Page 37 of To Touch A Silent Fury (The Bride of Eavenfold #1)

Tani

T he voices above me were so quiet I didn’t hear them at first. I fell in and out of sleep, seeing the torchlight flinting against Langnathin’s bloodied eyes, the baby’s wings failing to extend, and then more than both of those, I saw Vellintris’ huge blue eyes.

Twinblood . Why? Darkness pressed against the backs of my closed eyes, and then brightness.

New scents wrinkled my nose, pungent and earthy, and my body felt very heavy.

The next time I heard murmurs, I managed to piece some of the sounds into words.

“Can’t stay—”

A man’s voice.

“—of you.” A woman, probably.

“No.”

“What of him?”

“She interrupted the rite.”

“She saved him.”

They stopped talking, or at least, I stopped hearing them. This short act of listening had exhausted me, and I fell back to a fitful sleep.

This time, the Dragon Prince was the only thing I could think about. Standing there in the dirt, under the Gossamir sky, he hadn’t looked out of place.

I dreamt that this time, the wolf did not turn. We bounded straight for him, jumping as the bow loosed and Shadow opened his mouth for the killing bite. The arrow carved through my shadow’s upper jaw, severing his snout, and the blood splattered until all I could see was red.

Red hands, red fur, red eyes.

When I awoke, the pain was sharp and insistent, and my throat was dry.

I opened my eyes and then squeezed them shut.

Even filtering through towered stone, the light was too bright, the colours too vivid.

I touched my hand to my throat and pushed my hands down against the soft surface beneath me, propping myself up.

I groaned as my leg pulled against fabric and tried to open my eyes again.

“Easy.”

My neck whipped towards the sound, and I blinked several times.

A man in the corner stared at me from under a shock of white hair.

Another sat beside me. Soft river stones piled high around me, with matted reed on the floor.

One of the Sons’ towers. I looked at the woman next to me, recognising her as the speaker. She gasped.

Yvon. She’d taken her coat off, and the dark markings of her tribe painted her arms, her under-eyes smudged with dark violet, and her hair braided tighter than usual. Her back was rigid as her finger tapped on her knee. She stared at my face with a mixture of awe and shock .

I jolted as something touched my side, a warm body. It made some small noise, rubbing its nose against my left arm.

Awake?

My heart skipped a beat as I heard it. It was hard to describe; the word was unsure, quiet in my mind. A probe, a question. Did it even know it was speaking to me, or was it simply talking to itself?

I looked down at the thing curled up near my ribs.

A light grey belly moved into a dusty periwinkle back.

No hardened scales covered its flesh, only patches of harder skin near its spine and pebbling above its tiny snout.

It breathed out, its narrow chest moving fast, and stretched, the thin skin of its wing a warm lilac.

I reached down and brushed a finger along his side. He made a little coughing noise, and his front claws splayed and then gripped onto my finger. In a second, he had my entire heart.

“Is he healthy?”

“He seems well. He will not leave you.” Yvon’s voice was near a whisper. “You, we measure, are not so well.”

I rolled my right shoulder and took a deep breath as I flexed my hand, and then my elbow. There was pain, but I did not seem to have broken anything in my arm. The relief of that was small compared to the growing heat in my leg.

I looked at Yvon. “How bad is my leg?”

Yvon grimaced. “The wound was deep. The leg will heal, in time. But you lost a lot of blood.”

I stared up at the dawn light as my stomach rumbled. “Have I been out all night?”

Yvon shook her head. “Four days.”

‘Four?’ I signed. That explained the hunger.

She nodded as the Son in the corner let out a strange noise. I saw him watching my hands with distaste. I dropped them to my lap, but he was already glaring at Yvon .

“Why didn’t you tell me the Sons were Brothers?” I asked her softly.

Yvon sent a guarded look to the Son as he flinched from my question. He breathed out through his nose, his nostrils flaring like Vellintris’ had the night before. Then he signed rapidly to Yvon. I picked up a few of the nouns. Fate. Wrong. Fast. Bad.

Then, he signed for her to go outside. She signed back that she needed to reapply my medicine. He made a gesture of rebuke.

“What’s going on?” I asked Yvon.

“The Sons don’t like the way the Brotherhood imposes your Fates,” she said, and I could tell it was a huge understatement. “We found you close to death. I told them what you are and asked them to shelter you.”

“You told them?” I asked, betrayal lancing my gut. I didn’t want to be the Moontouched girl again, and I hardly imagined a cacof would be welcomed into their secret order.

“To protect you,” she explained. “Sons would not kill another Son.”

I let this sink in, sitting in the silence. ‘Thinking,’ I signed.

The Son made that noise again. I looked at him with narrowed eyes.

“You know our speech,” Yvon said. “They are angry.”

“Ah.”

I grimaced in quiet apology to Yvon. She’d taught me, traded with me, instructed me in the ways of the forest. And now, she had rescued me. I was alive because of her, and now I was causing her more trouble.

The Son gestured for Yvon to leave again, his cheeks reddening.

I recognised the sign for ‘cacof’ and ‘noise’ , but the rest was signed so quickly it hurt my head.

Everything seemed a little too vivid, the room’s colours distorted and too bright.

The light of the room was dim, and yet I saw it all in perfect clarity.

My head pounded, and I closed my eyes as the Son stormed from the room.

Well, as much as one can storm without sound.

“I must leave,” Yvon said, standing up. “There is water and bread beside you, and we fed the dragon some grub. There is medicine, too. Apply it, if you have the strength.”

“Thank you,” I said. I opened my eyes again and touched her hand. Yvon stiffened. I felt her fear and agitation, and realised it was the first time I had touched her skin without gloves. I whispered, the sound barely coming from my lips. “I do not wish to be trapped here.”

Yvon breathed out. “They will send you away before you can even walk.”

I swallowed. “They will not make me stay?”

She knelt down and touched my hair, pulling a lock of mud-dried brown towards her. “They will not let you. Be grateful they do not execute you. This place is for Sons. Now you are awake, they will not believe you are one of them.”

I blinked as my vision swam again. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know how you did it so quickly. Maybe she helped. But there is nothing to mark you as a Son, now.”

I signed confusion, and Yvon sighed.

“Your eyes are blue, girl.”

My stomach turned and immediately I looked down at the tiny dragon sleeping beside me. The memory of its little tentative voice came back.

Yvon gave me the softest of smiles. “Bright, dragon-blue.”

We were bonded. We were bonded .

After I had drank more water than ever before, I took in the sight of my leg.

It was a worse sight than I was prepared for.

Thankfully, the blackness around it was the remnants of a compact of gleadless, domil, and ashraf leaves, rather than rot.

Once I had used the rest of the water to clear it off, I could look at it without nausea.

The arrow was gone, and the wound did not appear to be seeping anything to indicate it had gone bad.

It was warm to the touch, and moving it hurt, but it would heal fine enough.

It was a far sight better than it should have been after four days, and I wondered then if Yvon had lied to me about the time that had elapsed. Though I couldn’t think what reason she would have.

Once I’d reapplied the salve of pestled leaves, I stared down at my young ward.

Bonded to me. Already. I could not stop looking at him. I was struck by how much I wanted to protect him.

Somehow, I knew Vellintris had done this. When I had taken it upon myself to help her, she must have done something, given me some method by which she would force me to look after her child. Passed her maternal bond through me.

I pined for Seth, knowing he would be fascinated by it all. He would throw himself into the research, poring over every known facet of draconic bonding. But I was here, in Gossamir, with a wounded leg and an infant dragon.

And I had no idea what I was doing.

I scooped up the baby and placed him in my lap. Stretched out from his puny tail to the pink tip of his nose, he was barely longer than my forearm. He curled tightly into a ball against me, warming me as I brushed a finger down his back.

I didn’t know the first thing about keeping this thing alive.

I had thought at some point this could happen.

I had even hoped for it: my bargaining chip with Fate.

To bond with a sapphire dragon was to become something Langnathin could not refuse.

He could not allow a bonded dragon rider he did not control.

But one he could marry, another weapon in his arsenal, another jewel of the Vidarium?

This was his ancient weapon, in my grasp. This bond was my way into the castle.

More than that, to be bonded was the only way to disguise myself. My hair, I could darken through muds, but one look at my eyes and the prince would know me. But this? With my dragon-blue gaze, he would not find me out straight away.

And yet, looking down at the bundle of flesh, I could not ever consider him a weapon.

Outside of the stone tower, low mumblings filtered through. So rare was the noise of talking Euphons that I found myself tucking my sleeping bundle against my stomach and donning my coat and boots.