Page 42 of To Touch A Silent Fury (The Bride of Eavenfold #1)

Tani

T he night had brightened from pitch black to a dark and foggy grey when I heard the footsteps behind me.

They were evidently attempting to be quiet.

If I had not spent years in the truest of silence, knowing every drip of every leaf and every skittering of each tiny bird, I might not have heard him.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Something akin to humour, or justice, fell on my mouth when I heard Langnathin’s voice. I prided myself that I did not freeze, nor stumble. I kept the exact pace I had before, stepping forwards with my injured left leg, bending it as I left the other behind me in a soft lunge.

The Dragon Prince had not been able to surprise me.

I remembered his opening words to me, all those years ago, and smiled at the irony. I’ve spent enough time in the Soundlands to hear a mouse move.

For all his time here, he hadn’t truly learnt the ways of the Euphons. He might have learnt to hear more than most Sightlanders, but he hadn’t spent enough time in the silence to know all of his own tells.

I lifted myself back to standing, turning to him. “Stretching.”

Langnathin was wrapped in his heavy coat, ready for the flight. In the winds, even with the season turning this very night to Tanmer, it would be bitterly cold. I, too, wore my coat, using the sheets from the bed to attach my dragon to me.

With the grey fur up to his ears, black fur-trimmed boots, and the calculating expression on his face, I finally saw Braxthorn’s image in him. In our portrait back on Eavenfold, he was similarly clad, always kitted for dragon riding and wearing a stern look.

The prince narrowed his red eyes at me. “I can see that.”

“Then, why did you ask?”

He opened his mouth to retort, and then closed it. I tried my best to ignore him, continuing my stretching. Each long step pulled at the muscles in my left leg, flexing them around the still-healing wound.

“How is it?” he asked.

“Better than I would expect,” I admitted. In truth, it was far far better than I could have expected. The wound felt half a season old already, and the hole was already healthily scabbed.

Langnathin did not seem surprised. “Dragon riders heal quicker than most.”

I straightened, and faced him once more. “Why?”

He shrugged, and it made him look younger than his years. I didn’t know his age for certain, but even with his tiredness aging him, he could not be more than two spans older than me. “It’s the bond, you pull on each other's strengths and weaknesses.”

Guilt flowed through me as I cradled the child at my chest. “Am I hurting him? ”

“No, it’s not quite so direct,” he said, shaking his head. “If you were on the edge of death, he would feel very weak. But now, I am sure it is doing little more than tiring him out.”

I nodded, and we were both silent as the end of the night faded into the coming dawn. I heard the first call of the sparrow hawk and a scuffling noise from beyond the fence. A mole, maybe, or a fox.

“He sleeps through the day as it is,” I said into the fog. With Yvon, I’d never felt the need to speak to fill the air. But with Langnathin, I was on edge.

“It is what infants do.”

I studied the prince before me. “What else?”

He shifted his weight, studying me back. “What do you mean?”

“What else does the bond do?”

Langnathin thought for a moment. “Your vision will be improved, as you might have noticed already. Your reflexes may be sharper, though I think that happened later, when Chaethor was older.”

I nodded, drinking this information down. There was so little I knew about dragons, so much to be aware of. “What else?”

He watched me intently, until our eye contact made me uncomfortable. I kept worrying he might see past my eyes and work out who I was behind it. The shadow of the girl he’d once Broken. But he had not indicated any true recognition.

His gaze dropped first, just as my cheeks heated from the strength of it. “Yours is a sapphire dragon. I am sure there are things which are… unique to your connection.”

I blinked. “Kallamont is a sapphire. What does your father experience?”

He smiled, but it was not one of joy. “You would have to ask him that yourself.”

“Can you hear Chaethor?” I asked. “Inside your head? ”

Langnathin froze, and then stared at the lightening sky. “It is not something we talk about.”

“Why not?”

“It is not something most riders share,” he said, cutting his eyes to me. “It is a rare aspect of dragon bonding, the mindspeak.”

“But you have it?”

He folded his arms and flicked his head in my direction. “Have you heard him?”

I shrugged. “It’s not something I can talk about.”

A hint of a smile touched the corner of his mouth. Then he frowned, stepping past me along the walkway.

I reached out and grabbed his shoulder. “What was that look?”

He turned, staring down at my gloved hand. I removed it quickly.

His lip curled into something angry, then he just rolled his eyes. “It is uncommon for you to be able to speak to him at this age.”

Langnathin started to stride away from me again, and I walked alongside him, my legs moving faster to keep up with him.

My injury burned, but my curiosity burned harder. “Why, because it did not happen to you?”

The prince stopped, turning to look down at me imperiously. His face was far closer than before, and his breath warmed my cheeks before curling like smoke into the cold morning. “You are about to enter a king’s court, Vorska. You will have to learn to treat royalty with respect.”

I took a step back from him, embarrassment curling my toes in my boots. I remembered a similar chastisement back on Eavenfold, and I could only hope his mind did not make the same connection. His jaw flexed as his previous words flooded over me. You’re supposed to call me ‘Your Grace’.

I ducked my head. “I apologise, Your Grace.”

His eyes widened, and I turned from him, resuming my stretching. The sun would soon be up, and my body felt far from ready for a dragonflight. If there was something he had come to achieve, I should not interrupt it.

My final set of lunges was deeper, followed by balancing on one foot. Throughout, I tried to ignore that Langnathin had made no movement. He was as still as the waiting day, held back by the last vestiges of night.

Eventually, he sighed. “I know you see me as a cacof. But if you speak to my father with such impertinence, he will cast you out. If you’re lucky, your head will still be on your shoulders when he throws you from the walls.”

I shuddered at the visual, but found myself prickling at his preaching tone nonetheless. “I will restrain my impertinence to our late night conversations, then, Your Grace.”

A brief silence descended as the cool wind of the night flowed past me.

His voice was strained when he eventually replied. “Wise.”

I hesitated, my balance wavering and then resettling, as I had the horrible awareness that my words, whilst taunting, were also something else. There was a hint of wilful mischief in them. Even flirtation.

And yet, I knew better than to take them back. If he interpreted my disdain as flirtation, that could only help my cause. He had to believe that I would accept his hand if this was ever to work.

I glanced over at him to check he hadn’t noticed my unease. Instead, his eyes looked clouded, his head tilted. A moment later, he blinked, and the focus was back into his gaze .

“Did she just speak to you?” I asked, without stopping to check myself. “Chaethor?”

He narrowed his eyes, and then nodded. “She is close.”

“Your eyes glazed over,” I explained. “As if you were lost in thought.”

I don’t know why I felt the urge to explain myself, or why I felt so on edge.

But it was painful to speak to him whilst being so many things at once.

His most mortal enemy, pretending to be another of his enemies, whilst positioning myself as his potential wife.

My head hurt already, and we hadn’t even left the forest.

After another pause, he spoke. “You might find that your values and thoughts shift. Another perk of the bond.”

This pricked my interest. “How so?”

He glanced up to the skies, and both of us heard the smooth thump of wings approaching. “It is hard for me to know sometimes where my temper ends and Chaethor’s begins. But I know both my father and I are prone to a draconic covetousness.”

Strangely, I found myself smiling. “Have you considered that perhaps it is your nature to take things which do not belong to you, and not your dragon’s? Is that not what kings do best?”

He lowered his eyes back to mine. There was something dark there, hidden away. “Careful.”

My humour dropped, and my body chilled beyond the power of any cool winds. He was right, I had overstepped. Completely. Something about him made it hard not to, he had a face I could not help but argue with. It was distinctly satisfying to make any emotion flare behind that mask of his.

But that was a dangerous game, and one I should not be playing injured in his barracks. I could only blame my lack of sleep over the past nights.

I had to get a better rein over myself .

I opened my mouth to apologise again, when the soft thump of wings beat stronger, and I raised my arm to protect my face.

It was hard not to be terrified at the sight. Huge red wings, dark brown in this limited light, her head lifted proud as her legs came down to squelch into the mud. Still, I did not think to retreat nor hide from her, even as the edge of her wide right wing settled mere feet from me.

I only had the power to be in awe, as her neck curved graciously, and her hazel eyes took us in with enviable confidence.

“She is beautiful,” I whispered.

The prince beside me laughed.

I whipped my head around to him, the noise the first one that had surprised me in days. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh since Eavenfold, when I’d commented on Chaethor’s hunger.

He seemed surprised by it, too, and he coughed to cover it up, sobering and avoiding my eyes.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he replied, all traces of that laughter gone. “Nothing at all.”

I gritted my teeth, holding back the retort I wanted to unleash. I had spoken too much this morning already. He walked straight up to his dragon, touching the skin where her neck curved into her chest. I watched them, cradling my own dragon.

Chaethor looked at me sharply then, studying me more acutely than before.

She flexed her wings and shook out her tail, and I flinched.

I saw in her gaze the same ferocity that had melted men where they stood, that would melt me if I stepped wrong.

I remembered Brascillan as he offered me his favour, and then, in my imagination, his skin bubbled and dripped from his bones like wax until he was nothing more than a skeleton.

It took everything in me not to shudder .

I assessed she must be half the size of Vellintris. Yet she carried the same regal bearing, as if she knew she was far too good for the likes of us.

Chaethor lowered her right wing, spreading it so the joint up to her back was closer to the ground. Holding onto the scales beside her neck, Langnathin pulled himself up, and then climbed onto her back, where a thick hide saddle awaited him.

Then he looked at me. “Are you coming?”

I swallowed. Was I truly about to get onto Langnathin’s dragon? The same creature who believed she had burned my hopes and ambitions to the ground? I knew now the depths of a dragon’s feeling; her emotions were as thick and deep as any root or lake.

My boots moved before my head had caught up, moving from the bouncing wood to the claws of deep mud. I pulled my feet across the terrain, my hands shaking as I reached Chaethor’s side.

I looked up at her huge eye, and she stared back down at me with an expression I could not name. I nodded to her, as I had to Vellintris. Then she shifted, lowering her wing. The wing of a murderer of nobles, the mount of my enemy.

I reached up with gloved hands that shielded me from her probable ire.

I pulled myself up by my arms, my legs not in a fit state to flex that high, and fell gracelessly over the joint of her wing, twisting my body so I didn’t land on the baby attached to my front.

My breath huffed out inelegantly as my hands scrambled for purchase.

Then, I was weightless. Langnathin grabbed me by my coat, like some drowning kitten, and pulled me up until I was across his lap, staring up at the sky. I shook my head, dazed, and then quickly pushed myself up to a seated position, settling before him in the saddle .

My cheeks blazed, my leg throbbed, and at my chest, my warming pile of tiny wings and retracted claws stirred. None of my flesh had touched the dragon beneath me, though, and as such I didn’t have to suffer Chaethor’s likely glee at my sprawling climb.

“Are you ready?” Langnathin asked, his arms tightening as he reached around my body to hold onto the saddle’s handle.

I sucked in a breath as his voice tickled my ear.

I, too, grabbed the handle, my covered hands inside of his.

In front, Chaethor stretched, her neck rearing back, and then she huffed close to the ground.

I tipped forwards with her movement, and steadied myself, pressing more firmly back against the Dragon Prince.

“I think so,” I said.

Chaethor let out a screech and planted her wings firmly down. Then she pushed off, and all of my breath escaped my lungs in one moment as she threw herself into the air, beating her wings furiously.

The light of dawn cracked behind us as we soared up past the tree line and into the sky.

Scared. Go?

I pulled one hand from its clawing grip on the saddle and reached into my coat. Despite the frigid wind streaming past us, this was something he needed to see. I opened the top of it. Feel this.

He wriggled against my chest, nudging the moonstone out of the way, and poked his head out of the opening. Air.

Your first flight, little one.

He tasted the air, the wind, the day, opening his small mouth to it. Then he buried himself back into the warmth of my coat. I closed it back up with a smile.

Then I turned my eyes to the horizon. Below us, I could already see the edge of the forest in the far distance. Beyond it, the Flourine Mountains. Manniston would be next, and then, Droundhaven.

I was flying towards my Fate, whether I liked it or not. And flying right along with me was the man I had to force to marry me somehow.

It was unfathomable, all of it. And yet, soaring on dragonback, it all felt possible.