiar and it was underground.

The song of the Source was louder here, which didn't surprise me, but it was also different.

"Sit with it."

I slipped into one of the storage rooms and shut the door behind me, throwing up a ward to lock it as well as barricading it with shadows. Then I sat on the floor and laid back, closing my eyes to avoid staring at the stained plaster ceiling. It seemed like the moment I relaxed and stopped grounding myself in the moment, the music swelled like a storm and my eyes snapped open.

"Focus."

This time when I closed my eyes I was expecting it. Again, the music swelled. Instead of backing away from the sound, I stayed with it, listening. It got louder. It became more forceful, more insistent.

I tried to shield against it, visualizing walls, shadows, even putting myself on my hill in Aretia and pushing it away, but nothing seemed to work.

Finally I just braced myself against the impact, my feet planted on the hill, and let the water rise up around me. It swirled in waves against my body, climbing higher. One minute it was at my knees, then my waist, then my chest. When it reached my neck, I had to fight the urge to take a deep breath, and then a wave rushed at my face and I was surrounded.

When I came back to myself, it took me several slow blinks to realize I was using my eyes. The room was so blackened with shadows that I wasn't sure they were open at first. I pulled the shadows back, though they were slower to answer than usual. They were thicker, viscous, flowing back toward me like blood from a corpse.

As the light came in, I had to keep blinking to focus on anything. Everything seemed to have a halo. When I ventured out into the hall, there was an almost blinding light. What the hell were they doing with the luminary to cause that?

I went to investigate, ignoring the screaming music of the earth and instead trying to focus on the clear, ringing bells of the luminary.

The woman working with the luminary had her back to me, and she didn't look up when I came in. I knew her; she'd been running the forges long enough that we'd met her as first years, when Garrick started down here to get us access to the alloy.

"Roan? Is everything okay?"

She startled and turned to look at me. "Riorson? Fuck, you scared me. I'm fine, what's wrong?"

I shook my head. "Everything looked so bright, I thought something might be wrong with the luminary."

Chappell set down her tools and came over to me, looking me in the face. She was glowing too, with a heartbeat like the forge itself, and I realized that whatever I was seeing wasn't any more clear to other people than the music was. I flinched away from her.

"You ever had migraines?"

I shook my head, confused.

"Might be you're having one now. Sometimes it'll give everything a halo, since your head's not working right. You ought to get yourself to the healers and let somebody check you out."

"Is this normal?" I asked Sgaeyl, but she didn't answer. I thanked Chappell for her concern and made my way back upstairs - not to the healers, fuck if they'd know what to do. I went back to Violet's room. Or was it our room at this point? I wasn't leaving, and I wasn't moving into an empty room like Garrick had done, so it seemed like it was ours, really.

When I opened the door, Violet jumped up from where she was sitting with one of her father's books. "Xaden! Are you okay?"

"Not sure," I admitted. Violet was glowing too, bright enough to make my head hurt. I closed my eyes and sat on the bed, rubbing my temples.

"What's wrong? Why won't you look at me?" She must have been channeling from Tairn because she managed to get even brighter, bright enough that it hurt with my eyes closed. I winced and turned away.

"Look at me, Xaden," she demanded. Why was she angry? I hadn't - fuck.

"Everything I look at is fucking blinding," I told her, forcing myself to open my eyes and lean in toward her so she could see them in detail. She looked more worried than angry, actually, but I felt like shit anyway. "Sgaeyl would tell you if I fucked up."

She froze at that and I wondered briefly if she hadn't realized what she was looking for. "I'm sorry," she said quietly.

"What for? I deserve it." Then she was angry again, but that was better than sad.

"I was worried! You were down there for hours, it's almost the end of dinner, I didn't know if you were…"

"You should go eat," I told her. "See your friends if you can. You need better company than just me." And I was exhausted and Chappell was right, I definitely had a headache coming on. I didn't want to argue, I just wanted to close my eyes.

"I'm going to bring food back for you and you're going to eat it," she insisted as she left, and I was in no position to argue. I took off my boots and changed out my leathers for some sleep pants before passing out.

I woke up in the middle of the night with Violet next to me and food on the desk. Violet's glow was softened now, like a mage light under the sheet. I ate as much of the food as I could, but it didn't taste like much. Was that just because it had been sitting out?

— Xaden —

In the morning, Imogen and Garrick argued with Violet until I told her to let them in.

"We have a plan," Garrick started.

Imogen talked right over him. "You look like shit, Riorson."

"Good morning to both of you," I grumbled.

"Are you poisoning him?" she asked Violet, then turned to me without waiting for an answer. "Is she poisoning you?"

"Yes."

Violet and Imogen both gawked at me, which made me smirk. Garrick just rolled his eyes. "Stop fucking with her."

"No, it's the truth," Violet told them. "Sgaeyl said it's a potential cure, but it has to make him worse before he can get better."

"We don't need him to get any worse." Imogen crossed her arms.

"A different kind of worse, I suppose. I trust Sgaeyl." It was too late for them to argue with me on that point anyway.

Violet explained some details about the process, but I wasn't interested in adding to it. It was hard enough trying to explain what had happened to Violet; trying to put it into words for Garrick and Imogen was impossible and unnecessary. After they left, we spent the day waiting to see if I'd recover, and the light dimmed just like the music had, to probably-tolerable levels. I went to dinner with Violet, but the cafeteria was entirely too overwhelming, and I begged off and went back upstairs, alternating between dozing and beating myself up for not being able to handle it.

"I'm going to take the second dose tonight," I told Violet when she was getting dressed for bed.

"You haven't recovered from the first one yet."

I shook my head. "I don't think I'm going to recover from it. I don't think that's the point." I hadn't thought about that before I said it out loud, but it seemed obvious once I did. Whatever it was doing to me, it wasn't something I was supposed to recover from.

My hand shook a little as I held the drink this time, but I still managed to throw it back in a single swallow.

"I don't know how I'm supposed to sleep, worrying about you," Violet said, kissing me. "Be careful, okay?"

"As much as I can," I promised. Quietly, I slipped out of our room and into the dark hallway. I pulled my shadows around myself and stuck to the sides of the walkways out of habit, but there was no one to see me at this hour.

I didn't know where I was going until I was at the door of the interrogation chamber, unlocking it and making my way down. They'd told us Barlowe was dead so I'd had no reason to be here, but here I was anyway. It was certainly down and if anything the noise here was worse. The music wasn't just screaming at me, it felt actively broken.

Maybe Barlowe had managed to draw here at one point or another? Maybe they'd missed a dose or something. Or fuck, maybe it sounded like that because it remembered what the place was used for. I remembered promising Violence we'd burn the place. Gods knew it needed it, it smelled awful from Barlowe's final days.

"Is there a way to fix it?" I thought to Sgaeyl. She still wasn't speaking to me most of the time, but she'd been listening when I started yesterday so I thought maybe…

"If there was, we'd have healed the Barrens."

I didn't answer that. If there was an answer for the Barrens… fuck, that was too far in the future to even contemplate right now. First I needed to figure out if there was an answer for myself.

The screaming earth and the screaming history of the place seemed to run together as I sat and let the sound wash over me again. I kept thrashing, thinking I saw Violet, or Liam, or fucking Barlowe. The music swelled faster, the discordant notes sped up. Shadows swirled around me like they were trying to keep up with the beat of the music, and shapes played across them, dark on darker. I watched a shadowplay of dragons and wyverns, though it hurt just trying to understand if it meant anything.

This time when it faded and I came back to myself, the room looked a mess. The furniture was nothing but scraps of wood strewn everywhere, like a storm had blown through. The floor and walls were no longer stained, though. The shadows must have blasted the stone clean.

I hauled myself back upstairs, black tendrils supporting me and making sure my legs kept moving. The sun was up when I stepped back into the halls of the quadrant and I hissed at the brightness before throwing up a dark blanket over myself.

Violet was awake when I made it back to her room, and I could hear her melody at double-speed, full of staccato notes of anxiety. It made me a little motion sick just to be near her.

"I was starting to worry I'd have to go find you."

"I'm glad you didn't. You wouldn't have liked it." My voice was barely above a whisper, and I dragged myself back to her bed.

"Next time, I want you to stay here," she told me as she pulled a blanket over me. It was warm, which was good, because I realized I was shivering. I didn't argue with her. She sat next to me, reading one of the books from her father's office, her hand resting in my hair.

"Do you need to get to breakfast?" I asked through a yawn.

"Eventually. But I have time for you." She carded her fingers through my hair and I fell asleep against her thigh.

I dreamed about flying.

At first I was on Sgaeyl's back, wrapped in my winter flight leathers. The ground below was white in every direction, snow coating the mountain passes between Tyrrendor and Deaconshire. It was the first time I'd been back to Aretia, in the winter of my first year at Basgiath. My stomach was in knots of anticipation and anxiety at seeing it again, and I reached through the bond to Sgaeyl, expecting some reassurance.

Instead of her navy starlight, there was an angry scream of power and I was falling, my shadows pulling at me but unable to stop gravity from claiming me as the ground rushed up.

I only found out that I'd slept for a day and a half because I was trying to count how long to go between doses and Violet corrected me. I'd been sleeping a lot, but that was more than a lot. I'm not sure if it was a side effect of not drawing or just an excuse not to think, but even after sleeping for nearly two days I was nodding off every time I stopped moving.

"Are you sure you want to keep going?" Violet asked again when I started to prepare the third dose. "I'm not confident this is helping."

"But it will. Sgaeyl said so." It sounds childish when I say it, but I have to put my faith in her. "Besides which, I'm not sure stopping is an option."

"It's not," Sgaeyl told me. "If you stop, you will die."

"Well, there's my answer." I shrugged, picking up the small glass.

I fully intended to swallow this one in a single motion again, but I choked partway through and had to force my lips together so I didn't spit it out and waste it. The liquid seemed thicker, more like honey than water when I tried to swallow it, and it left a coating on my tongue and the inside of my mouth.

"I'm going to stay here this time," I told Violet. The room was already spinning around me slightly. "You can stay or go-"

"She should go," Sgaeyl told me, and by the look on her face, Violet heard the same instruction. "You cannot hide now anyway." It's true. I couldn't imagine pulling myself together enough to walk the halls, and I could not imagine it mattered any more how close or far from the earth I was.

"Promise me I'll know if something's wrong," she said aloud, and it must have been for my benefit since I couldn't hear her talking to Tairn. The answer sufficed, because she gave me a quick hug and grabbed the volume of her father's notes she was working through.

I was relieved to be alone. The air in the room felt humid and stagnant, as if we'd left a hot shower running for hours, and the nightclothes I'd worn to bed made my skin crawl. I stripped down to nothing, trying not to notice how grey and flaking my skin looked.

Laying on the bed was impossible. None of my joints would relax. I tried sitting on the floor, but I felt like I could feel every speck of dirt or stray hair on top of the texture of the stone. I ended up dragging the blanket and pillows into the corner of the room. The blanket and sheets were smooth without being too soft, and the coolness from the stone was still able to seep in where I leaned against the wall.

There was no real meditation this time, no imagery. I just faded in and out of consciousness, aware of some breeze or some texture or just the way my body moved while I breathed, and then blissfully unaware for an hour or more.

Every time I woke up there were more pillows or blankets. At one point I woke up as the door opened, shadows dragging in a stack of sheets that must have come from the linens room. The sheets were the smoothest, but then I thought about the officers' linens and tried to focus long enough to get the shadows there to come to me.

I passed out before I was certain, but the next time I woke it was in the softest sheets I'd ever had outside of Aretia so it must have worked.

— Violet —

"Are you sure you want to keep going?" I felt sick watching him pour another dose of the poison through the filter. He was shaking against me; I had to steady his hand so he could pour. "I'm not confident this is helping."

"But it will. Sgaeyl said so." He whispered it like a prayer, and I wondered if he was doubting too or if he truly trusted her that much. "Besides which, I'm not sure stopping is an option."

Even I heard Sgaeyl's reply that it was not an option, which didn't make me feel any better. At least he wanted to stay in our room this time, so I didn't have to worry about who he might run into in the halls of the quadrant.

"Promise me I'll know if something's wrong," I insisted of Tairn as I left.

"The matter is of knowing what is wrong with him and what is right at this time," he told me, "but you will know if you are needed."

That was the best I was going to get and I knew it. Even Andarna was being quiet about it now.

I managed to distract myself all day, knowing it would likely take as long as the first two treatments had. I sat with Jesinia and Sawyer for a while, noticing how much his signing had improved, and then went to visit Ean. He'd finished rebinding another one of my father's notebooks, this one the oldest-looking one. The date on the earliest notes indicated it was a little older than me, even.

He hadn't started using his shorthand yet in this one, instead writing down his notes in Tyrrish. That seemed like the sort of thing he'd do just for fun, since my mother would have still been stationed in Tyrrendor at the time.

"I just started taking this one apart," he said, showing me a few unfolded pages. It took me a minute to register that they were something entirely different- they were written vertically, for one thing, and in an entirely different handwriting.

"Are these letters?" I realized after a moment.

"Seems like it. He must have decided to hide them with his notes."

I skimmed ahead to find the end- the first letter was three pages long, and I realized I recognized the signature. It ended, "Stay safe, my friend," and it was signed Isaac Mairi.

"Can you put them aside instead? Maybe in a folio? Once I'm done with them, I know someone who might want these." It felt strange to consider being able to give Sloane another stack of letters, but I couldn't imagine not offering them to her, either.

"Of course."

I hesitated before leaving. "Do you know my father had plans to do anything with his research? Some of it seems incredibly pointed, especially the work on feathertails and dragon adolescence." Just browsing the oldest notebook, she saw the Tyrrish words for dragon and change again.

"I don't know what he would have done with it. I don't know what he was trying to find, Violet, but I don't think he would have trusted Navarre to put it go good use." Ean looked down at the letters he was unfolding, one at at time. "If there's an answer, it's likely in the books alongside everything else."

By the time I found myself in the cafeteria, eating dinner with Rhiannon, I felt like I couldn't concentrate on anything she was saying.

"Is there anything we can do to help you or Xaden?" she asked, trying to be supportive. "It's good to see you going around and doing things but we could maybe sit with him, or... I'm not sure what would help. It seems like it must be serious if he still isn't leaving the room."

"You have no idea."

"I could, you know, if you told me."

She deserved it, after everything that had happened, but I wasn't sure if it was even my place to tell her. I reached around the meal trays and squeezed her hand instead, and she squeezed it back.

"I'm not sure what's going on with him at this point," I told her honestly. "I thought he was getting better, but now it seems like every step forward is actually a step back."

"I know you said it was burnout, but Vi-"

My heart stopped in my chest. Did she suspect something?

"Do you think maybe the venin sage did something to hurt him that we don't even know about?"

"I don't think so but... I hadn't even thought about that." What if he'd messed up Xaden's head somehow? I had been beating myself up asking why he'd do such a thing when it went against... literally everything he and his father had ever done.

Xaden said it was because the sage was going to kill him and then me. I remembered him saying he'd give up the whole revolution and everything else for me, but I never thought he'd actually do it. Or that he'd have to do it.

For a wild moment, I wondered if that could be an answer, if we could tell people the venin had infected Xaden somehow instead of admitting the truth, but I couldn't imagine going through with it. There was no coming back from a lie like that. Right now we were just being vague, mostly lying by omission, and had to believe that was different.

I shook my head, trying to push that train of thought aside. "We're still trying. Sgaeyl's actually been very helpful." In her own way.

Rhiannon insisted on walking me all the way to my door. "Let me know if you need company, okay? I can sit and study with you while he snores, even."

"You're the best, Rhi."

I paused outside my room for just a moment. Tairn? Is it okay?

It is safe. I could tell he was choosing his words.

When I opened the door I didn't see Xaden at first, I had a moment of panic that he'd left before my eyes registered a pile of blankets in the corner of my room. Shadows crawled around them like soldiers on a perimeter, but they parted for me when I reached for him.

"Xaden?"

The blankets shifted and his face appeared. He pressed his cheek against my hand, nuzzling me.

"What's going on?"

"Everything hurts."

"So you made a blanket fort?"

His answer came slowly. "... A nest."

I didn't understand what was going on exactly, but I couldn't shake the thought that it looked cozy and safe.

"Can I join you?"

"Maybe. I want you to. You're very bright, but I want to try."

I stepped back and took off my boots and jacket, and then my daggers very obviously. I'd already mistrusted him once and I wasn't going to do it again.

When I knelt down at the edge of Xaden's nest, shadows wrapped around me and pulled me backwards. The blankets moved around me, some lifting and others sliding into place, rearranging the space for two.

I finally laid hands on Xaden. He was so warm I thought he had a fever.

"Is it too hot in here?"

"No, it's perfect," he insisted, but it was so warm that being next to him made me start to sweat. I let the shadows help me take off my shirt, my pants, even my corset once I realized he was nude.

It was good to put an arm around him without him shying away from my touch. He let me run my fingers over his stomach and trace the sides of his pectorals, though I felt him tense under my hand.

"Is this okay?" I asked, wanting to make sure.

His answer took a minute, as if finding words was a struggle. "What?"

"You seem so sensitive," I tried to clarify. "I wanted to check. Is it too much if I touch you?"

"No," he said, barely above a whisper. "It's not too much."

My hands moved up as I pressed my body against his back, and he gasped at the feeling of my fingers on his… tricep? Armpit? That was even more wildly sensitive than I'd realized. I couldn't resist letting my hand trail down to his stomach again, to the little trail of hair that led down from his navel.

"Is this okay?" I asked again.

"Yes," he whimpered as I brushed my fingertips over the base of his hardening cock.

"Silver One, this is so much more dangerous than you realize," Tairn cut through my thoughts and I froze like a teenager getting caught on the couch again.

"Really not the time," I told him, and I wanted a moment to make sure he wasn't going to reply before I reinforced my shields to block him out. Honestly.

"Is this still good?" I asked Xaden, trying to get my mood back. When he didn't reply, I started to pull my hand away, fighting off disappointment.

In a breath he was moving, rolling me onto my back and flipping at the same time so that he was above me, his eyes so dark that I felt like they wanted to drown me. He crushed his lips against mine, nipping at my lower lip and then down my jaw and neck.

His nibbles felt sharper than usual and the shadows were crawling over his body like they had a mind of their own.

Rather than the slow, sensual approach that Xaden usually took, his lips didn't even leave my shoulder as his hand found its way into my panties. Pushing them aside, his thumb was quickly on my clit and another finger was tracing the line of my folds, stroking the wetness there.

"Xaden," I moaned his name. It hadn't been that long in the grand scheme of things, but it felt like months since he'd opened me up like this.

I closed my eyes when he tore my panties off, and then it was just moments before he sheathed himself in me. His cock seemed to push deeper than usual, or maybe it was the angle. Or- was he still using his shadows to keep from touching me? Fuck, it felt so good I didn't care. I raised my hips to greet him and he growled.

Not the way he usually growled in bed, not just a low, gravelly voice whispering my name, but a real animal's growl.

I opened my eyes and Xaden loomed over me. His body was more shadow than skin, and in the already-dark space it was hard to tell what I was seeing. His hands were pinned over my forearms where he held himself up, his entire grip dark and solid like claws holding me down. His face was so shadowed I couldn't make out half of his features, the shape of it seeming to stretch.

The blankets were thrown off entirely and shadow exploded out from him, onyx-black wings spreading over us as he threw his head back. Part of me, the part that understood the riders who ran at the first formation after crossing the parapet, that part of my brain panicked.

Xaden growled again, leaning forward against me like a dragon in rut until his mouth was against my neck, and something inside of me finally gave way.

Almost distantly, I heard myself growling back. I bent my elbows below his grip on me, digging my nails into his forearms. Then I came apart entirely, lightning cracking outside as I lost control. Above me Xaden roared, the noise utterly inhuman.

Afterward, he nuzzled me like he had when I first returned to the room and curled up around me as the shadows dragged the blanket nest back into place. I could feel a damp cloth working gently between my legs, and I slowly realized Xaden had fallen asleep as his shadow took care of the mess.

It was only after his breathing was regular again that I dared re-open the bond to Tairn.

"What the fuck was that?" I needed to know, my body still twitching every few minutes.

"I warned you-"

"You did not warn me about incredible sex," I clarified, feeling myself blush. "You said it was dangerous."

"It was dangerous," he insisted. "He is dangerous, though all three of you seem determined to ignore it."

This felt different from his usual complains about Xaden, though.

"Tairn? What am I missing?"

"He is losing control as the process continues, Silver One. His bond with the earth is changing. His very essence is changing, and we still have very little idea how that will play out."

"So far it's just been blanket forts and naps. I'm still not sure what you're seeing that I'm not."

"This is a very dangerous time for the Lieutenant. He must continue to avoid drawing what is not yet his, but his connection grows stronger with each dose."

"Stronger?" I asked, confused. "I thought the connection was being blocked or broken- isn't that why he looks like Barlowe did before he died?"

"The Lieutenant continues to refuse to draw," Tairn acknowledged.

"That's why his shadows are being so loud," Andarna added. "He doesn't have the strength to control them."

I pulled in my knees, curling up within Xaden's embrace. It felt natural to twine together like this. Different, yes, but natural.

"Why does he smell so good?" I asked as I started to relax.

I heard Andarna laugh. "Because he smells like a dragon," she told me just before I fell asleep.

I woke up to someone trying the doorknob and yelping.

"Sorrengail, what the fuck!" Imogen shouted through the door.

"Sorry!" Violet called back. I heard the bed shift and then her feet as she scurried to the door. "The wards aren't supposed to be that violent." That was probably my fault, but I was too tired to feel any more guilt. Clearly Imogen was fine if she was still yelling, right? I felt like I'd been asleep for about ten minutes, what could she possibly need to wake us up about?

"Is Xaden here? He's still here, right?" Even if I couldn't hear her voice I'd know that was her. The heartbeat was just a few notes higher than Garrick's, but she was somehow the angriest harp notes I'd ever imagined, every note resonating in and around her as her magic plucked at her feelings, or maybe as it plucked at the people around her looking instinctively for memories.

"Of course he's here. Where else would he be?"

Imogen didn't answer that. "Nobody's seen either of you in days."

"Xaden hasn't been conscious in days. I didn't want to leave him."

I'd swear I could hear Imogen crossing her arms over her chest. "So you've just been, what, existing on air and light for the last three days?"

Violet mumbled something I couldn't hear under the blankets.

"Actual words, Sorrengail."

"The shadows keep bringing me food," Violet groaned. "Mostly stuff they can bring in under the door, I think? Cookies and bacon and pancakes and yesterday there was a quesadilla."

"So he's unconscious but he's still bringing you snacks. How romantic."

"What are you so worried about?"

"What am I- Violet! Nobody's seen you in days and your boyfriend is-" She cut herself off. "Sick. Your boyfriend is sick. Of course people are going to worry about both of you."

"Well, I'm fine, so thanks for checking, you can go."

"Nope. If you've been in here for three days you need a break."

"But Xaden-"

"Go talk to your friends, Sorrengail. I'll keep an eye on him. Matthias is worried about you. Fuck, they all are."

"But-"

"I'll be fine, I've got my daggers."

Violet hesitated, looking between me and Imogen. I couldn't hear her thoughts but it was pretty clear what she was thinking. I pushed the blankets off of me and pulled myself to my feet. It was a lot harder than I liked, even though the shadows rushed in to hold me up. "She's not worried about you, Imogen. She's worried about what you might do to me."

"Wow, you look like shit," Imogen stared at me. She kept her voice flat as usual, but I saw her eyes flicking over me, looking away, flicking back. She didn't want to stare.

"I know." My mouth moved like it wanted to smirk, but I couldn't quite manage it. "Violence, she's right, you need a break. You need to be with your friends. I'll be fine."

"You're already not fine."

"I won't be any worse when you get back."

She looked like she wanted to keep arguing. I was already exhausted from standing, so I leaned against the armoire, trying to look casual and probably failing. Finally she huffed and left, Imogen calling after her where she'd last seen their squad.

Once she was gone, I let myself sit heavily on the bed. I wanted desperately to crawl back into my stupid pile of blankets, but if I did, I knew I wouldn't be able to get back off the ground for a while and I figured Imogen wanted to talk.

"So I really look that bad," I started, fighting to maintain eye contact. She wasn't quite as bright as Violet but I had gotten used to Violet, and instead of Violet's silver, Imogen was a sunrise's worth of color shifting around her: pinks and yellows and oranges. My head hurt more just looking at her.

She nodded. "You look…"

"Like shit, I know."

"It's not fucking surprising, I guess, but I was going to say that you look like Barlowe did before he died."

"All the more reason for me to stay here."

"I'm not sure I believe you can make it down the hall anyway."

That was fair.

"Bodhi's worried about you, you know," she continued. "He's worried sick that you're still supposed to be too burned out to talk to anyone. Garrick and I are practically taking bets on how long it is before he stops taking no for an answer."

Maybe it was ridiculous, but some part of me still thought of Bodhi as my little cousin, six years old and following me around. Garrick was one thing. Imogen was not my decision but I couldn't fault Garrick for it. But they hadn't brought Bodhi in either, so they must not want to do that to him any more than I did. "How about-" I coughed. "How about I write him a little note letting him know I'm okay? I can't have him see me like this. I don't even want you to see me like this."

"Letting him know you're okay," she repeated, skeptical but finally picking her battles. "Yeah, that sounds… whatever." She didn't specify which part she was agreeing to, but she looked away. I dragged myself to Violet's desk and sank down into the chair. Taking up some of Violet's paper and a pen, I tried to write, but the pen just sputtered and spit ink across the page.

I knew intellectually that the lesser magics hadn't been responding properly any more than my signets were listening, but it was grating to run into it with a fucking pen. I stared at the moist ink spatter for a while, trying to focus enough to figure out what to do next.

"Xaden?"

Right. The letter. The letter for Bodhi. Bodhi's letter.

"I can't make it work," I said quietly. Fuck, how many different ways would I have to admit weakness before this was over?

"Make what work? If you don't know what to say, just tell him you're fine."

"No, I- the pen." Why did I have to sound so pathetic?

"Oh." The word sounded like something had cracked in her throat. Imogen reached over and took it from me. I watched her imbue it in the Tyrrish style so the rune would power it, and then hand it back.

"Better?" Her voice was gentle and I hated it so fucking much.

I dragged the pen across the paper, spelling Bodhi's name. The ink flowed smoothly enough, and if my handwriting was a bit shaky, I didn't think it was too noticable. "Much better. Thank you."

Bodhi, I hear you're worried about me. Don't be, I'll be fine. I'm just trying a new treatment that's making me tired all the time. I'll see you as soon as I'm better, I promise. -X

My handwriting looked like shit, at least by my own standards. I handed the paper to Imogen, who looked at it doubtfully before she folded it up and put it away.

"Not reassuring at all, is it?" I put my head down on my arms, finding it exhausting to sit up anymore.

"Nothing's going to be. We're just buying time."

I dozed a little bit, listening to Imogen's music. It had grown steadily slower as she watched me.

"Okay that's creeping me out," she said , startling me, and I looked up. A shadow had gotten ahold of the runed pen and was vaguely imitating my writing motions, leaving sinuous swirls across the next sheet of paper. "Why are you doing that?"

"I'm not doing that. They're doing whatever they want at this point."

"Still creepy. I didn't know signets could do that."

"Dunno what to tell you."

"I'm glad mine doesn't have a life of its own."

I thought of the way her colors undulated in the space around her, the slightly questioning notes in her private melody… it wasn't just her, either, Violet's energy had a curiosity that couldn't be ignored. Garrick's just pushed when I thought back on it.

I realized I should write that down for Violet, because I'd probably fall asleep again before she got back. I reached for the pen, but the shadow danced it away from me.

"Fine," I grumbled at it as my hand missed. "You write it down then."

The pen straightened and the loops tightened up, managing to make something more legible than I'd have expected.

powerreacheslikegravity

That was not quite what I'd meant to say but it would have to do. I was exhausted. Setting the pen down, the shadows wrapped around my chest and hoisted me to my feet, hugging me as I stumbled back to the blanket nest and keeping me from slamming into the wall when I lost my balance.

"The bed's right there, why are you on the floor?" Imogen asked. A little of her edge was back. Good.

"Doesn't feel right," I murmured as I curled up and felt myself being tucked in. "Night, Ims."

When I woke up again, the room was dark and the magelights were out. Violet was curled up next to me in the blanket nest, her breathing even with a noise like a soft purr on each breath.

I looked for the energy to take a deep breath and realized I didn't need much. Slow as a winter sunrise I realized I felt better than I had in more than a week. For a moment I panicked, wondering if I'd drawn in my sleep, but that wasn't it.

When I stood up, I could barely see myself. It looked like my entire body was wrapped in shadow. My back hurt like I'd wrenched it somehow, the skin tight when I stretched, and my mouth was sore.

Everything about me felt wrong.

And I remembered Sgaeyl telling me when you can no longer pretend, and I knew this was the time.

I pulled on a shirt and my leathers, because it felt strange not to. The leather hung loose on my frame; it was hard to remember it had once fit me like my skin. Though I wasn't sure my skin fit me any longer, either.

The walk to the flight fields felt longer than it ever had. It took on a dreamlike quality that reminded me of the way time had slowed down when my father ordered Bodhi's mom to take us and Garrick and the other kids left in Riorson House and bundle us out of Aretia. No matter how much I insisted my place was to stay and fight beside him, I was walking away from my home. My aunt was hurrying us, and I know we made good time because we did make it out of the city, but it felt like I was running for hours that day. Every step was slower than the last.

Now instead of being sent away, I was being brought in. Sgaeyl had every right to send me away, and I'd argue that it would have been the safer thing for her to do. I'd been afraid of her doing it, and I knew I deserved it. I knew Tairn wanted her to.

Sgaeyl was waiting for me on the far side of the flight field. The poison - the treatment? - was playing havoc with my senses again. It was one thing to have my normal night vision- three and a half years of seeing through shadows was more than enough time to have gotten used to that- but this was different. Instead of just seeing the shape of Sgaeyl, there was color: a deep blue light in the darkness that reminded me of the sky when we were camping in the further parts of Tyrrendor. It was as if she herself was made of starlight.

"You're beautiful," I breathed when I reached her. It was the same thing I'd said on the day she bonded me, and felt just as inadequate now as it did then.

"Come, hatchling," she said. Instead of waiting for me to climb up on her back, she picked me up carefully in her talons. I'd seen Tairn grab Violet this way before, but she never had. It was so much more intimate than I'd realized, to be held so tightly and know how easily they could kill you.

But she wouldn't. If she'd wanted to, I would be dead already.

To see the Vale was probably more than I had any right to experience. I'd seen it from the air at a distance, but this was the closest I'd ever been. I could pick out the dragons in the darkness, like flickering magelights in different colors.

"You will go to the Source and it will decide if you are accepted," she told me. "Don't fail me."

I started to ask her where to go, but the thought died when she set me down. The energy in the earth here didn't swell, loud and discordant and trying to deafen me like the ground around Basgiath or even on the flight fields. It didn't pull on me at all, just flowing where it wanted to go, a fast river with a strong current and a sweet melody from an instrument I couldn't identify.

It was right there for the taking. I knew instinctively that I could pull here and in moments I'd hold more power than I ever thought possible. I felt nauseous with the amount of trust she had shown me.

I wouldn't fail her.

There weren't many dragons active at this time of night, and the glow that seemed to radiate from everything here made sure I didn't get caught by surprise. I did sense dragons approaching as I walked several times, and each time I saw any hint of movement nearby I cloaked myself in shadows, carefully reinforcing the walls I'd tried to build between my hilltop and the source below. I tried not to think about Presentation, about the cadet I'd been talking to one minute and stepping over the next, about how much I'd worried that they'd smell traitor on me and send me to Malek. This is not then, I reminded myself.

Only one dragon even seemed to see me, and she shone with one of the strongest lights I'd seen, a wine-dark bruise of a moon among all the reds and greens, oranges and browns.

Andarna, I thought, and though she'd never heard me before, she nodded to me.

Keep going, brother. Her voice was clear and calm and reminded me of Violet. It was the strength I needed to keep moving. She pointed her tail, though I didn't really need the direction. The show of support, though, I appreciated that.

The source itself was like a sun ahead of me, drawing me in with its light. By the time I reached it I felt like I was vibrating with anticipation and the force of will required not to draw.

I would. not. fail her.

The light in the pool flowed upwards, first taking the shape of a beautiful woman- the very image of the statues I knew from the temple in Aretia- and then almost as soon as I recognized her, the light continued to flow and coalesce into an enormous dragon, larger than Codagh, her scales shimmering with the colors of the ocean in seafoam and pearl and pale teals.

"Amari?"

"That is what humans call me. Since the first six links between humanity and dragons passed out of my sight, so few have come, and only one other has approached me here in hundreds of years. How odd that the two of you are connected."

That surprised me. Whoever it had been, I guess Sgaeyl didn't know about it. "I thought dragons didn't care about human gods, but you… You are Amari, aren't you?"

The light flickered like laughter. "The relationship dragons have with the source is very different than the one humans have."

I bowed to her the way a human would regardless, trying to decide what to say. "Amari, I-"

"Don't worry about choosing your words. I see your soul, Xaden Riorson, chosen of Sgaeyl and son of Fen."

The idea struck fear in me.

"Do you think yourself unworthy?" It was unnerving to be on the other side, to have someone else knowing what I thought rather than being the one doing the reading.

"Sgaeyl thinks I am worth saving."

"But what do you think?"

I thought about Violet, and the marked ones. The Assembly and the people rebuilding Aretia, the fliers and the gryphons and the dragons who had been willing to trust my word and my hospitality. "I want to be worth saving." Violet had started to unweave the knots around my soul and help me remember what it was like to be a person again.

"You took what was not yours."

I bowed my head. I wanted to explain, to make her see why I'd done it, even to beg forgiveness, but I already knew there was no excuse.

"Would you do it again?"

My breath caught. I couldn't lie to her. And I was sorry to fail Sgaeyl after all she had done for me. But Amari would see the truth of me, I was sure.

"If I had that moment to do over again? To save Violet? I would."

I closed my eyes and waited for her to destroy me.

"You choose the narrowest possible interpretation. You choose to think the worst of yourself."

"I know better than to lie to you." 

The huge dragon lowered her face to mine. I lowered my eyes in deference and she snorted warm air at me, the same thing Sgaeyl had done when she was training me to look at her. To trust her. 

I looked up. Her eyes alone were big enough that I could only focus on one when she was this close. It was warm and golden, like a sun close enough that I could touch. A sun close enough to burn. 

She reared back and opened her jaw and I could only hope Sgaeyl was open enough to hear my I'm sorry before her fire enveloped me. 

I'd thought about what it was like to be burned in dragonfire. I had nightmares about it after seeing my father executed, and they'd never really stopped, just changed form after I came to Basgiath. Sometimes it was Codagh and I was in my father's place, or beside him. Sometimes it was one of the dragons who had landed on the wall on my conscription day, or the orange dragon that had been watching Alic try to kill Garrick on the day we were threshed. Sometimes it was Tairn and I was in Amber's place. 

Since the battle, it was usually Sgaeyl, the minute she realized what I had done. 

To say that it hurt is like saying Tairn is a bit tall or Violet is a little stubborn. It was a surprisingly peaceful agony, because there was so much of it that I couldn't really comprehend it. My leathers charred to nothing, my skin blackened and cracked and peeled, my muscles felt like they were melting, pulling away from bones that were being reduced to ashes and blowing away on the wind. 

I was everywhere in that moment. 

I saw Sgaeyl sitting with Tairn, Andarna between them. 

I hope I have done the right thing, she said, nuzzling her head next to Tairn's. 

You always do. Andarna stretched and clawed at the floor. 

Sgaeyl wrapped a wing around her. Not always. 

When have you not? 

You have already seen that life outside the shell is made of difficult choices, Tairn rumbled. Your mother and I made many of them even before you came to us. 

I was a good choice though, wasn't I? 

Of course, both of them assured her. 

And Violet was a good choice. So my brother will be too. 

Sgaeyl pulled her closer. I don't deserve you, young one, but I'm glad you came to us just the same. 

I saw other dragons, hatchlings, the entirety of the Vale, and beyond that Basgiath where they wove their gates with ours. 

I heard Violet's voice before I saw her, among the third years' doors. 

"Garrick? Please be here, I need to ask you a very important question about Xaden."

Down the hall, Imogen's door slowly opened and Garrick looked out. "Violet? Is he okay? Has he-"

"He's gone, he left. I don't even know when." Garrick's eyes widened and Violet shook her head. "Tairn said not to worry, so I don't think it's the worst case. But… I just needed to tell someone. I hate being left behind. Is it always like this?"

"Yes!" Imogen's voice came from behind him. 

Garrick laughed a little, but he didn't deny it. "He deals in impossible choices. We all do, but he tries to make sure he gets to make the worst ones, and then I make sure he gets out in one piece. I'd ask what's going on, but if I was supposed to know the details, I'd already know."

Violet nodded. "This time I get to be the one keeping secrets from you, I guess. I just hope he gets out in one piece."

He put an arm around her as my consciousness drifted past. Violet would be okay. She had her family, and mine. I was losing track of myself, ash drifting over the entire continent, flashes of dragons, humans, gryphons, lives, each of them tied to each other and ultimately down to the source herself. The continent was a living thing of her own, flowing and breathing and covered in the scars the venin had left on her.

I waited to learn what would become of my consciousness. Surely I should be fading by now? 

I sank down into the earth, into the sea, and further down. I recognized the sensation, or at least what it reminded me of. Pulling. But I was the one being pulled, through the energy of the earth herself and up, into Amari's channels, into her claws, and woven like a rune. The most complex rune I'd ever seen, but still a rune, built the same as any other. Breath. Blood. Bone. Warmth. Wisdom. Spark. Love. Knot after knot, she wove me back together.

Usually what keeps me sane when there's too much going on to deal with is finding a solvable problem and focusing on that. When my father died, I told Mom I would handle the arrangements so she didn't have to. Maybe that was selfish, because it meant it wouldn't be the awkward, formal rememberance and burning that Brennan had. I didn't have the chance to clean out his office; Markham saw to that, and after the scribes were done my mother told me not to disturb it. But I went through the rest of the family apartment at Basgiath, putting aside the things that were uniquely Dad's and dwelling with Mimr, the goddess of memory.

I only knew about Mimr and her brother Liew at all because of my father. Among the books we read when I was young there seemed to be endless fables and myths, and among those were the stories about much more complicated death and grieving had been before Unification. Now we have straightfoward burnings like Brennan's, commending the dead to Malek and moving on, at least in the military. Based on things I've heard Rhiannon say, or what Bodhi told me about Liam's burning, I'm realizing a lot of things are still carried forward, even if people don't know why they're doing it.

In the stories my father read me, the soul was judged by Malek but the grief belonged to Mimr and Liew. Choosing what to burn was more complex; it was about letting go of what would hold you in the past. I held my father's sweaters, his cream scribe robes, the cushion he put under his back when he sat on the couch, his favorite mug and the wooden tea-spoon he always used, the little notebook by the couch where he'd write things down. Each item was a memory, and while I prepared I draped myself in the memories of my father. Literally, in the case of wearing his sweater for the two days it took to go through everything.

A huge burning was a show of love and grief, a statement that everything reminded you of the one who had walked with Malek. There was an ancient Tyrrish chivalric romance where a queen in mourning cut her hair and threw it into her king's pyre, and for a long time widows had done that.

But one thing hadn't changed: once you were done burning, that was it. The soul belonged to Malek, and their name was either given to Mimr to be recorded as history, or to Liew to be forgotten. Of course everyone still thought of their dead, but we weren't meant to dwell in the past.

If anyone truly believed that a burning was the line between what you had with someone, and what your future would be without that someone, it was my mother. When my father died, she shut the door of his office and it no longer existed. When Brennan died, she only spoke his name at official commemorations and when she was too angry to forget. I knew the Sorrengails who came before us by their history: their dragons, their medals, their promotions. If my mother had once been a child who saw her parents as parents I never heard about it.

This particular morning, I could almost understand it, though. If I had the option to just let my mother's memory be something from the past, a person I could never disappoint again, would I? I considered just letting letting my siblings handle the apartment- Mira offered when she woke me up to let me know she was going there- but there were too many questions Mom didn't bother to answer. I needed to look.

Xaden had insisted on coming with me, and I wanted the support. I popped into the cafeteria for something for breakfast and handed him a pastry while I bit into one of my own. Thanks for coming, I sent through the bond, but he didn't answer. I assumed he had his shields locked down because-

I had enough to think about. Finding a solution for Xaden was my number one priority, but if I was going to get through today and tomorrow I had to put the problem in a box for now. Or an armoire. Or some other kind of furniture, it didn't really matter what as long as it stayed there. Otherwise I was afraid I would blurt something out to Brennan or Mira.

We had barely turned onto the corridor when I heard Mira's voice arguing ahead of us. At first I thought she was arguing with Brennan about something, but I couldn't make out enough of the words until we were closer. I pushed the door open and paused in the doorway, Xaden's presence a comfort right behind me.

Over her head I could see Brennan and Mira only a few inches apart. I was surprised to see someone standing almost between them, a scribe. Not someone I knew from my earlier training or any of Jesinia's friends.

"We deserve to have a day before they come through like jackals," Brennan was yelling.

"What are you planning to do, throw him out?" Mira shouted back.

"Protocol requires—" the scribe began to say.

They both turned on him. "Shut up!"

"So this is what having siblings is like," Xaden murmured.

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, that is exactly the way I've seen you argue with Garrick or Bodhi."

"What's a scribe doing here?" he asked as I watched the scribe look back and forth between Brennan and Mira like he was trapped between two dragons. 

"Oh, you wouldn't have run into it before," I realized, turning to Xaden. "When someone of a high enough rank dies, Markham sends someone to clear out their office. It happened when my father walked with Malek too. Officially it's about preserving the records of the dead, but…"

"But it's probably to make sure nothing interesting falls into the hands of anybody cleaning out the space?"

"Exactly. Wait here."

I took a fortifying breath and walked into the argument. The good news was I wasn't trying to play peacemaker between them this time, the way I had sometimes I was young and I didn't like the yelling. Instead they were mostly united, and my job was translating between the emotions of the riders and the rules of the scribe.

Finally I convinced the scribe to give us some time and he walked out of the apartment. Mira's shoulders sagged, and Brennan was looking at me like I'd surprised him again. He really needed to stop underestimating me, but this was not the time for that discussion. I turned back to Xaden and only then did my siblings seem to realize he was there.

"Good to see you up, Xaden," Brennan greeted him. "I think we're going to want to get the fliers out of here as soon as the gryphons are up to it, just to make sure nobody gets any ideas about eliminating threats to Navarre. I'd like to trust Melgren, but I don't."

Xaden scoffed. "I don't want to trust him either."

"We need to figure out which riders are coming with us," Brennan continued. "Navarre's leadership wants them to stay, but-"

"We'll stay for now," Xaden said quickly, and I remembered his declaration last night that we'd stay in the wards so that I was safe from him. "Anyone who wants to go back is welcome to, but I don't want them to be rushed into making a decision. Melgren knows we're serious now, so we have some leverage, and even with the luminary functional, there are other resources here."

"That's why were're all here, isn't it?" I interrupted. "I was hoping to find some things that I think Dad might have kept hidden."

"I think we all want to see what's tucked away in here. You asked the scribe to come back when riders were calm, Vi, how long does that mean?" Brennan asked me.

"That's how scribe cadets tell each other to fuck off. Jesinia thinks it's hilarious. But realistically?  It buys us maybe an hour or two. If we push back too hard, we'll just get Markham up here lecturing us." Brennan made a face at that idea, and I suspected I was making the same one. "Scribes are like anybody else, Bren, he's got leadership giving him orders he has to follow. Telling him we know he's just following protocol goes a long way, and now he knows we aren't going to get in his way if he gives us a little space."

The main room, now that I was looking at it, was depressing. Mira was sitting on the edge of the couch like she was worried she wouldn't be able to escape if she leaned back. It was little wonder I'd never felt comfortable here. The furniture had been issued by housekeeping and it looked like it. 

Xaden picked up one of the uncomfortable, square throw pillows and turned it around.

"Looking for something?"

"I was half expecting it to have the PROPERTY OF BASGIATH WAR COLLEGE stamp on the back like the wool blankets in the dorms."

"Bren, Mira, can you two attack Mom's office? Anything she didn't want found would be there, so let's start there. I'll see if I can find anything Dad hid. Xaden, come with me."

"Do we need to get anything of yours while we're here?" Xaden asked as he followed me down the hall.

I paused, my hand reaching for the door to Dad's office. "Can you believe I almost forgot about that? Mom had me pack up my things before I entered the quadrant. That seems like another life, almost. Like I should let them burn the scribe I almost was."

"I don't want any part of you burned," he told me, kissing the nape of my neck. "The girl you were is still part of you, even if you thought you left her on the other side of the parapet."

I felt tears in my eyes, but I was bone-tired of crying. With a deep breath, I pushed open the door. "Let's do this first, okay?"

The first thing I noticed about the room was that even with the shelves picked over and half-emptied, even with the desk and the armchair covered in dust, this room still felt more lived-in than the front room had. I couldn't have explained it when I lived here with just Mom, after my father died, but eighteen months away from it let me look at it with fresh eyes. The living room looked like someone had set it up once but no one had sat there since Dad's memorial. In here, though… underneath the dust, the blotter on the desk had ink spots and wear marks. The chair in here looked like something people would actually sit in, and I couldn't help remembering a younger version of myself curled up there with a book.

"Anything worth finding in here is going to be hidden, right?"

"Exactly," I agreed. "I know a couple of places Dad hid things, but he was hiding his research from me by the end."

"That seems like a good sign to me. It means it's worth looking for."

I started by pulling the drawers out of the desk while Xaden began pulling down and flipping through the remaining books on the shelves. The large drawers on both sides had false bottoms, but neither had anything more than dust in them. The third drawer was locked.

There was one other place I could check. I crouched down on the floor and reached up under the armchair. It took a minute of feeling around with my fingers along the edge of the upholstery before I pulled out a small key, which unlocked the drawer. All that was in it was a single sheet of paper.

"What does it say?"

"'Nice try, Markham.'"

Xaden gave a short, sharp laugh at that, but he must have seen something on my face because the sound died quickly. 

On one hand, it was nice to see a reminder of Dad's cleverness, his sense of humor. On the other hand…

"Colonel Markham…he was my mentor, Xaden, he picked up training me when my dad got sick. I'm not sure what my father expected Markham to do, but I hate knowing that this was happening while I was here and I had no idea about it."

He put an arm around me. "Do you want to tell me something about your father?"

I thought about it for a minute. "When I was little, we'd make up silly poems together, and sometimes we'd even sing them. First in Navarran, and then in other languages as I was learning them. It helped a lot with pronunciation, because I was very invested in everything rhyming."

"That sounds adorable. Do you remember any of them?"

I sang a few bars of a silly song about goat cheese, and I could feel my face getting progressively more red as I went. Xaden's face was fond as he watched me, but it was too much and I made myself look around the room. "I used to sit in that chair and read while Dad was working, especially in the evenings. It was one of the few pieces of furniture my parents bothered to move between postings, alongside his boxes and boxes of books. I'd curl up there and he might ask me questions about what I was reading, or talk about what he was researching to see what questions I'd ask."

Xaden swept the chair with shadows, removing the dust before I dropped onto the leather.

"There's got to be something I'm missing," I said, leaning sideways in the armchair so my head rested on the arm. I still fit just as well as I had when I was a teenager, but considering I'd hit my adult height at fourteen that wasn't shocking. "I've looked in all the hiding places I know."

"You're confident it would be here, though?"

"If he didn't submit it to the Archives, then it's here." 

"I have an idea." He knelt in the middle of the small room and lay the palms of both hands on the ground. Shadows gathered in from the rest of the room, and then more slid in under the office door, piling up around him like layers of silk. 

"What are you doing?"

"They can sense things I can't see, sometimes. Remember how I told you that they could hear anything that happened on campus?"

"I thought that was—your second signet," I said, switching to speaking over the bond midway through the sentence.

"Yes and no." I was surprised he answered me out loud. Now that I thought about it, he hadn't spoken to me through the bond all morning.

"There's a lot of things shadows can tell me. Who's coming, where something is. Openings, cracks, places where light can get in." The shadows pushed away from him like water poured from a bowl, rippling across the floor. They traced the floorboards, climbed the bookshelves, even pushed against the mortar between the stones in the wall. 

"There are more shadows hidden behind one of the bookshelves than the others," he told me quietly. "One of the bookshelves has a false back." He grabbed hold of the sides with shadowy tendrils and pulled the entire bookshelf forward. Almost before I'd thought about what he was doing, the same shadows were working the back panel loose from the sides, until it slid up.

Inside were a dozen notebooks stored flat, where they'd been pressed between the panels. Before any of them could tip forward and fall, Xaden and I scooped them up. I wiped away some of the dust on the desk before setting them down, opening the book on the top of the pile reverently.

"I remember some of these sitting on the shelves when I was young. I don't know when they disappeared; maybe when we moved here after Bren—after the—maybe when we moved here, when Mom was put in charge of the college."

"Maybe because of how close to the Archives he was?" Xaden wondered. "Or maybe later, to keep them from going to the Archives when he couldn't stop them."

"Maybe…" was all I said as flipped through the first notebook.

"Your mind is already running ahead of me, I see," he murmured.

I went through all of the notebooks quickly, hoping to find something to show Brennan or Xaden, maybe not an obvious answer but a sign that we were looking in the right place. None of them seemed to hold anything of consequence, just everyday notes and journal entries and to-do lists. One of them had some of my childhood colored-pencil drawings. The newest-looking one was blank aside from something just inside the cover.

Xaden flicked away the shadows and I could feel him move closer to me to see what I was looking at. The darkness in the room scattered, letting the back of the bookshelf fall against the wall with a loud crack. A moment later, Brennan appeared in the doorway.

"Violet? Are you okay? Did you find—whoa," he started to ask, and then his eyes fell on the desk. "I guess you did find something. Are those what I think they are?"

"These are some of Dad's notes. Did you ever learn the shorthand he wrote in?"

"Somewhat, but it's been so long. What was he working on?"

"Allegedly feathertails, but I think it was more than just that. It's hard to tell, though, some of these just look like nonsense lists. This one is blank. Why would he hide a blank book?" I heard the crack in my voice and Xaden and Brennan both leaned in closer as I looked at something scribbled at the end of one of the books.

Violet,

Maybe you will never need this, but I doubt we're that lucky. Your mother and I love you so much. Enough to do anything to save you.

If you don't have need of it, burn it. Better to have it in Malek's hands than in Markham's.

Love, Dad

Enough to do anything to save me? Like force me into—did my father know mom would put me in the Riders' Quadrant? I didn't know what else he could be referring to. He must have been sick by the time he wrote the note if that was what he meant.

"What is it?" Brennan asked. 

"A note from Dad. I'm starting to think Mom had good reason to think I'd be in danger if I learned the truth as a scribe." I thought I had accepted that I belonged with the riders, but apparently that was different from having to admit my mother might be right without resenting it. "I think he was killed for his research. I bet he was poisoned and he didn't realize until it was too late."

"Who could have? Nobody knew poisons better than him."

"Poisons like lavender lemonade." I looked at Brennan. The image of Nolon holding the drink out to me before I found myself in Varrish's torture chamber came back clear as day. "It doesn't have to be flawless. It just has to come from someone you trust."

"Mom?" Brennan asked, and I startled. Did he seriously think she would kill our father?

"No! You didn't see her when he died. Or when you died, Brennan. She took it hard. She closed off, she shut down, she wasn't there when I needed her. She was awful about it, but she was definitely grieving."

He held up his hands in surrender. "Okay, point made, Vi."

"So what are you thinking?" Xaden asked me, trying to change the subject back.

"Markham? I think it had to be Markham. Otherwise why would Mom keep me out of the Scribes?" I slammed my hands on the desk, frustrated, then pulled out the note we'd found and showed it to Brennan. Quietly, Xaden laid his hand on my back just to help me ground.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. I realized it was something we had in common. He certainly knew how it felt to watch a parent die in the service of Navarre's lies. It was too late for Markham's words to matter now, too late to keep the venin a secret if that was what my father had been researching, but that didn't bring him back. That just made it all the more senseless.

I picked up the newest-looking notebook again, the one with the note from my father. He'd written the note as if something I needed was already in the pages. Maybe he'd intended to write something and run out of time? "There's something about these notebooks that feels odd," I said as I flipped through it again, then opened another one of them to check, bending the pages as far as I dared as I let them slip across my fingertips. "The pages don't feel right when I turn them."

The corner of Xaden's mouth turned up at that. "Now there is a sentence I can't imagine anyone but you saying."

"Just goes to show you don't know many scribes," I told him. He stepped away as I set the book down and picked up the newest one again, doing the same thing. Then I closed it and held it up to my face, flipping the pages again, only inches from my eyes. "The pages aren't flat."

"Do you mean they're damaged?" Brennan asked, moving into the space Xaden had left for him.

"No, it looks like it's intentional, but it's like the pages are… split? Or like a quarto didn't get trimmed in the bindery, but it's every page." I pushed down on the edge of the page, making it bow out in both directions, then ran my hand over it to flatten it again. "Jesinia might know. I can check with her. Did you find anything in Mom's office?"

"Letters. Mom labeled them property of each of us, to make sure we got them. I guess she wasn't feeling terribly hopeful about the battle."

"Considering Melgren foresaw them losing the battle, that's not too surprising." I noticed Xaden had disappeared, maybe to give me time to talk to Brennan.

He handed me an envelope labeled in Mom's neat handwriting. "There wasn't much else to find, certainly not in terms of military intelligence. Mira took a few things but I think she was feeling more sentimental than anything."

"Are you talking about me in there?" she called, apparently hearing her name. "Wow, we're taking apart furniture? Maybe I should go through Mom's office again."

"Dad was thorough," I said with a shrug. "Mom was looking for his research last year, so… I'm not sure she knew about this."

"Dad was always thorough," Mira agreed, picking up one of the notebooks and flipping through it. "What are these? This looks like a grocery list or something."

"I'm not sure, but I think there has to be something if he hid them like this. I'll take them and let you know what I figure out." Xaden came back into the room, setting one of my dad's old scribe satchels onto the desk. I started loading the notebooks into it, taking a moment to appreciate the worn canvas.

"Couldn't resist the chance to poke around after all?" I teased him as I tucked a few of the abandoned books into the now-stuffed satchel.

Was that a little blush on Xaden's face? Why was this man so adorable?

"Just trying to stay useful."

"You don't need to worry about that, trust me," I pointed out to him as he shouldered the full bag like it was nothing. Behind me, I could hear Mira making a gagging noise.

"Are we bringing anything else?"

"Let me look in my room really quick," I told him. Everything really was exactly as I'd left it, as if Mom hadn't even bothered to open the door once I was gone.

I sat down on my old bed and tried to remember what I'd packed up. A lot of history, which made my hands clench to think about. The novels Jesinia and I had traded back and forth, working our way through romantic fantasies about fae lords. My own half-finished novel about the youngest daughter of a king who was betrothed to the high lord of the fae without her knowledge.

… Maybe I'd pull that out just to make sure nobody else laid eyes on it.

I heard steps behind me and turned, expecting Xaden, but no. Brennan leaned against the door frame the way he never had in this apartment, and maybe it was just because I was thinking about everything, because I was sitting here with the ghosts of who I was when I had living parents, because my first thought was, oh, it's Dad.

"She really made you pack everything before you went in, huh?"

"She made me pack up my room too," Mira said behind him. "Not that I know what she was thinking, or whether it was the same thought process for me as it was for Violet. She was probably just thinking her posting would change before I graduated."

"That's very pragmatic of her."

He flinched, and I assumed she'd punched him in the kidney or something similarly nostalgic. "It was also correct, Bren. I wouldn't have been able to come pack up my stuff when she got posted to Basgiath. I didn't even get leave when you died."

"You realize how fucked up that sounds, right?"

"Yeah, but the fact that you pretended you were dead is more fucked up, so I don't want a lecture."

"How are those two things related?" Brennan asked in exasperation.

"You don't think it's obvious?"

I rolled my eyes. "As much as I missed the two of you bickering all the time, I need to figure out whether I want to go through all of this."

On the other side of the apartment, I could hear the scribe announcing himself as he re-entered.

Brennan nodded to me. "Well, your stuff is clearly yours, and Mira's is—"

"—in the storage closet over there," she interrupted.

"—clearly hers, so I should be able to get it shipped to Aretia for you to deal with later, if you want."

The idea that I could put off dealing with at least one thing was reassuring. "Yeah, I think that's a good idea."

"It's about time you had more than a couple of sets of leathers in my house," Xaden said, slinking into the small amount of space remaining in my old bedroom. "Mira, do you want a room in the family wing?"

"I don't even have a room in the family wing," Brennan complained, and Mira and I looked at each other and broke into giggles. "What?"

"Sometimes you sound exactly like you did when you were eighteen," Mira told him, locking him into a headlock.

I could see Xaden's eyes following the three of us. "Why would you have a room in the family wing, Aisereigh? I might want to put a Sorrengail behind my wards so my girlfriend doesn't have to worry about her." I grinned at him.

Brennan gave a pained groan as he shifted his weight and stood back up, picking Mira off the floor in what looked like an incredibly awkward piggyback ride. Mira kicked out at Xaden from where she was hanging. "I don't need protection, Riorson."

"Are we done here, then?" Xaden asked, and his face was tense in a way I hadn't noticed. Oh yes, we'd been here for a while, hadn't we? He probably needed a break from everything.

"I think so," I nodded. "When are you planning to leave, Brennan?"

"Tomorrow, if the fliers are up for it. Frankly, I can't get out of here fast enough, and on average they're jumpier than me."

That made sense, once I thought about it. "I'm still impressed they came," I admitted. "I'm glad we had the support." But I can't imagine how anxious they must be here, deep in… was this still enemy territory? How could it not feel like it, to them?

"They'll be happier once they're away from here, and we need support back at the edges of the wards as soon as we can get it. They can regroup and look for weaknesses," Xaden nodded.

Again, I had the sudden, vivid memory of the day before, Xaden telling me we'd stay inside the wards because it was safer for me, and I shivered.

"Are you okay, Vi?" Mira asked, finally letting go of Brennan and putting a hand on my arm.

"Fine, just… thinking. Do we know what leadership is doing about us yet?"

"They want us back," Mira said. "I don't know if I want to come back, to be honest. I'm waiting to see who they put in charge. But Devera said nobody wants a bunch of cadets roaming around bored, either, so they'll probably resume some kind of classes in the next day or two. The people who stayed need to learn what to do about venin, for one thing."

Classes. So I was supposed to go back to attending classes while I really needed to be doing research and helping Xaden… again.

I took a deep breath. I'd told Xaden we'd figure it out, and we would. It'll happen.

I told Brennan and Mira I'd see them before they left and went back up to my dorm room with Xaden. He handed me the books from my father's office and I did my best to put them in order based on what context clues I could find. The oldest ones were easier but they got less clear as they became more recent- there seemed to be a gap in the middle, and I thought that corresponded with some work he was doing when we were in Calldyr, so he hadn't had as much time for personal research.

Xaden was peeking over my shoulder now, shaking his head. It was kind of adorable, and I tilted my head until I was brushing my cheek against his. He leaned in and then pulled away suddenly, like he'd forgotten something.

"What language is that?" he asked. "I know the Navarran, and I think I saw Tyrrish in some of the older ones, but…?"

"Oh, that's his shorthand. He never sat me down and taught it to me, but I treated it like a secret code when I was small and he thought it was cute, I think. When he got sick- once he realized I'd figured out more than he realized, he explained the finer points so I could help with recording sometimes, when he was too tired to sit up and write." And so there would be someone who could use his research after he died went unsaid, but I guessed it was equally important to him. No scribe wants to see all of their knowledge lost at their death.

"So you're back to translation, Violence?"

"I guess so. I'll take the one with the weird pages to Jesinia tomorrow and see what she thinks, maybe there's more to it."

There was a knock on the door and Xaden startled like I'd never seen him do before. "It's Dain," he said, rolling his eyes. "I know that shadow."

"I thought you'd worked things out with him," I mumbled as I stood up and walked to the door.

"I tolerate him because he's loyal to you, and he's useful. Isn't that enough?" Xaden picked up one of my father's books- one of the Tyrrish ones- and tried to look like he was engrossed in it. Boys.

When I opened the door, Dain smiled at me anxiously. "Oh, good, you're here. Rhiannon said she hadn't seen you all day, so I wanted to check and make sure you're alright."

"I'm coping," I told him. "I spent some time with Brennan and Mira earlier."

"Good. I'm-" He hesitated, and changed his mind. "We're going to have formation in the morning, there'll be announcements. Are you…?" He looked around me, and I could see him looking at Xaden, but he apparently wasn't going to ask.

Fine. When he was ready, then I'd worry about it. I'd just as soon not have to think about people staring Xaden down before I had to.

"I'll be there."

Just another problem for tomorrow. Xaden looked up from his book when I shut the door and smiled at me. Maybe I had lots of problems for tomorrow, but right now I still had him.

That had to be worth it.

Sitting on my bed that night, I felt numb. Grief had settled in my chest like a sleeping cat, heavy but quiet, making me want to lie still and do nothing. Xaden had been the one to unpack my father's notebooks and set them into a neat row on my desk, spines out. He'd brought me dinner, and the idea of eating it exhausted me.

"I felt better this morning than I do now," I sighed through the bond. He looked up at me, but didn't respond. "Xaden?"

A kitten of anxiety curled up beside grief as I tried to remember if I'd heard him at all today through the bond. I'd spoken to him, and he'd reacted, but I couldn't remember actually hearing him. Gods, had I been that up in my head all day? Was this some kind of shielding to protect me or something that happened because he'd turned?

I closed my eyes and grounded myself in my Archives. Tairn's power was where it always was, and Andarna's was stronger and brighter than ever. Even Sgaeyl's wisps of navy were there.

Xaden's shadows were not. When I opened my eyes, he was sitting opposite me on the bed, closer than I'd realized, and I startled.

"You can't hear me," he said aloud as he handed me a sandwich. He didn't look me in the eye, but there was a hint of question in the words. He was looking for confirmation.

I nodded as he sliced up a pear and started eating it.

"Do I sound any different than usual?" I asked, forcing myself to take a bite of the food.

"No. You're crystal clear. I'm going to try- my signets have been acting strangely, so I've had my shields pretty tight. I'm going to loosen them just to check, and then I'll close them again, okay?"

"Okay?"

"I want to make sure it's okay with you, since I told you I wouldn't."

Was he asking permission to read me?

That had to be a good sign, right? He was in control.

His eyes went distant for a few moments before he winced and pulled his attention back. "Too much input. You're there. It's just the bond that's missing. It must be because Sgaeyl is…" He left that unfinished.

"Is she blocking you?"

He nodded.

"I'm sorry," I said aloud. There was no good response to that, though, and I didn't expect one. Instead I thought it best to change the subject. "Does this mean I get to tease like you did at Montserrat? I can think anything I want and you can't respond?" I tried to imagine myself in that silk nightie Cat had worn when she showed up at his bedroom door in Aretia.

He bit his lip before responding. "All wrong on you," he said out loud, smirking. "That looked like something Cat would wear."

That surprised a laugh out of me, and he chuckled too. Xaden moved the plate with the remains of dinner over to my desk and gave me a predatory look that cut through the weights in my chest and made my core heat. It was good to hear him laugh, even if it was just for a minute. I wanted to believe he could relax a little, that he had this under control.

"How are you feeling?" I switched topics. It felt unfair, somehow, to think casually through the bond when he couldn't respond. "In your head, I mean. It must be strange, after…" I was about to say after so long. It had been only a bit more than a year that I'd had Tairn and Andarna in my life, and only about a year that I'd been able to access Xaden through the bond.

"I haven't been alone in my head in over three years," Xaden said quietly. "At least I hope I'm alone in here."

"You hope?" I didn't understand, and I was starting to realize how much nuance came through our bond even when we were speaking aloud: there was no sense of how he felt, whether he was worried or calm. Part of me kept trying to reach for something that just wasn't there, like I was pulling at molasses instead of shadows.

"Do you ever hear your self-doubt in the form of someone's voice?" he asked.

The echo of my mother's voice was immediate, and I thought of the day we'd seen her on our way to the flight field, asking about my father's research. She'd always been the voice of my failures. I nodded to Xaden and he continued.

"It's… he's…" he dug his fingers into his hair. "Fuck, how do people have conversations out loud?"

"You have conversations out loud all the time. My room is warded against sound, among other things. You should know, you warded it."

"It's different." He sounded petulant, and he looked like he knew it. I set down the remains of my sandwich on the plate, too distracted to pretend I was going to finish it.

"It is different. I'm sure it's temporary." I reassured him. "You can tell me."

He dropped his volume even though he'd just acknowledged the wards on the room. "It sounds like the venin sage," he said, and I shivered.

"He's dead, you killed him yourself," I reminded both of us, reaching toward him. I worked his fingers loose where they were pulling at his dark curls, gently taking his hands in mine. If he needed anything right now, I thought it had to be gentleness. Reminding him what mattered.

I was about to reach for him when the thought occurred to me- was it safe? We'd touched, but fucking was something else, wasn't it?

"It's okay," Xaden said, pulling back. "I- I don't blame you." The look in his eyes made me want to take it back, but he'd already turned away. "Would you be more comfortable if I found another bed?"

"No!" I said it so quickly I surprised myself. "I mean- Last night was fine. I don't want to be alone." More than that, I didn't want him to be alone.

He stayed in the bed. He didn't pull away when I put my arm around him.

He didn't put his hand in the small of my back, or pull my body against the solid line of his chest… he didn't look at me with sparks of fire in his eyes… but he stayed.

In the morning I felt a little more hopeful, or maybe just a little less exhausted. Pulling away from him to climb out of bed was a little bit easier, and some of the tension had bled away. I showered, trying to figure out how I was going to get through classes, but I'd done it before when I was worried about Xaden. It was pretty much all I'd done as a second year cadet, go to class and worry about Xaden and almost get killed.

I dressed and brushed a kiss against his hair before I left. If he wanted to sleep in, I didn't see any reason he shouldn't. On the way out I grabbed the notebook with the odd pages, figuring I'd probably see Jesinia today when we visited Sawyer.

During breakfast, I sat with my squadmates and fended off questions about how Xaden and I were doing.

"Are we going to see Sawyer today?" I asked instead, desperate to focus on something else.

"I don't know, after yesterday I might be afraid I was getting in the way of his quality time with Jesinia," Ridoc snickered, chewing on a slice of bacon.

"She'll have to get back to the Archives soon, too. If we see her today, we should co-ordinate when we're visiting so we don't overwhelm him," Rhiannon added. "Ridoc, what are you doing?"

He looked up from where he was sliding the rest of his bacon into a pouch. "Sawyer was complaining about the food; I figured I'd bring him something."

"Promise me you'll ask the healer before you actually let him eat that," she insisted.

"Sure thing, Squad Leader."

"You're not just going to tell him no?" I asked her as she stood up.

Rhiannon shrugged. "I feel like picking my battles today."

"We're showing up to formation two days after everybody almost died, I think they should just be happy we're here." Ridoc shoved the pouch of bacon into his pocket. I wondered what the odds were that he'd forget it was there entirely before we even got to visit the Healers' Quadrant.

Formation felt like it lasted for hours. The death roll alone was probably half of that. Apparently they'd decided to list everyone who'd died; I recognized at least one flier's name among the riders. There were so many names it was hard to make sense of it, even when there were names I knew echoing across the courtyard.

Melgren stepped onto the dais when they were done commending all those souls to Malek and I braced myself for his announcements.

"First, on behalf of Navarre I would like to thank the gryphon riders who came to join in the fight here at Basgiath." He looked around the courtyard and frowned, then had a quick, murmured conversation with Panchek. "It seems they have chosen to leave quite early today rather than stay and receive Navarre's gratitude."

"Did you see if Brennan and Marbh left?" I asked Tairn.

"Marbh was still here an hour or so ago, though I believe he is preparing for the flight."

I turned my attention back to Melgren. "In light of the… extraordinary circumstances we find ourselves in, Navarre will be granting a full pardon to anyone who chose to desert their post before the… extent of the venin threat was made clear to us, assuming they are willing to report for new orders."

"So by extent he means…" Ridoc whispered to me.

"The existence," I nodded.

"So what, he thinks we'll just stay here like nothing happened? You're not going to stay, are you?"

I bit my lip. "I don't think I can decide anything until Xaden's… feeling more like himself."

"I thought I saw him with you yesterday, in the hall?"

"I had to go down to the family housing," I whispered. "He was moral support."

Ridoc looked serious for a minute. "Don't forget you have the rest of us, okay? If he's not feeling well or whatever, we can help too."

"I know." And I did know that, though I'd forgotten it before. I didn't have to protect my friends- except from Xaden, maybe? Or protect Xaden… I didn't want to be afraid of what anybody would do if they found out, but of course I was. I didn't want to think about what would happen if Xaden got pushed right now.

Brennan caught me between classes to let me know he was leaving, or as he put it, "putting as much of the continent as I possibly can between myself and this place."

I'd waved my squad on to physics and hesitated, looking up at Brennan. Maybe he could help? Maybe he could… I wasn't sure what yet, was the problem.

"You're not staying to burn Mom's things?"

Brennan's face paled. "Mira and I already had this fight, but no, I'm not."

I wanted to argue with him, but considering that wasn't even why I wanted to talk to him, it felt hypocritical, too. "Before you go, there was one thing I wanted to ask you about-" I started, trying to figure out how to phrase it. "About mending."

I could see his attention returning to me, some of the tension leaving his shoulders as he gave me his full attention. "What is it, Vi? Something we can do about the Aretian wards?"

I shook my head. "I'm still not sure how to fix them. But I was thinking about Jack Barlowe-"

Brennan shuddered.

"-and Nolon was mending him ever since last year, and for a bit it seemed like maybe it had worked? Like maybe for a little while he'd stopped being venin. It's hard to tell because he was always an ass, but I was wondering if you'd ever head of anything like that." Nothing I said was a lie. None of it was important, exactly, but none of it was a lie.

My brother frowned and for a minute I thought he was going to tell me to stop. His eyes were distant- was he talking to Marbh?

"Maybe I'll go talk to Nolon before I leave after all," was all he said.

"Feel free to guilt trip him for helping with the torture, if you think it'll help."

"He's so busy I managed to spend half of yesterday helping mend patients without actually having to talk to him, so it's probably not necessary, but I'll be thinking about it, believe me." Brennan asked, fixing his gaze on me. "Are you actually concerned about Barlowe or is there something else? Do you need me here, Vi?"

"I promise I'll tell you if I come across something I need your help with," was the best I could do. "I've thought a lot about what might be in Dad's notes and research on the venin is one of the things I've wondered about."

"Okay. I trust you. I'll see you back in Aretia soon, right?"

"Hopefully. We'll see."

He was headed toward the Healers' Quadrant as I redirected myself to physics. It was almost hard to believe there'd been a time when I worried about things like 'being late to class.' No wonder Brennan kept giving me that look like he wasn't sure he recognized me.

After physics, we headed down for visiting hours. When we arrived in the Healers' Quadrant, Jesinia was holding Sawyer's hand as they both dozed, her head on his shoulder.

"They're adorable," Ridoc whispered.

He wasn't wrong.

"Should we let them sleep?" I asked.

"'m awake," Sawyer mumbled, opening his eyes slowly. A moment later, Jes did too.

"Good nap?" I signed, saying the words out loud for Sawyer.

"She won't leave," Sawyer said, then made the signs a moment later. "I'm getting a lot of practice when I'm awake though."

"You should rest, or at least get some food," Rhiannon signed. "We can stay with him while you do."

"I should," Jes agreed, but the look she gave Sawyer made it clear she was still hesitant.

"I'll walk with you," I signed to Jes, leaving Sawyer at the mercy of Rhiannon, Ridoc and Ridoc's bacon.

Jes yawned as we made our way down the hall toward the Scribe Quadrant. "Did you need something, Violet?" she signed.

I felt bad that I was so often asking her for help. "If you're up for it? I had a question about a book I found in my dad's office."

Her face opened into a smile. "One of his notebooks? I thought anything like that would be long gone." Jes had taken his death hard; he was like another father to her. Maybe I shouldn't have worried she'd be annoyed by my questions.

"It was hidden with a few others, but I haven't figured out why. This one has weird pages." I took the blank journal out of the pouch at my hip and held it out to her.

She opened it up, inspecting the pages as she flipped through, then the binding from the top and bottom of the spine. After a few moments she handed it back to me. "That's an unusual style of binding," she agreed once her hands were free. "I don't know a lot about binding but we both know someone who does."

"We do?" I tried to think who she meant, but I'd lost touch with most of the other people I knew in the Scribe Quadrant in the last year and a half.

"Do you remember Ean? He used to work with your father. I'll talk to him."

So many of my memories of my father were folded up and filed away alongside the boxes of books in my old bedroom that it took me a minute to put anything to the name. I thought I remembered him, maybe?

"Thank you. After you eat, though, right?" I stopped in front of the Scribes' dining hall, pointedly gesturing.

"Yes, I'm going to eat." Jes flicked her hands as she finishes the last sign, waving me off.

On my way back to the Healers' Quadrant, I caught sight of Nolon further down the hall; our eyes met for a second before he looked away. Was he shaking? It was hard to tell from this distance; he was just rider black and tired, pale skin against the grey stone walls.

I spent the afternoon with my squad, in my classes, in flight practice with Tairn where he was distant and quiet.

"Do you want to talk about it?" I asked him.

"You will not listen to my advice if we do."

"That bad?"

"Of course it is that bad, Silver One. You know how I lost my previous rider."

"Yes, but Xaden is one of the strongest people I know. He can resist, we can fix it."

"As I said, you will not listen to my advice." Judging by his tone, there was more to it than that. I wondered what he and Sgaeyl had spoken about.

I brought food upstairs after dinner, since I wasn't sure what Xaden would have been up to. There was a note tucked in the gap in my door with a scribe's seal on it; I grabbed it as I opened the door and stepped through the wards.

The mage lights were off and it had already gotten dark outside, so at first I thought Xaden must have gone somewhere without me. As the door swung further open, though, there was enough light for me to see him sitting on the bed, legs pulled up, staring at nothing.

"Xaden? Why is it so dark in here?"

I saw him startle slightly in the thin light from the hall, and then he waved the magelights on, warming the room. "Sorry. I didn't notice it had gotten dark."

"Have you even left the room today?"

"No," he admitted after a minute. "I've just been thinking."

I set the plate down on my desk and walked over to put my arm around him. "I think tomorrow you should make sure to go out."

He nodded but didn't actually say he would. I let it go for now. "I brought you some dinner."

Xaden moved over to my desk to eat and pointed to the sealed note I'd dropped next to it. "Someone passing you notes in the hall, Violence?"

"I think this is the follow-up from Jesinia," I said as I cracked the wax seal.

Violet,

I was very sorry to hear that you are dealing with your mother's passing. Jesinia told me you had some questions about bookbinding. I will have some time free next weekend, after you're no longer burdened with Malek's requirements. Please come by my rooms at your leisure.

Ean Fleming

I showed it to Xaden. "Looks like I'll be able to figure out what's going on with my father's notes."

"That's good. And we can trust him?"

"Jes wouldn't have reached out to him if we couldn't."

It was good to have something to look forward to after that. I spent most of the next day with Mira at the burn pit, standing vigil while people came by to offer what they had of our mother: mostly vague platitudes about how good she was at her job, or how brave or how vicious. These were supposed to be stories, the last chance for us to see other parts of our mother, but it seemed there wasn't much there.

Mira and I whispered back and forth when we were alone, mostly Mira telling stories from before I could remember. I told her about the conversation we'd had when Xaden rescued me from Varrish, the most I'd spoken to her about that week. She told me about the advice Mom had given her before she entered the quadrant. I told her about Mom's aborted attempts to talk to me after Dad died, the way she'd looked like she saw a ghost when she found me asleep in Dad's office.

"What did Mom's letter to you say?" Mira asked after Panchek saw himself out.

I realized I'd completely forgotten about it the day before, in the middle of everything else. "I haven't opened it yet."

"She apologized for downgrading my medal," Mira laughed a little. "As if I cared about that. She said she wasn't sure what to do with me because I was so much like her and she'd never known what to do with herself."

"Yeah, that sounds like Mom."

"And she said- she said she was proud of us for leaving."

That surprised me, after her lecture about how I'd feel differently about it when I had kids. But it wasn't as if she'd be around to see it if I did, so maybe she'd changed her mind after seeing Brennan.

The shadows from the burn pit's flames were long and cold when Xaden joined us at dusk.

"Have you got a date tonight, Vi?" Mira asked with a weak laugh.

"Not that I know of." I smiled up at Xaden. "Did you come to keep us company?"

"Not exactly." He didn't look at either of us, but instead studied the burn pit's flames like he was committing them to memory. "In Tyrrendor, this tradition is a little different than what I've seen here, and not just because the college is so quick to burn a cadet's existence away. I was taught that when you keep vigil with Malek, you talk about the good and the bad so you can balance the scales of a life, and decide what memories to keep what which ones to forget. I thought I might offer you a memory."

Mira tensed next to me. "You want to offer us a story about our mother?" I saw Xaden's jaw tic at her tone.

"Mira, just let him talk," I whispered.

Xaden's smirk looked more melancholic than usual in the firelight. "I don't blame you for wondering what good I, of all people, could possibly have to say about your mother."

I thought about the way his back felt under my hands in bed, the ridges of the scars there. The way Sgaeyl's relic seemed to curve, making sure it covered as many of them as possible.

"The first time I saw your mother, she looked like Dunne herself had come to smite Aretia. She was terrifying."

In the corner of my eye, Mira started to say something and I put my hand on her arm. Xaden wouldn't be doing this to hurt me, I knew that. Probably if this were two weeks ago, she'd know it too.

"The second time was on the way to Calldyr, when they were still trying to decide what to do with us. I think everyone in leadership came and looked at us stuffed in those damn wagons. She was the only one who actually talked to a few of us. including me. I think she was trying to figure out how involved any of us might have been. I don't remember the questions, but I remember that she asked, like we were people and not animals she was keeping an eye on.

"After the executions, after…" He looked down at the relic swirled at his wrist. "Before they could decide to drown us like kittens to solve the problem, I asked to speak to her because of that conversation in the wagons. At the time I said it was because she'd been the one to conquer Aretia, but it was because she talked to me like I was a person."

Mira's hand was gripping mine now. I looked over and saw her eyes shining in the light of the burn pit. Xaden still hadn't looked at us, but he didn't need to. I could guess how difficult it was for him to dig this story up and lay it out for us.

"She was so angry then, still, and there was hate in her eyes when I stood in front of her, but it was… I'm not sure if I can explain it, but it was a personal hatred. Melgren hated us because he hadn't gotten his way, and Tauri hated us because we were a living memory of things he wanted forgotten, but Lilith hated us because we were alive and Brennan was not, and that meant she was willing to give us time and space… maybe just time and space to suffer more, but it was better than being burned.

"By the time I made it to Basgiath, she had convinced herself it was about making us better than our parents, and as fucked up as it sounds, I took it as the gift it was. I didn't see her often, but when I did she looked at me like she was trying to figure me out. Like it was worth trying to figure me out." He tipped his head back, staring up at the clear winter sky. "I don't know if she regretted telling me to protect you, but I'm glad she did."

Love and affection poured out of me and through our bond like tears, but Mira managed to find her words before I did. "Thank you for sharing."

"Thank you for the memory," I added, mirroring the way he'd started. It sounded like a ritual.

He nodded to Mira and gave me an unusually chaste kiss. "I'm going for a walk. I'll see you later."

Once he was gone, I laid my head against Mira's shoulder. "How are you holding up?"

"It's hard to believe she's gone," Mira admitted. "Considering how rarely I saw her, it'll probably take a while for my brain to catch up."

"That's how I felt when Dad told me about Brennan. It just seemed like an awful joke, that I got to see him for the first time since he went to Basgiath, and then he was gone forever."

"I saw her more in the last six months than I had since I started at Basgiath, and I was so mad at her every time. The time before that, too, because that was your Conscription Day. Amari's mercies, Violet, I don't remember the last time I had a pleasant conversation with her."

"I don't either, and I'm including the time I lived with her," I admitted. "Probably it was before Dad died. Maybe it was before Brennan."

"I can't believe he didn't stay for this," she grumbled for what had to be the third or fourth time that day. "Mom loved him more than she did either of us."

"Mira-"

"Tell me I'm wrong."

She wasn't wrong, was the thing. But I wasn't sure that actually mattered. "I think Mom had an idea of what each of us was supposed to be, and Brennan was probably the closest to her image of him than either of us was. Or maybe she loved her idea of him the best."

"I don't know what more she wanted me to be. I tried so hard."

"I remember when she downgraded your metal for Strythemore. She was always so worried about what other people would think, Mira. You couldn't have done anything else to make her proud. You were just like her, everybody said so. I remember how much it annoyed you when you were getting ready for conscription."

"That should have been enough for her."

"It should have. Both of us, all of us should have been enough for her."

She sighs. "We shouldn't be talking about her like this, not now."

"I think Xaden had the right idea. Remember the good and the bad, and decide what to keep. You argued with Mom all the time, but she was so proud of you. Especially before she took the position at Basgiath, your first year, you should have heard how she talked about you when we got updates from the Quadrant."

"Really?"

"Yeah. All the time. It drove me kind of crazy, but it was good to know you were okay. I knew most cadets' families didn't get that opportunity. It wasn't until she was in charge of the college that she had to act like she didn't know the names of anyone there."

Mira put an arm around me and hugged me close. "How are you so fucking smart all the time?"

"It's kind of my thing at this point." I grinned at her for the first time all day.

It was well and truly dark now, and I stood, walking over to the last of my mother's things. We'd burned most of it at the start of the day so the leathers and things would have time to burn up over the hours, but we saved a few things for last, as always.

I started feeding the last of the papers from Mom's office into the fire, holding them up to burn so the ashes flicked up into the breeze like shooting stars.

"If I believed in ghosts," Mira said as she tossed in a whole stack of paper, "I'd put good money down on Mom threatening Malek into leaving her here."

"There were definitely days I thought I'd rather face Malek than Mom's disappointment." I didn't mean that to be about Brennan, but as soon as I'd finished the words the thought was there. If he truly wasn't ready to think about his relationship with Mom, maybe it was better he hadn't stayed.

I was glad for Mira's presence, and I was glad I could be there for her. She'd been alone in the Quadrant when she got the news about Brennan, and she was alone at her duty post when she got the news about Dad. It was about time she got to mourn someone properly, especially because she was always going to take Mom's death harder than I was.

When we finished the last of Mom's things, she walked me down to my room. Xaden wasn't there; he was still out walking or whatever else he was doing.

I intended to stay awake until he came back, but once I was curled up in bed with one of Dad's books, the weight of the day caught up to me and my eyes started closing almost immediately. I set the book carefully on the nightstand, and as I fell asleep, I could have sworn I felt the darkness curl around me a little more solidly than usual.

—

The next morning, Xaden was there. I was only a little disappointed he hadn't woken me up; I wondered what time he'd come to bed.

"Xaden? When did you sleep?" When he didn't answer, I poked at him through the bond.

He opened one eyelid and then shook his head no, pulling his shadows over his head like he was a teenager who didn't want to answer to his mother.

"Nice attitude. Come on, handsome, I'll make it worth your while." It had been days and everything was fine, surely we could have a little fun? I wanted to show him I wasn't afraid. That I had faith in him. I pulled off my nightshirt, and then pulled my sleep braid loose when I felt his attention on me.

"Don't you have classes to get to?" He was talking, good. "You shouldn't let me keep you from your studies, Violence."

"I'm sure I have a little time to spare…" I trailed off, waiting for him to keep talking behind me. Instead I felt something soft on my bare skin like fabric- I realized they were shadows just as they lifted me and pulled me back into the bed alongside Xaden.

I laughed and rolled over to kiss him. "That's one way to win."

Xaden threaded his fingers through my hair, pressing his lips to mine like he wanted to breathe me in. Shadows ghosted across my body, circling my nipples, tracing my hips. It was almost too much by the time he pulled away from me and rolled over.

Even as I started to whimper in disappointment, Xaden's hands were on my hips, lifting me up above him and settling me above his mouth. I could barely move but there was no pressure on my joints; I looked down and saw shadows bracing me and bearing my weight but there wasn't really time to process it before Xaden got his tongue on me and my vocabulary went out the window.

The way he moaned with pleasure as he brought me to the edge made me grab uselessly behind me, but I was miles away from touching him. Another shadow grabbed my arm, pressing a new conduit into it just as I came apart. The air around us vibrated with electrical charge, but no lightning flashed outside.

Xaden guided me down onto the mattress and played with my hair as I lay there for several blissful minutes before I remembered that I had to get up and do other things. I started to reach for him, wanting to return the favor before I had to leave, but he picked up my hand and kissed my knuckles before I could do anything.

"You should go," he said.

"Are you sure?" I asked through the bond as I moved to the edge of the bed. He made a face- looked like there was still no word from Sgaeyl, and thus no thoughts in return. It wasn't my place to say anything, but it was starting to worry me too.

"My mate has every right to be angry with the Lieutenant," Tairn offered as I got dressed.

"And I have every right to be worried about both of them." I couldn't imagine it was any easier for her than it was for Xaden, given how close they'd always seemed.

Xaden stayed in bed, and this time I didn't argue because I wanted to actually make it to breakfast, but I pushed thoughts down the bond as I left anyway: love and concern and please talk to someone.

Then it was time to face the day.

The walk to the Scribe Quadrant made my skin itch with proximity to the life I'd imagined for myself. Even now I mostly saw Jesinia in the Archives; I'd never been to her quarters. It felt strange to be in the housing for another quadrant, instead of the public areas.

Xaden was quiet next to me as we walked. He was looking around - taking in somewhere he'd never been? Listening to the shadows here? He hadn't said much since we left my room, though that seemed to be more normal for him lately. I was starting to feel like he was more shadow than rider.

"We can trust Ean," I said as we turned onto the corridor where I'd been told to find him. "Jesinia vouched for him, and he trained under my father."

"And you're sure?" He sounded distracted.

"You know your people, Xaden. I know mine. They might not be my Squad but the scribes were my family, once." It hurt to admit that, that I had in a way lost more of my family than just my father, but that was what it was.

Xaden nodded. "Okay."

"Just… okay?" I must have looked confused. It wasn't like Xaden to trust people, even people I trusted, without an argument.

"Yes, okay. You made a good point, and I trust you, so I'll trust him. Don't look so surprised that I listen to you, Violence." There was a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"Sorry," I shook my head and smiled. He was trying to trust me, I should encourage him. "It's been a long week."

He blinked at that. "Fucking shit, it's only been a week?"

"Six days, if you start counting from the battle." I ran through them again in my head, checking my math. Most of them blurred together into a haze of research and classes and keeping an eye on Xaden so he didn't just… sit in the dark.

"Don't... just - don't tell me that again. Let's go meet your father's trainee."

I put an arm around his waist. "Are you sure? Do you need to take a nap? I can meet with him and meet up with you after."

He made a face that told me sleeping just sounded worse. "No, it'd just be more nightmares anyway."

"I figured... I thought maybe your nightmares would get better, after." It sounded silly to me when I said it out loud, but he didn't seem bothered by it, at least.

"Did yours?"

"Well, they're different now. Mom dying, mixed up with Soleil and Liam. Just fucked up memories, instead of creepy venin torture. I figured that was because you killed the Sage, so... are you still hearing him?"

He shook his head. "No, not that," he said, which made sense because the Sage was dead. "Mostly about the fight with the Sage."

"About drawing from the earth?"

"Yes."

"Are you worried you will?" I tried to send support through the bond, but it was hard to tell if he was able to pick up on it.

"I don't want to even think about it, but... how could I not be?"

"We can talk about this more later, in my room." Behind the wards. "Right now, we're here."

Here was a door in a hall that looked pretty similar to the third year dorm rooms, or the single occupancy barracks the riders had at the outposts. I knocked, and the scribe who opened the door did it carefully, looking up and down the hall before smiling at me. "Hello, Starshine. It's been a while."

"It certainly has." I relaxed as we entered the room. I'd never actually been inside a Scribe's individual quarters before, but it felt familiar nonetheless. Every surface in the place was covered in books and papers, including the bed, and while my father had never taken over our entire apartment it still reminded me of him. It felt like home in a way the apartment never had once Mom cleaned up and burned all of Dad's things. I wondered if this was something I could have, maybe in Riorson House someday, if we lived long enough to actually relax and settle in somewhere.

"Your note said you wanted to talk about your father's work, but Jesinia said you needed a bookbinder?" Ean sounded hesitant as he cleared a stack of printed paper off the worktable in the corner and gestured to it.

"Why do we need a bookbinder?" Xaden asked both of us as he set the stack of books on the table. "They're already bound."

"Because ideally you don't want to just rip the book apart, right? Else you'd have done it already." He looked at me. "I mended a copy of Fables of the Barrens for Jesinia last year, as a favor."

My cheeks turned red, remembering what Xaden and I had been doing to damage it. "That was- that was very special circumstances! Usually I'd never let that happen to a book!"

"I know, Violet. I'm sure it was an accident, I was just teasing." I made some small talk with Ean, catching him up on what I'd been doing in the Rider's Quadrant, when Tairn's attention grabbed mine.

"The Lieutenant," he growled in my head. "He is losing control, you must tell him to ground himself. His training is better than this."

"Xaden, are you okay?" I looked over at him, surprised to see his eyes closed and his face tight. I couldn't really feel him through the bond but I got a sense of overwhelm or even panic from him nonetheless. "Tairn says you need to ground, now. Can you do that?"

"Yes," he answered, and I knew which question he meant. It was obvious he wasn't okay.

"Do you need something?" Ean asked, looking up from the first notebook.

"He's still recovering from the battle," I told him, still not sure what was going on but desperate to help Xaden. "Can I get some water?"

"Sure. There's a few mugs on the shelf by the sink."

The water was as cold as I could get from the tap and I handed it to Xaden, gently guiding him to sit on the sofa. The water seemed to help, and some of the tension seemed to bleed off him finally.

"What happened?" Xaden just shook his head and mouthed later to me, so I turned my attention back to Ean.

"I can start with this one, if you like. It's likely the last one, since he didn't get a chance to seal the pages. This is the one you noticed, I bet?" He held out the one I'd shown Jesinia, and even though I didn't need to, I took it from him, flipping it open.

"I noticed the pages separated a bit when I turned them," I skimmed through some of the pages, showing him the same thing I'd shown Xaden and Jes, how the pages had gaps inside them like they were folded.

"There's an older style of bookbinding that I learned from Samael- sorry, from your father. It's not as common as signature binding is these days, now that we have the more modern presses. Originally it wasn't as easy to print on both sides, so it was common to print on a single side and fold it, then bind the loose edges. It meant you could print the pages in order, and didn't have to worry about the ink bleeding through. Modern techniques mean it's obsolete in most situations, but there are few where it's useful. One use is to hide something inside the folded pages, of course."

"So he took his notes and then turned them inside out?" I was stunned. What could my father be researching that was so dangerous it was necessary to hide it like that?

"Precisely. You've learned how dangerous it is to be a scribe, haven't you?" The bookbinder laid out tools on the workbench: a knife about the size and shape of a letter opener, a similarly-sized piece of bone that tapered to a point, small scissors, and a few other things.

"My mother said she put me in the riders quadrant because I'd be safer there," I said, and I must have looked upset because Xaden reached over the edge of the couch to take my hand.

After a minute, Ean changed the subject. "Do you know the story of the first scribe?" He spoke as he set about cleanly slicing through the endpapers that held the pages of the book to the cover.

That was an easy question and a good distraction, too. "Awen? She was a priestess of Amari. People collected books before her, but she was the first one to build a real library."

The older man nodded, waiting to continue until he'd separated the covers from the block of pages. Once it had come loose, he began worrying at the strip of cloth glued to the spine. "And the place where she built her library?"

"Became the Archives," I said, just as Xaden answered, "the Temple of Amari."

"What?"

"Navarre took it," he told me. "Officially it was a gift of Tyrrendor as part of the Unification."

Ean peeled the cloth away slowly. "I won't argue how willing a gift it was. I wasn't there, after all. But the first weeders came through then, deciding what would go to the Archives and what wasn't worth taking. Every library has a scope, after all, and even the First Six had specific ideas what should be written down."

My eyes widened. "How do you know about that?"

"Jesinia told me. I wish- I wish I'd known what the three of them were up to. We don't generally bring cadets in, they're too optimistic, but what she did... she's pretty incredible. We're lucky to have her."

"We were lucky to have her help," I agreed.

"And now we're lucky to have her, if she doesn't go back to Aretia." Ean snipped at the threads that held the pages together with his tiny scissors, then pulled them away. He worked the first folded page loose and unfolded it, flipping it around to reveal the same neat shorthand as was on the other notebooks, but a little straighter and better organized. There was a date at the top- about a year before my father died.

I could feel grief welling up as I looked at his handwriting. I hadn't felt his absence so strongly since it was fresh, and I wondered if Mom's death compounded it. Was there some sort of dead parent math? Trying to distract myself, I ran my fingers along the cover of the next book. "This is my father's life work, and I'm asking you to take it apart."

"The books themselves aren't the work. That's one of the most important things for scribes to know, and it's one a lot of my colleagues don't seem to understand."

"It's the knowledge."

"Exactly, Violet. Your father's life work was two things, and it looks like he managed to keep both of them from Malek so far. For one thing, Samael kept his research safe and made sure it would outlive him. Markham didn't get it, and neither did Malek."

"It seems like a shame he didn't get to do anything with it."

Ean stopped what he was doing and looked at me. "What else could he have done with it?"

"Shared it?" It seemed obvious to me. "He had to have guessed he wasn't the only one who'd know."

"Given the general's position, his situation was more precarious than most. I can get away with a lot in my spare time because nobody really cares what I'm doing. But Samael spent a lot of time worrying that if he pushed too hard it would come back on the general. Besides, a lot of his personal research was... odd. Especially at the end of his life."

"Odd? You mean the feathertail work?" I hedged the question, trying to figure out what he suspected.

He chuckled to himself before he replied. "Likely I'm just not smart enough to understand what he was aiming toward. Regardless, though, knowledge is knowledge."

I nodded. "Thank you for this. I appreciate it."

"I can rebind them for you, so you can read them normally," he said. "Won't even have to replace the covers, just the endpapers once I've sewn the new spine."

It seemed like I couldn't stop running my hands over the stack of books. "It doesn't look like much, for a life's work."

"It's a fuck ton more than we had to begin with," Xaden chimed in from the couch.

"And it's only part of his life's work." Ean's comment was offhanded, but I jumped on it. Was there more research I'd missed?

"What else are you referring to?" I asked.

"You, of course. Your siblings too, but Violet, he put everything he had into making sure you'd have the tools to do what you need to do. And look at you! You restored the wards, saved the entire country, and you're still a cadet. He was so proud of you, Starshine."

It was good to hear, especially after days of hearing what other people thought my mother would say to me. That was enough to buoy my mood as Xaden and I made our way back to my room.

Ean promised to have the first of my father's research tomes ready for me as soon as he could, but that meant I'd run out of distractions for the moment. With the notebooks gone and Xaden sleeping off his migraine, it was harder to ignore my mother's letter sitting on the desk.

If there actually was any vital intelligence for the war effort in there, Mira would never let me live it down.

It was ridiculous that I'd waited a whole week, honestly. No matter what it said, she'd gotten the last word. I always knew she would. I picked up the thick cream-colored envelope and slid my finger under the fold to break the seal.

Violet,

I know your memory, so I won't bother repeating myself, but there is one thing I should apologize for. After your father died, it hurt to see him in you. I turned away and told myself I was staying busy, that I was not good at comforting you. And while that was true, it was also an excuse. I should have made the effort.

I've told you before that everything I do is for my children, but never how far your father and I went for you. I thought there would be time, but if this is in your hands, then there was not. I've asked Aimsir to tell Tairn the details if I'm unable to. It's the only way I can think to explain so that you will understand.

I wasn't sure what I'd been expecting. One last lecture on my shortcomings, maybe? Another excuse she told herself?

"Tairn," I reached out. "I'm guessing not, but did Aimsir have a chance to speak to you before the Battle of Basgiath?" I showed him the image of my mother's letter.

"No, Silver One."

"So you don't know what she's talking about?"

"I did not say that."

I waited for him to explain, but I got the impression he wanted me to finish the letter first.

I'm not entirely sure what Aimsir or her dam will be able to put to human words. It has been years, and the details were hazy even then. Whatever you decide, I know you'll make the best of it. If you could do so in the Quadrant, you'll succeed anywhere.

I always knew you'd be an incredible rider.

There was no point in arguing with a letter from a dead woman, but the idea that my mother had always had faith in me and had never managed to convey it except in the thinnest possible slivers hurt all over again.

"Now will you tell me what she was talking about?"

"I will need to make some inquiries before I can tell you anything with certainty."

"Can you at least-" but no, the shields were up.

Andarna's presence was still there, though, like Mira's hugs after an argument with my mother. "He won't tell me either, if it makes you feel better."

"It does," I sent my love back to her. And hey, if Tairn was being avoidant, I could spend quality time snuggling with Xaden without any lectures, right?

He was already curled up in bed, and I sat against the headboard, stroking his hair.

"Vi?" he asked, his eyelids fluttering open for just a second and then closing again.

"What happened back in Ean's apartment?" I poked gently. "Can you tell me?"

He didn't move or even open his eyes, but he took a deep breath and began to speak. "I said I trusted you, and I do, but I don't like unknowns," he admitted. "I thought I'd just take a quick look at his intentions-"

"Xaden-"

"-and I lost control almost immediately. I could hear far too much and I couldn't stop it. Sgaeyl must have," he swallowed, "she must have felt it, and had Tairn get your attention."

I wanted to be mad at him, but he was so clearly miserable and in pain already that it seemed almost pointless. "Do you want me to get you anything?"

"No. The only thing that makes me feel better is you." He uncurled just a bit. "I know it's too early for you to sleep but will you sit with me for a while?"

The vulnerability in his voice was stark, and it made me melt just a little more for him. I was so fucked when it came to staying angry at him.

I got up to look at the books we'd grabbed from my father’s office, focused on the books in languages that I could read easily. I loved having books around me all the time as a child, so I'd never thought much about the fact that my father had a very robust personal library for someone who was in the Archive most days; when I looked through them now, some of the books still bore the stamps showing they'd been marked for excision from the Archives, and a significant number of the others were Tyrrish.

"Do you want me to read to you?" I smiled to myself. "I know you like it when I speak Tyrrish to you."

"Maybe if my head wasn't so fuzzy." His voice was weak but I could hear a hint of smile in it, "but go ahead and read to yourself while I lay here. I don't have the energy to do more than that anyway, and you always seem to think more clearly when you have something to focus on."

I picked a book and sat next to him, snuggling against his back.

"Why does your father have so many books in Tyrrish anyway?" he asked me a few moments later.

"I'm not entirely sure. He spoke Tyrrish at home when I was young, though. My mother was stationed in Athebyne before she got promoted," I mentioned, sorting through the memories I had to pull from. That was the trouble with family that keeps secrets, wasn't it? "Brennan probably remembers living there, but I was born in Llewellyn."

"Your father must have been a very interesting man."

"I'd like to think he would have approved of you," I said with a little smile. "I would have told him how you write poetry."

I watched a tiny smile tug at his face at the idea. "I'm not good at gaining approval, but I would have liked to meet him. Brennan talked about him from time to time, too."

"He did?"

"When he was... the thing you do when you're nervous and focused on something, and you recite? When Brennan is focused on his hands, he talks about how he learned the thing he's doing. I heard a fair amount about how he trained his signet when he was mending you, but there were also a handful of times he was working on poisons while I was waiting for him."

I probably should have guessed, but it still hit me in the chest, the reminder of the years when Xaden had access to my brother and I didn't. I'd loved Brennan when I was little, but the age gap between us was so large that we'd never been the kind of close that talked about things, not really. Now I had him back but it felt more like I was still getting to know Brennan Aisreigh half the time, rather than having someone I actually knew back in my life.

By the time I'd gotten my thoughts back together, I could hear the soft, regular breathing that meant Xaden was asleep.

When I returned to my senses, I was surprised to realize that I was… well, myself, as far as I could tell. Also embarrassingly naked, laying on the edge of the flight field.

At least I wasn't cold.

"Does this mean I failed?" I asked Sgaeyl, confused.

"You did not fail. You still breathe."

Right, of course I would be dead. The memories from in the Vale were hazy, but – "Did she put me back together as a human instead of a dragon, then?"

"What do you feel?"

"Aside from the rock under my back?" I sat up. "I feel you, here." I started to reach for my head, but placed my hand at the bottom of my rib cage instead. It wasn't as if the connection was literally in my head, so it shouldn't be strange to realize it felt like it existed somewhere else, but it did. I could still place myself on my hill, though there was a small pond at the top of it now. I looked around.

"I feel Violet where she's always been. There's Tairn, he's… wow, he feels closer than before. And –" There was a feeling like the dawn, iridescent beams of light. "Andarna?"

"Yay! Now I can threaten you directly!"

"Our bond is different now," Sgaeyl confirmed. "You hear Andarna because she is your sister. It is possible you will understand other dragons."

"Possible." It was easy to forget that this is so unknown.

"I had expected you to look more… like us." Sgaeyl sounded disappointed. "Perhaps it will come in time. But what do you sense of your connection to the Source?"

"I feel it. I hear her." Amari is the Source, I felt confident thinking so. "I do not feel –"

"Pulled?"

"Yes. No discordant notes. Only harmonies."

"Good. Then the problem is resolved. All else we can deal with later. Go sleep."

Dawn was clawing its way into the sky over the flight field, and while I didn't feel exhausted at all, I was still naked. Sgaeyl's shadow reached up and wrapped around me.

"I'm a little surprised that still works."

"Likely it's your fledgling gift, and you'll grow out of it. What of your other…?" Even though Tairn knew, she didn't want to say it. I guessed it was probably still sore between them.

I realized that my shields were not just down but gone, washed away. I tried to direct my attention toward anyone who might be awake and unshielded at Basgiath, but I felt only the air. "Nothing." The thought was more frightening than I expected, but there were much worse prices I could have paid.

Before I walked back, though, there was another question. "Will other dragons be able to tell?"

"I do not think so, at least not immediately. It may be best to wait to report this to the Empyrean until then. I would not see anyone challenge you until you grow into your claws, my little one."

The name made me smile. "Should I call you mother?"

Sgaeyl seemed to freeze and I worried I'd said the wrong thing, but then she leaned close. I closed my eyes and laid my head on her cheek. "You may," she rumbled.

She had been more of a mother to me than the woman who birthed me anyway.

"Thank you, Màthair. For that, and for everything."

Watching them leave to return to the Vale while I snuck my naked ass back into campus felt wrong on so many levels I couldn't even start to count them. I remembered doing this once as a first year after a prank, surprised how vivid the memory was. I hadn't been anxious about it then – I wanted the guy responsible to know I wasn't lacking confidence even if I was lacking clothes.

Now I found myself missing that confidence. Between the circumstances we'd left Basgiath under and the way I'd been hiding since the Battle, it was hard not to pay attention to every movement, and being naked felt much, much more vulnerable than it usually did. The campus was mostly empty, though not entirely. I could hear footsteps against the stone. I couldn't place them; they were too loud, and the sound echoed too much. As I got closer to the halls that were busy at this hour, it got louder.

Everything was music now, rhythms and patterns as people walked around me without seeming to realize they were avoiding me. Walking past the cafeteria entrance where cadets on breakfast duty were already talking and clinking cutlery and dishes, every sound felt like part of a greater harmony. I was grateful for my shadows and the privacy they afforded me as I wove between the melodies.

The dorms and washrooms had their own noise, still enough to shake me until I reached Violet's room. I passed through her wards, a familiar hum, and the outside world quieted.

Violet's gentle, sleeping breaths made me shiver with the noise.

"Is this normal?"

"Our hearing is quite sensitive."

It was fascinating, really, to be able to focus so closely on her. I'd always loved the little noises she made, another set of the myriad ways in which she was alive.

"Xaden? You're back. Something wrong?" she murmured.

"Go back to sleep," I thought to her, sending reassurance. "Everything is fine."

She did, her face never quite losing the slack peace of sleep. I climbed into the bed next to her, draping my arm over her and pressing against her back.

I woke up to a lot of things, all at once.

Violet's hands were on my face, her eyes wide and wet with tears as she said my name. That was worth a lot all by itself, to wake up to that again.

"I missed you, Violence," I thought at her, purely for the satisfaction of doing it.

Outside in the hall I heard shouting.

"Is that Bodhi?" I murmured.

Violet rolled over, seeming to hear the noise in the hall for the first time. "Maybe? I think I hear Imogen. Should I check?"

"How about you stay here and I let him in?" I suggested.

Blushing, Violet laughed. "Xaden, you can't!"

"Get dressed, then. I doubt we can avoid company."

When the knock on the door finally came, she called back that we were getting dressed. She had her leathers and a tunic on in moments, while I had to hunt for something in decent shape, but I finally managed to lay hands on a pair of my own leathers and pull them on my legs before Violet opened the door.

"What's wrong with Xaden?" Bodhi demanded.

"Nothing," I said, putting on my best smirk, "except that I was in bed with Violet and now I'm not."

Bodhi grinned and swept into the room like a sunbeam after the curtains were opened. He hugged me tight enough that I suspected he still didn't believe I was real.

"I kept hearing how sick you were but you wouldn't see me, and then you wrote me a fucking letter? It looked like you couldn't even hold a fucking pen, Xaden! I was worried sick about you, and then Garrick shows up last night and says I need to be here –"

"I didn't want you to worry," I told him honestly. "You've got enough to worry about keeping the fliers in line."

Bodhi punched me in the side, hard enough that I felt it. Hard enough that a week ago I would have fallen over. I wondered if he was testing me. "Don't fucking do that to me again!"

"I'm sorry, Bodhi. I never want you to worry about me."

I turned to see Imogen and Garrick in the doorway, both staring at me like they'd never seen me before, and now Violet was gasping behind me.

"Xay, your back –" Garrick got out, but he shook his head. He nudged Imogen into the room and shut the door behind them.

"Is something wrong with my back?" I asked, feeling Violet's hand tracing my scars.

"Sgaeyl's relic is gone." Garrick's voice held an undertone of seriousness, and I saw his hand twitch toward his daggers. "Did she break the bond? Did you –"

"Sgaeyl? What should I tell them?"

"Your mate and your lieutenants can know the truth if you are comfortable giving it. Beyond that it becomes dangerous, my hatchling. You are still vulnerable."

I wasn't entirely sure what that meant yet, and it would take time to figure it out. I trusted everyone in this room, though, even Imogen who already had a dagger in her hand. Violet had known the details from the beginning, but there was no telling what other people would make of it.

"Sgaeyl didn't break our bond," I told Garrick, very aware that all four of them had their attention trained on me. Sgaeyl gave me the words and I repeated them. "The treatment she offered was very unusual. She said I'm technically an unbonded dragon now, as one dragon cannot claim another."

He started pacing nervously, watching to see if Imogen was going to say anything before he started talking. "Okay, you know I'm ride or die, Xay, but what the fuck? First you're venin and now you're a dragon? Except the only sign of it is that you don't have a relic anymore and you magically recovered from days of not drawing from the earth in one night." Garrick looked sick as he dragged his hand through his hair and I had to admit when he put it like that it didn't sound great. "You gotta give me something else here, brother. You can see how this looks, right?"

"I will confirm it to Chradh," Sgaeyl offered, but I knew he wouldn't be the only one with questions.

I watched Garrick's face as his eyes grew distant and then refocused. He looked at Imogen and Bodhi, nodding his head yes. "How is that even possible?"

"How is what possible?" Bodhi asked again. "Stop fucking ignoring me!" I hated not answering him but I didn't know how to have both conversations at once. I tried to sort it out in my head: the days of weakness, Sgaeyl's silence, her help.

"I'll explain it as best as I can once Garrick is satisfied," I told my cousin, "but the short version is: I made a mistake, and I was able to rectify it with magic and with Amari's help." It wasn't as if I had a better explanation. A longer one, yes, but not a better one.

Imogen stepped up close to me. "Let me see."

I looked down, meeting her eyes. I tried not to worry what I'd find there. Were they more suspicious now because I'd seemed like less of a threat before? I'd give them whatever they needed, because they deserved it for standing alongside me when I'd asked them to, but it was hard to still be surrounded by their disappointment. More of it, even.

"No red," she confirmed. "Fuck, you could have warned us; we had to hear it from Sorrengail."

"I didn't know exactly what was going to happen. None of us did," I repeated, looking at Violet. "Even Sgaeyl wasn't sure, and it was her idea." Frustrated as I was by their questions, I knew how lucky I was they hadn't tried to kill me before this. I was thankful Garrick and Imogen trusted me, but they would have been well within their rights to do otherwise.

Of course, if I hadn't trusted them, I wouldn't have told Garrick in the first place. It was a hell of a circle, wasn't it?

It took me most of the evening to explain to Bodhi what had happened, and to give all of them the longer story – well, the impressions, really, of what became of me in the Vale. For every minute that passed, the time I'd spent – dead? unmade? whatever it was, it felt further away and harder to recall. It took on the almost dreamy quality of my mother's face or my father's voice. It wasn't a memory, not really, but calling up the way remembering had felt. Instead of remembering and then feeling something about it, I felt something and let whatever remained of the memory float to the surface.

Bodhi needed to walk away three times while I told the story.

The first time, Imogen and Garrick both looked at me, waiting for me to go after him. I started to get up, but Sgaeyl's voice surprised me.

"Patience, hatchling. Let Cuir's boy decide to return on his own."

I wanted to chase him down, to explain things so everything was right between us again, but I took Sgaeyl's advice and stayed where I was.

The thing was, I couldn't make it right. I couldn't do anything to change the way Bodhi felt about what I'd done, whether it was the drawing itself, or trying to get him away from me and from Basgiath so that he was safe. I was getting used to not being able to pull my shields aside like a veil and just check what one of my friends was intending, but I hadn't been able to read Bodhi like that since he first manifested his signet.

The first time he left was when I fully confessed what I'd done during the battle. Bodhi bit his lip and stormed out like he was afraid of what would come out of his mouth. He came back only a handful of minutes later, looking more confused than anything else. He frowned when he spotted me still sitting in the same place, but he closed the door and crossed his arms. "Well? Then what?"

The second time was when he realized Garrick and Imogen had known, and had gone along with sending him away. He left with a sigh but he wasn't gone much longer that time, and he came back with fierce glares for Garrick and Imogen too. I thought I could hear the soft hum of his magic just outside. I thought maybe he was testing to see if I'd follow.

It was a reasonable assumption. Usually I did go after Bodhi; usually I had something more to say, some more explanation, some justification, some… frankly, some bullshit I was going to make out to be his problem. But all the bullshit here was mine, so I waited and let him take the time he wanted to decide how he felt, and then he came back. It wasn't all that long; even the third time wasn't quite half an hour. Amari knew I could give my cousin half an hour after I'd just admitted to him that I'd accepted I might die without seeing him again, that I pretty much had died. He looked sick when he left, hurrying like he thought he'd throw up. Maybe he was sick at the thought; maybe I should have gone after him that time. But Bodhi had never refused hearing me out completely, not even when I'd been trying to explain why I was being entirely rational about Violet Sorrengail and we both knew I was lying.

"Do you want to fight it out?" I asked while we were waiting for him, giving Imogen and Garrick the opportunity.

"Not yet," Imogen said, interrupting something Garrick had been about to say. "I think all of us need to… figure out how to feel about this."

When Bodhi did come back the third time, he walked straight to me and pulled me into a fierce hug.

"You don't get to fucking die on me." His voice shook the tiniest bit and I felt guilty all over again.

"Not planning to do it again," I tried to reassure him.

Bodhi stepped back from the hug, holding me at arms' length with both hands on my shoulders. "Good. Don't – don't leave me alone."

"I won't," I promised again, pushing away the sense that Sgaeyl was watching me. The sense that I was making a promise I didn't know I could keep.

I thought getting through that first explanation would be the hard part, but it turned out that no matter how many times I found myself thinking I'd get back to normal, normal never came. Normal never had come, not since my father started his rebellion; at best I'd found routine, so I went looking for that. Garrick had patrols he was assigned to. Bodhi rejoined classes Imogen was attending. Violet had her father's notes to read through and I realized that while I'd been a mess, she had her whole squad doing research to try to fix the wards in Aretia. Fuck, I loved that woman.

I asked Sgaeyl if she had any new suggestions about the Aretian wardstone but she only told me that the problem would find a solution soon enough. I appreciated her confidence but being well enough to consider returning to my lieutenant duties and resume hunting venin made me very aware of the danger Aretia was in with the wards weakening there.

It felt like there was a fuckton of life to catch up on. Violet filled in the holes in my memory from the last week, along with more details from the research she'd been doing. Bodhi had brought letters from Brennan and the Assembly that I needed to read and respond to, and Garrick caught me up on the gossip. I didn't care much about that part, but it was soothing to listen to him talk about everyday things. His rhythm had calmed.

I slept, got breakfast with Violet, let leadership know that I was nearly fit for duty again if they had work for me. Every little thing felt like I was doing it for the first time. I listened to the way different signets sang, the way magelights softly hummed the songs of the people who had imbued them, the subtle way melodies changed and echoed each other.

The first day was guard duty, probably because they didn't know what to do with me. That was fine with me. I stood at the entrance to the school and tried to chart the songs I heard, to learn the sources. It was like being a first year all over again, learning how to make sense of someone's intentions or how to understand what my shadows felt and heard.

And of course there was the most mundane thing of all, laundry. I didn't have much to wear and I'd lost what I wore out to the Vale, so there was a visit to the exchange that had to be made as well, but at least I had clean clothes after that. I couldn't remember how long it had been since I'd had nothing but Basgiath-issued everything. Maybe not ever; I'd carried underwear across the parapet along with a change of clothes, and I'd been able to get my own things later.

Everything I wore felt slightly wrong, probably because it was off the rack and I'd been getting stuff tailored for so long. Even my underwear felt like it didn't sit right. I kept standing up and walking around the room until Violet turned and laughed at me.

"You're worse than Ridoc tonight," Violet finally said. "Go do something, Xaden, please. I love you but I'm trying to read."

"But all the different somethings I can think of are things I'd rather do with you." I felt a little smile playing over my lips. "Please?"

"Xaden!" she laughed again. Gods, it was so good to hear her laughing. "Later, please, I'm trying to get through my dad's research while I'm light on homework. Tomorrow's Friday, you can have me all weekend if you want."

"I might hold you to that." I put a hand on her shoulder possessively. "Maybe I'll keep you in bed all weekend."

"I might be disappointed if you don't," she tilted her head so she was looking up at me through her long lashes, like a rabbit in the tall grass. Like prey?

Where had that thought come from?

"Maybe I'll go see if Garrick wants to spar," I told her, kissing the top of her head and promising to be back before she fell asleep. Of course, Violet with a research project would stay up half the night without someone stopping her, so I wasn't particularly worried about it.

I went down to Imogen's room and knocked. There wasn't any sound from inside, but there never was; her sound shields were good when she had them up. I felt one of my shadows slipping under the door and reaching around, touching the other dark outlines inside the space. Bed, desk, armoire, and three shadow-shapes I knew well. That was good. I was pretty confident I wouldn't interrupt anything too personal if Bodhi was there too.

It was Garrick who opened the door, and I thought it was interesting that he looked back at Imogen and Bodhi before letting me in.

But he did let me in, pulling me through the wards on Imogen's door. I heard the wards chime as I passed through them, a gentle sound; Imogen's wards were beautifully harmonized with each other. If I concentrated, I thought I could tell which ones she had woven and which were Garrick's. I didn't feel them push against me at all, which seemed interesting, given Garrick clearly expected to have to pull me through them.

"What's up?" Garrick asked as I stepped in.

"Violet shooed me out of the room," I admitted. "Apparently I'm distracting when she's trying to do research."

Imogen snorted. "Well, yeah, nobody's surprised by that."

"I didn't really have anything in particular to do so… what are you guys doing?" I thought I caught a glimpse of something on Bodhi's face, but it slipped away before I was sure.

Garrick blinked and laughed at me, pulling my attention away from him. "Xaden Riorson, are you bored?"

I was going to argue with him, but… okay, there wasn't anything I could specifically say wasn't true about that sentence. "Maybe?" I admitted. "I feel like nothing fits right and I can't get comfortable."

"You just got, what, remade? Isn't that what you said?" Bodhi asked. "That probably makes sense."

"I was thinking maybe we could spar and I could get some of this nervous energy out," I said and then looked around the room at the three of them again. I'd noticed their harmony, but then I'd stopped paying attention to it; now something sounded off, a minor key winding its way into the music. Was it just magic I could hear, or was there more to it than that? "If – you're not busy?" Were they busy? Fuck, had I interrupted them talking about me or something? That would explain why they all looked so awkward.

Bodhi and Imogen both looked to Garrick the way they used to look at me, waiting for his answer. I could practically hear Bodhi shifting his weight in the chair, the sheets moving across each other as Imogen leaned back against the bed.

Fuck.

"I probably owe you a couple of shots at me," I told Garrick, trying to fix it. I hadn't been able to hear it then, but the four of us used to have such an easy melody together. There had to be a way to fix this. "And you can see for yourself whether I'm still myself."

Garrick crossed his arms over his chest and looked me up and down. "You sure? You were dying like… two days ago."

"I'm fine now," I insisted. "Let me show you."

"I guess, if you want to."

"I want to." I bounced on the balls of my feet, ready to move already.

"Why are you acting like a kid?" Imogen asked when she stood up, narrowing her eyes at me. Garrick tried to put a hand on her arm but she shook him off like he was a particularly pushy coat.

I couldn't get over how excited I was to be dragging Garrick, Bodhi and Imogen to the sparring mats. Imogen wasn't wrong when she said I was acting like a kid, now that I thought about it. I felt like a kid, like some kind of weight had been lifted from me.

It was almost like a dream trying to remember how miserable I'd been after I drew from the earth, with Sgaeyl's anger and Violet's pity, how much the urge to draw had overwhelmed my thoughts. Fuck. No wonder I felt lighter.

"I'm going to start out going easy on you, just to make sure I don't beat the crap out of you too fast," Garrick said, and I finally saw a grin coming back onto his face.

"Don't even think about it or I'll put you on the floor," I told him, shaking my head. He pulled his shirt off, giving Imogen a wink that had her both smiling and rolling her eyes, and I started to do the same.

"Don't –" Bodhi said, stopping me. His voice was a low hiss. "Did you fucking forget?"

Oh shit. "Yes," I admitted, looking around the sparring gym. Our corner was quiet but the space wasn't empty. No one worth worrying about, passed through my head, sounding more like something Sgaeyl might say than my own thought, but I was alone in my head at the moment.

I shook my head; that was not a helpful thing to be thinking. There were cadets I didn't know a few mats away from us, and while they didn't seem to be paying attention, that didn't mean I shouldn't pay attention to their presence. "I don't exactly spend a lot of time looking at my back," I said, trying to bring my focus back to my friends.

"Well, be more careful, or the questions will get a lot harder," Imogen said from behind him.

She was right. Maybe I needed to find an excuse to go back to Aretia, where people would be less likely to watch me closely. At the thought, a little pang of homesickness shot through me. That was new. I'd certainly missed Aretia, but I'd been away so much – even when the riot was there in the fall – that I didn't think I got homesick, but the flutter of melancholy was unmistakable.

"You miss your hatching grounds," Sgaeyl told me as I stretched, preparing for the match. "As do I. We choose where we connect to the earth, and the Vale is still familiar and welcoming but we chose Aretia and we long to return when we are not there."

"You ready to get your ass kicked?" Garrick asked, interrupting me.

I smirked at him. "Trust me, I'm recovered enough to handle you." I could see the way he kept checking in with Imogen and Bodhi, the little nod he gave my cousin before asking me.

"Bare hands, no signets?" Garrick asked.

"I'm still adjusting there," I admitted. "My shadows seem to have gotten used to having a mind of their own."

Bodhi's jaw tightened and I wondered if he was going to use his signet on me. Despite Sgaeyl's good word and my best attempts to reassure them, they were all still acting so skittish. Well, fine, I told myself, resolving to put Garrick on his ass. Hopefully that would help.

Trading blows with Garrick felt almost like my body was coming back to itself, the itchy-tight feeling starting to fade away as I moved. He started out going easy on me but I resolved to make him regret that as quickly as possible.

"I know you can hit me harder than that," I grumbled, moving to sweep his legs out from under him. My balance felt off, and I had to put one hand down on the mat when I dropped low to swing my leg, but I knocked him off balance too so that seemed fine.

I glanced over at the side of the mat where Imogen was actually watching me and not Garrick. That was probably the most obvious sign of how worried she still was, and it stung. Bodhi was following my movements too, and I almost considered reaching for my shadows just because I was curious if he really was blocking me. It wasn't surprising that he was watching me, though. His eyes had been following me every time we were in the same place since he got here, like he had to keep reminding himself I was okay.

I shouldn't have tried to protect him.

Garrick was taking this more seriously now, and my distraction let him get a bruising shot in against my jaw. My head snapped back and I felt the skin split along the right side of my jaw. Garrick froze, his eyes wide like he was suddenly seeing me shaking and weak again as I stumbled back a step.

I reached up to apply pressure, to hopefully keep it from bleeding too much, but it wasn't bleeding at all. For a moment I stared at my clean fingers before touching it again. All I could feel was bone, nothing else at all.

"Xaden? You okay?" Bodhi asked after a moment, stepping in close to me.

"I'm fine," I insisted, trying to shake it off. It didn't even hurt. But Bodhi wouldn't back off – instead he grabbed my chin in his hand with a strong grip and made me look at him.

"What the fuck," he murmured, leaning right into my personal space and refusing to let go.

I noticed a low rumbling noise, but it wasn't until Bodhi stepped back that I realized I was growling.

"Okay! We're done with this," Bodhi announced. "Imogen, I'm sorry, I need to take him to the third year bathrooms."

She scoffed. "Like I haven't been in the men’s room before."

"I've never seen you in the men’s room," Garrick said to her as Bodhi grabbed my arm and pulled me beside him. I had to fight off the urge to pull away; I did not like feeling leashed. Still, it was Bodhi.

"Why are we going to the bathroom?"

"I'm pretty sure I need to stitch that shut," he answered, "but first I want to know if you can explain what the fuck I'm looking at."

I couldn't see Garrick and Imogen but their footsteps were right behind us. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen Bodhi like this. The chin-grabbing? I was supposed to do that to him, not the other way around.

When we reached the bathrooms, Garrick pushed the door open and chased out Aetos without explaining anything at all before holding the door so Bodhi and Imogen could escort me inside. Bodhi led me straight to the mirror, and Garrick and Imogen pushed in on either side of me to see what he was pointing me at.

"It's just a cut," I said, not even really looking at it.

Bodhi shook his head. "It is not. Look at your fucking face, Xaden."

Imogen was pushing in closer from my right, pulling at my split skin with her finger, and then I couldn't miss what Bodhi was talking about. Beneath the brown skin I was intimately familiar with, rather than red flesh or even white bone like I'd thought, there was something dark. I moved, and the light reflecting off the mirror almost seemed to shine against it.

"Oh that's so gross, I can reach right through your skin," Imogen said, scraping at it with her fingernail. "Whatever it is, it's hard. No give at all."

"Get your finger out of my face," I snapped my teeth at her.

On my mental hill, I could sense that Sgaeyl was watching with curiosity to see what was going on. I leaned in toward the mirror, letting her borrow my eyes to see, and I felt excitement and pride emanating from her.

"Excellent. Your scales are coming in after all."

"My scales..." I was caught so far off-guard that I said it aloud.

"We should get you back to the hatching grounds soon," Tairn added. "Having to drag one hatchling through the air while she entered the Dreamless Sleep was sufficient. Letting it happen a second time would be an insult to my own forebears."

"Scales?" Imogen echoed my words. "Are you telling me those are dragon scales in there?"

"It doesn't matter," Bodhi said, shaking his head as he returned – when had he left? Why was my attention so scattered? "We just need to make sure nobody else notices." He unrolled a little medical kit and I could feel it when he flicked lesser magic along the needle and the suture thread to make sure it was clean, a little ripple of static electricity.

I barely felt it as he stitched my chin shut, my thoughts racing. I'd been focusing on returning to routine, convincing my friends I was myself, and maybe I had focused on that too much.

Was I myself? Or was I someone new?

"You are both," Sgaeyl said to me as Bodhi stepped back from my face, letting me look in the mirror again. Neat stitches held the skin together over my chin, but I knew what was underneath it now. I looked closer, trying to see if anything else was different.

Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought there was more gold in my eyes than there used to be. My eyes flicked to Bodhi, my reflection. I'd always had sharper features than his. When he was a first year, I'd heard more than one person say he looked like me, "only human." I studied him and then myself, trying to shake the feeling that I couldn't recognize my own face.

"Do not overthink this. We all become new people as we grow, dragon and human alike." Sgaeyl's voice had a comforting lilt, and the love she was sending through our bond hummed in my bones.

I smiled at Bodhi and his music softened, slowing just a little.

"Are we good?" I asked all of them, but my focus was on him.

"Yeah," Garrick said, clapping me on the back, and Imogen added, "For tonight, anyway."

"Be careful," was Bodhi's answer. "Just – be careful."