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“Ah, there you are,” Revna said from the doorway behind him. Her boots rapped across the floor as she crossed toward him. “The lads think they’ve found some unaccounted for stones: a bit of tumbledown wall from the farm Admar and his family abandoned when he lost the leg.” She arrived beside him at the window. “What are you looking at? Lost in the clouds?”

“Essentially,” he answered, and nodded toward the view of the sky through the glass.

The drakes, and their Drake riders, were heading away from the palace, out toward the cliff faces and the harsh coastline where the Sels had set anchor and snuck up on them from the rear. At this distance, the great beasts looked like no more than birds, with the arch of their flapping wings – if you ignored the swinging, rudderlike tails. Too far for him to still make out the red of Oliver’s hair, shining like a fox pelt in the late day sunlight.

Revna followed his gaze, and chuckled. “Well then, good for her. She’s getting braver all the time, our sweet Tessa.”

Our. Revna, the boys, Bjorn and Birger – his whole household had accepted the Drakes as their own. Proud, possessive, protective, just as he was. Horrors lurked on the horizon, he knew – every night he woke in a cold sweat from dreams of that Selesee captain kneeling on the flagstones, snarling up at him. You will burn before the end, Frodeson. The magics of this land will bend to the emperor’s will, and your whore will look on, laughing, as he burns you himself.

An empty threat from a condemned man?

He thought so.

But he’d also thought drakes long extinct, and here he stood watching three in flight.

He gave himself a mental shake. All he could do was prepare for war – prepare his family for it – and do what he knew to be right. It was the same thing he’d always done, only, his family was a bit bigger, now.

He draped an arm around Revna’s shoulders.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“No reason.”

Sunlight struck Percy’s sharp, spade-tipped tail, and it glittered like a flash of diamond – like a falling star, one on which Erik wished, fervently, not to lose the precious things that he’d gained.