Page 33 of To Touch A Silent Fury (The Bride of Eavenfold #1)

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 second Domin, 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 .

The wyverns, a different species, though from the same family as dragons, were also able to bond to some degree.

I only knew the rumours. Whilst an adolescent dragon might survive its bonded partner’s death, its strength of body and mind enough to withstand the pain of it, a wyvern never did.

They were simpler of mind and nature, as well as far smaller.

If their riders died, so did they. A bard had sung of the falling stars of green and gold in battle as I had travelled up to Lavendell Point with Ersimmon and Seth.

Though, how any of it worked in practice, I had no idea.

The Sightlands’ wyvern nursery in the Vidarium closely guarded that process, alongside all of its results.

If I had read anything that came out of the Vidarium, it was likely no more than propaganda about their unnervingly growing ‘fleet’.

Sunset bled into twilight, and the Sons stopped.

We were up in the northwest of Gossamir, just to the right of the Ramelon River and only a day’s ride from the outskirts of Sellador. I checked over my shoulder more than usual, knowing that Langnathin’s barracks might only be a short walk from here.

His choice of location was well-thought.

Thane Ivangor ran Sellador, and when Yvon spoke of him, she would be uncharacteristically animated in her vitriol.

By all accounts, the thane was far too willing to trade with the cacofs and had even been known to host the Triad’s royalty.

It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine Ivangor might turn a blind eye to Langnathin’s occupation, too. Why Odenor allowed it, I could not say.

Of all the places to land, Vellintris had chosen the Dragon Prince’s doorstep.

I leaned against a tree, staring at the back of these men’s white heads, the sight almost as normal to me now as it had been five years ago.

A low bray, a noise of distress, rumbling through the trees.

Deep. Ancient. Draconic .

I weaved back and around, casting a wide circle around the Sons even as their low humming started to fill the trees. The noise would surely alert some Sightlands scout soon enough, even if the fire had not yet followed. This was borrowed time.

Stepping over thick roots and pushing rough shrubs, I positioned myself against the noises of the Sons and the deep belly rumblings of the creature. Cautiously, I closed towards the dragonsound.

My shadow appeared, then, and I could not help the small breath as he stepped up alongside me, stalking through the forest as I did. He did not look up at me, matching my slow pace. I wanted to shoo him away, but it was too risky now.

And then we stepped around either side of a curving yew, and my heart thundered.

Vellintris lay in a small and broken clearing.

When Skirmtold burnt down the Wing all those years ago, I’d only caught a glimpse of him, retreating on the wind, blotting against the sun as the smoke filled the air.

He was distant, and surely only made so huge by my childish mind.

When Chaethor had landed on Eavenfold, she had settled in my mind as the size an adult dragon must be.

The height of two men, each wing spanning another two men.

But Chaethor was only four or five spans old.

Vellintris was much older.

Lying down, curled as she was now, I only had hints at her true size.

She was three men tall even on her side.

The taper of her tail, even at its narrowest, was thicker than the yew I now held for support.

It widened into a spiked end, and as she rumbled she thumped it, the dark flinty scales pounding heavily against the ground.

From just one stretch of her wings, I assessed they had to be three times the size of Chaethor’s.

Her great blue-black scaled snout breathed heavily as she poked her nose against her side. I fathomed I could lie against that nose and not reach where her piercing sapphire eyes blinked in slow serpentine movements.

I fell back a step, crouching to hide myself behind the cover of the nearby foliage as I tried to work out my next move. My shadow did not hide. He sat at the edge of the clearing, staring at Vellintris.

Did he not feel the danger in her? Why did he not flee, as any prey would in the eyes of such a behemoth?

My whole body quivered with fear I couldn’t suppress. Despite all the years I had known that one day, if all went well, I would be here in front of Vellintris, I hadn’t fathomed how terrifying she would be. Even the laziest of her tail movements would kill me.

There was no hope in taking even a scrap of food from her clearing, let alone retrieving her egg.

I scanned the clearing and saw the Sons on the far side, staring at the dragon as they murmured their low hum. They would almost certainly see me if I crept towards her.

Vellintris did not look around, and part of me was certain she already knew we were here and didn’t care. There was something so deeply other about her that I fully understood why the Euphons worshipped dragons like Founders.

Vellintris breathed in deeply, flaring her nostrils.

She tucked her nose to the dirt in front of her and exhaled hard, letting out that same low braying noise from her barely open mouth.

I flinched as her belly rumbled, and she exposed the soft underbelly of it.

Under its grey-blue leather, a faint orange light, a fire within, flared and then died.

The dragon released the breath, and let out a strange keening noise as she pressed her nose near her belly again and nudged at something there .

But it wasn’t herself she was nudging. It was the egg. Laden with perfectly uniform lilac scales, the egg was nestled half under her. It looked like it weighed a ton.

The dragon tried again, summoning a huge breath, and then braying out; the fire starting in her belly, warming the ground, and then nothing. When she pulled her wing back further, I realised something was very wrong.

A deep cut speared across her lower belly. I couldn’t tell from this distance who or what could have caused it, only that it looked nasty, oozing blackened blood.

The Sons exchanged signs as they sang. They had noticed too. I squinted, making out some of the words. ‘ Injured. Fire. Problem.’

But they did not move.

So this was why Vellintris had not made her fire. This was why they had enough time to reach her, uninterrupted by cacofs. The dragon was too hurt to ignite the flame beneath her egg.

Vellintris pulled in yet another huge breath, pushing it through her as she failed to summon her fire yet again. The bray took on a difficult tone I now understood. She was in pain, a lot of it.

The thought flickered then, that maybe if I was fast enough, I could run in and haul the egg somewhere.

The dragon might be too injured to fight me off.

But I studied the way she coiled around it, and I knew in the next instant that Vellintris would happily give her last breath to protect it.

At this rate, she likely would do so sooner rather than later, wearing herself out like that.