Page 64 of To Touch A Silent Fury

I thought Yvon was done then, and I nodded, despite the sadness on her face. This ease she spoke of, it was clearly not her own.

Yvon’s face crumpled with grief. “She still hears too much. It is as if a gentle breeze is a storm, or like someone screams at her, someone no one else can sense.”

“I am sorry.”

Yvon waved my apology away, and I knew the conversation was over. Sollie. Alone somewhere in these woods. Her mother was now almost a mother to me, too.

I wondered if her music box still sat in that same room in the Wing. I wondered if she thought of it. Then Yvon ran off into the forest and left me standing alone.

It was another frustrating hour before anyone moved from the stone towers. It was even more painful now, with the burden of Yvon’s information. Vellintris was here, on the forest floor, and I had to wait on the whim of some barbaric cult of men, yet again.

There was no sign of my wolfish ‘shadow’, and the weight of Yvon’s strange words weighed on my mind. The part that kept replaying was her discussion of my Fate. She signed the word with the same reverence she signed‘Amune’, or any of the dragons. And yet she’d never used the word before, never spoken of it.

What did the Euphons care for the Fates of the Brotherhood? They hated the Brotherhood and killed all the moon’s offspring.

Finally, sound. Footsteps, and shuffling fabric. They were on the move.

I pressed my body against the tree, peering around.

It was only Yvon’s careful training that kept me from choking on my exhalation.

The men, for they wereallmen, had begun their procession. In slow steps, some thirty people, aged from three to fifteen spans old, moved out into the forest. They made next to nosound, but enough that I picked up the faint rustling of their green cloaks.

It was not their silence, nor their maleness that surprised me.

All of them had a head of shockingly white hair.

The Sons of Amune were not killing the infantile Brothers of Eavenfold.

TheywereBrothers. Hidden, deep in Gossamir.

I pressed back against the tree, touching my hand to where the moonstone lay warm against my chest, stunned by the revelation. Once more, my first thought was wishing Seth was here. He’d resented his servitude to the Thread of Knowledge, but I knew he would be in awe of this information. Where was he now? He must have completed his Service and been granted his Mark. What did it look like? Had he gone home to Droundhaven?

I longed to tell him everything that had come to pass. Everything I had learnt, everything I had survived. There was a mystery here, one long sown and kept by hundreds. But it would have to wait. Now, I needed to follow them. It was time to find the dragon.

17

Tani

I’d been tracking them for an hour when a breath came from behind me. At first, I suspected Yvon, but the sound was too heavy to be her, even when she was trying to make noise.

I paused, then relaxed when I heard the telltale swish of fur against bark. I found the tree, the source of his shoddy hiding, and the silver fur behind it.

It was him. The shadow of my footsteps. His limp had gone now, but he still had that pale grey stripe down his right flank.

I waited for him to step around, and when he did, we stared at each other. Slowly, I dipped my head. After a moment, he huffed.

Since I’d touched his paw, I had decided he didn’t seem interested in killing me. In Domin, I would have been far more cautious. The wolves got hungry in its depths, hungry enough to disturb the tribesfolk. They had stolen food I had left out countless times, and during my secondDomin, it was only a wild thrashing with a torch that stopped me from becoming their next meal.

But this wolf seemed content enough, his body stocky with a season of good hunting. I had never set out to tame the beast, nor thrown a bone his way. There was no chasing the wolf off; it would cause far too much noise and might alert the Sons. I couldn’t risk losing them. I had to hope my shadow could keep himself quiet enough to not risk us both.

Why he followed me, I had no idea. Ergreen had been a whirlwind of fires and searching, and if I was any less exhausted, I might have thought about it more.

Turning back, the last Son stepped out of view, a green cloak dragging in the mud. As before, I waited several breaths before I pursued, only closing enough to see the last few men, and only enough to know their direction. After five years of waiting, it was a taxing final exercise in patience. My salvation, and Langnathin’s deliverance.

I had no plan for when we reached her. With no access to the same research here I might have had at my disposal on Eavenfold, I didn’t know how long it took for an egg to hatch once the process began, or how the bonding even worked.

There were snippets of dragon lore and fragments of their biology locked in my memory that I'd learned for my Fate Ceremony. They did little to serve me now. A dragon left in the wild will usually attach itself to its mother, provided she survives long enough to care for it. But those born around humans could form attachments to their primary caregiver. Given the natural magic of dragons, and the lack of inherent magic for most of humanity, those bonds drew them to one another, marrying small elements of each’s physiology, such as the changes in eye colour. From what I’d read, the bonding process took weeks, or months. The exact point, and how to achieve it, seemed hazy at best.