Page 44 of Valor’s Flight (The New Protectorate #5)

“I’ve noticed.” Taevas tried to ease her worries with a smile and a long, admiring look. “I love this about you, minu metsalill. I hope to continue to show you just how much when we’re in our nest.”

The smile didn’t work, and he was fairly certain the compliments had the opposite of their intended effect.

Alashiya crossed her arms and inhaled in a way that suggested she was summoning patience. “I don’t even know why it matters. It’s not like I’ll be going. But getting you a car for that kind of a trip—”

Taevas sat up straight, his tail tightening reflexively around her calf as the tip gave a menacing rattle. “What are you saying? Of course you’re coming with me.”

They stared at each other in mutual incomprehension for a beat before Alashiya asked, “Why would I do that?”

“Why wouldn’t you? I can’t stay here.”

“So… you’ll leave.” She didn’t appear very happy about that, which was somewhat gratifying, but the fact that she said it at all made him cranky. “Wasn’t that always the plan?”

She thought I intended to leave without her? Taevas leaned forward to cup her cheek, a soothing rumble starting up in his chest. His chest tightened. That explains it. She must’ve been hurt, thinking I’d abandon her. My sweet Shiya. Never.

“Ah, I see where the miscommunication happened, Shiya. You thought I would call in my Wing and they’d whisk me away without you. I wouldn’t allow this.”

The immediate relief he expected to see in her eyes didn’t come. If anything, she appeared more uneasy than before. “Why not?”

“For one thing, it would be dangerous to leave any trace of me here that might lead my attackers back to you. Until I know for certain that they’ve been dealt with, you are at risk simply for having harbored me.

” Taevas’s voice dropped as he became distracted by the smooth skin of her cheek under his stroking thumb.

“And for another… sweet Shiya, I’ve found you at last. I’ve wanted you for ten years.

Do you expect me to give you up so soon? ”

“But my wards will hide me,” she protested, gaze moving restlessly across his face like she thought there might be some answers there. “And… and can’t you just come back to visit me?”

The possessive thing in him snapped its jaws.

Feeling his muscles tense, one by one, Taevas informed her, “Any wards can be broken with enough force. You aren’t safe here, Alashiya.

You said this yourself. And what of that man who harasses you— Monty?

You expect me to leave you here on your own when he could escalate his behavior at any time?

You don’t even have a phone, Shiya. You’re completely isolated and easy pickings for anyone who might get the wrong thought in their head. ”

He recognized the familiar rebellious glint in her eye when she protested, “I’ve done just fine on my own.”

Not wanting to rehash the argument from that morning, he shook his head. “I won’t fight with you on this again. This is non-negotiable.”

“You expect me to leave my home?” Her expression grew even more incredulous. “For how long?”

Trying not to sound evasive, Taevas danced around her second question. “I wouldn’t ask this of you if it weren’t absolutely necessary, but Shiya, you aren’t safe here, and I am Isand. We are tied together now. I know you feel this. I know you do. And that means we can’t stay.”

“I can’t leave,” she insisted, sounding truly alarmed now. “I’ve never left.”

“What?”

Alashiya stood up from the table. His tail slid reluctantly away from her leg as she began to pace. Her right hand bounced and twitched by her thigh — dip, pull, flick.

“I’ve never left Birchdale,” she explained in a rush. “My grove bought this land just before I was born. I went to school here. I’ve only ever been to town and back. I can’t just— You expect me to go out there? I’m a nymph, Taevas. We aren’t built for that world. I’m not.”

To someone like Taevas — indeed, to any dragon — the concept of being confined to a few acres of flat land, to a tiny rural town, was wholly inconceivable. It was the stuff horror movies were made of.

A dragon could glide fairly early in childhood.

They began leaping from carefully placed platforms around the roost at around four, sometimes as early as two.

By the time they were ten, they were expected to take short flights with their parents and to leap fearlessly from many story-high launching platforms or roofs.

By their teens, average dragons could fly hundreds of miles without needing to touch down for food or water, guided unerringly by the magnetic field of the Earth.

Adults could fly for much longer, much farther, making all the world seem quite small.

Their limitations were contained to the bands of the atmosphere that clung so delicately to the face of the planet and, in the modern world, by the political landscape, which could make finding a safe spot to land tricky.

Borders and laws didn’t exist when soaring through the clouds, but they had an annoying way of popping up when one touched down.

To roam was an innate part of them, culturally and biologically.

So much so that they could get what they called the roaming sickness, an insidious, often random disease that messed with a dragon’s internal compass.

It made it so they couldn’t land, driven by the impulse to just keep going until they found the perfect place to roost, and tended to result in unchecked aggression, confusion, and death as exhaustion simply dropped them from the sky.

Taevas’s own cousin had fallen prey to the sickness a few years prior, but it had all worked out for Artem, since it led him to his Chosen, Dr. Paloma Contreras, who dwelled at the top of a mountain in the Sierra Nevada range.

To fly, to chase, to roam — it was in their blood. Taevas couldn’t imagine a life where he stayed in one place every day. To hear that Alashiya had done exactly that for the gods knew how long was horrifying.

Afraid that he was getting some of the answers he’d craved in the worst possible way, he pressed, “You must have left at some point. There is a whole world out there, Shiya. I understand not having the money to travel, but to never leave Birchdale— Why?”

“What’s out there for me? I have no one and nothing except this house,” she answered, heartbreakingly matter-of-fact.

“I don’t know how to live out there. I was never taught.

And nearly every person I’ve met from the outside, everything I’ve ever read or heard, has only made me more certain that I wouldn’t survive ten minutes on my own in a city. I can’t risk that.”

Good gods. If this hadn’t happened, I never would’ve found her.

The idea that the only way he might’ve met her was if he’d finally broken those final, ethical rules he’d laid down for himself so long ago made his stomach drop.

What if he hadn’t? Alashiya would’ve lived out her days in complete solitude, never appreciated for her kindness, her gifts, her strength, until the day Grim came for her with death’s sickle and veil.

A cold trickle of unease slid into his veins. He’d been so certain that he was doing the right thing by clinging to his control. He’d convinced himself again and again that abiding by his made up rules was the best choice.

For me. I only ever thought of what I wanted. What I fear. If I continued on that path, we never would’ve met.

Putting that disturbing thought aside for later, he tried to quickly reorganize his argument.

Taevas truly hadn’t considered that it might be difficult to convince her to go with him.

It was a foregone conclusion in his mind.

They were together. Since he had to return to the Draakonriik as soon as possible, of course she would come with him.

Only now, staring into her ashen face, did he realize he had another fight on his hands.

“You’re scared,” he realized, stomach twisting.

Alashiya’s right hand bobbed against her thigh as she began to pace the length of the kitchen. “Of course I am! I can’t leave. It’s impossible.”

“Why is it so impossible, metsalill? Explain it to me.”

“What’s there to explain? I just can’t.”

Taevas rose slowly from his chair. He had to support himself against the table as pain lanced through his fractured ribs and wrapped around the base of his wings like hot barbed wire.

Fighting to keep his voice even, he asked, “Is it because you have some connection to the land? I once heard a rumor that nymphs will die if they’re separated from their land for too long.”

She tossed him an impatient look. “That’s ridiculous.

Yes, we bond with land and become attached to it, but it’s basically the same as becoming attached to a community over generations.

It’s based on relationships, on tradition.

My grove once looked after the greatest forest in the world, but times changed and we had to leave.

We didn’t die. Not because of that, at least.”

“The greatest forest in the world?”

Alashiya paused her pacing. Looking away from him, she explained, “The God Forest, where all beings were made. My mother’s line stretches back to the very first nymph, who Blight made from a foundling left among the roots of the first trees. I’m the last one left.”

Taevas wasn’t religious, but he knew the place she spoke of. It was hard not to, when every version of the great creation myth began there. It was an unspeakably ancient, sacred cedar forest whittled down to hardly a sliver of greenery after ten thousand years of necessity.

But that wasn’t what interested him most. My mother’s line stretches back to the very first nymph, she’d said.

Something clicked in his mind when he looked at her then, something she’d been telling him all along and he had waved away without thought.

Even he knew the stories of the nymph queens of the old world, when everything was new and wild.

They were the dispensers of wisdom, of prophecy, and it was often a chance meeting with one of those queens that would send a great hero on their journey.

He vaguely recalled that they had once had their own powerful trade networks built of thousands of interconnected family groups — the groves she spoke of? — and vast wealth.

But time had come for them, as it always did, and nymphs had little by way of defensive abilities. At some point, they’d gone from legendary queens to ethereal dancing figures in paintings, their power lost to the erosion of history.

“You’re a queen,” he breathed, astonished that he’d been so blind.

Alashiya gave him another impatient look. “Yes, I’m queen of this grove. We’ve been over this.”

“No.” Taevas limped over to her and stopped her pacing by cupping her shoulders. “No, you’re a queen, Alashiya. If you’re a direct descendant of the first nymph, that means you’re— what? Queen of all nymphs?”

She looked at some spot over his shoulder. “That title has been defunct for thousands of years.”

“And so it means nothing?”

“Exactly.”

“That can’t be true,” he insisted.

“It is.” Her eyes closed. The fight bled out of her. “I say that I’m queen of this grove, Taevas, but that doesn’t mean much. I was princess of something once, when my family was alive, but now I’m queen of nothing but memory.”

The empty rooms. The crumbling house. The queen of memory.

Taevas skimmed his hands up until he cradled Alashiya’s jaw. She seemed so fragile, but that wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Not if she’d survived on her own for so long.

In a hoarse voice full of dread, he asked, “What happened to your grove, metsalill? Why are you all alone?”

It broke something in him when she leaned forward, bending like a flower in the wind, until her brow touched the dip between his collar bones. His breath hitched. Members of his clan often came to him for advice and even comfort, but it had never felt like this.

It hurt.