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T here was no food to fetch. No better source of mana that he was allowed. No place warmer, either. So when Jai started awake to find Winter snoozing on his lap, he did not shift her from her place, or attempt to go outside. Instead, he soulbreathed, and explored the meld.

She was dreaming. He could almost see it in his mind’s eye. The cold cooling her from below, the sun warming her from above, the wind lifting her from beneath, tugging at her from the front. Flying was a mess of contradictions, and she revelled in it.

Still, there was no clear image in his head. Only the impression of what she saw. He knew he could do better. He needed to see through her eyes, as Erica could.

As if she sensed Jai’s intrusion into her dreams, Winter stirred, yawning such that her great pink maw near enveloped his head. She was hungry, he knew. She too could subsist on mana for a short while, but her metabolism was far greater than his own.

‘Go,’ Jai whispered.

But she refused, stubbornly insisting on staying in their cocoon of warmth. Jai realised, they spent very little time this way. For usually, when he’d finished dealing with the affairs of state and they were both settled in his chamber, he was wont to fall straight to sleep. Hell, he hardly managed to read a few passages from the diary at a time before he was snoring.

Winter met his eyes, beseeching. Wanting more. Jai leaned forward, pressing his forehead between her horns, letting her deep breaths lull him. He entered the full-trance, and seized their melded umbilical.

Jai remembered.

THEY BOTH CRIED TEARS that day, nestled in their cocoon of warmth. Held each other close, and shared in their solace. It had been a different kind of pain, the kind Jai was not used to.

He had relived his life. From his earliest memories to this very day, the images pulsed down their connection.

Of his brief, happy infancy, with Balbir and his brothers. Of his move to Leonid’s chambers, of the long years of solitude. The hatred he suffered, the derision, the fear of him and what he represented. The slaughter, and escape.

Her arrival into his life, that happy surprise. And more too, things that Winter had seen as well, even knew how Jai felt about, but did not understand.

Now Jai explained with pulses of emotion and meaning as best he could, hard though it was to explain geopolitics and the dark stain of fettering to a dragon.

It was not perfect, by any means. But was a bittersweet joy for her, to know him that way. She had known him in every other. Known his fears, his hates, his wants and loves. But not his history.

He himself had not relived it in that way. Gone over it in his mind, remembering who he was, where he had come from. It had always been too painful.

His tears were still hot upon his cheeks, the wet merging with Winter’s own as she pressed herself closer, trying to soothe him.

For she too had flashed back her own history. This too, he knew intimately, for he had known her all her life. But now he understood far more. How she’d sensed the death of her own mother, trapped inside an egg within her belly, knowing she might die in darkness, having never seen the light.

Only for Jai to free her. To bond with her, to carry her with him across the wild lands. To care for her, and she him. She reminded him of their love.

It was when the tears had dried, and mana ran dry, that Winter finally moved. She lapped Jai’s face, nudged his chest as if to keep him in place and pulled back to let the cold light in once more.

Jai took a few deep breaths, glad of the fresh air, before his heart somersaulted at the sight of Winter leaping from the precipice.

He wanted to soulbreathe, to fill his core once more. Instead, he closed his eyes. Let the world fade away, instead focusing on his connection to Winter. In truth, he had not once tried to soulwalk, as the Speaker had called it.

He’d never had a need, for since his escape, Winter had spent much of it at his side, and he had been more interested in how she was feeling than seeing the same world he could through her eyes. So it was strange to lean back and seek out the meld that joined them with new purpose, to seize upon it and draw all he could.

However, it was hard to grasp, in his mind’s eye. He could sense their long, braided souls stretched into the darkness, but the glowing shard that was Winter’s core felt far away, like a distant star. Still, he could see the light pulsing up and down their connection. At first, he knew not what to do, because he’d been told to see . What he realised, though, was that perhaps that hadn’t been the right word, the right action. So he concentrated his efforts elsewhere, and listened to those pulses.

And they came. Bursts of sound in his mind. Fuzzy, and harsh. Such that at first, he thought he was doing it wrong.

It was only when Winter noticed what he was doing, and opened her mind to him, did Jai understand it was the roar of the wind in her ears, as she tore through the air below. With that window into her mind open, it slammed into him with a blow, and Jai found it hard to parse all the senses she sent him. Bursts of exhilaration dizzied him, and his sense of balance flipped and twisted as Winter did the same in the mountains’ heights.

With all that, though, he saw nothing. Only sensed what she knew, that she was swooping through a ravine. But he could not see the shape of it.

He pulled his connection back and hugged Winter, wondering if those weeks of neglect were enough for this connection to be fully realised.