Chapter 1
The first message arrives during Battle Brief, while Professor Devera is sketching troop movements along the eastern border and half the room is pretending to take notes.
"The small one," Sgaeyl says, in the tone she reserves for weather she dislikes, "would like to know why you are being stupid."
I keep my face exactly where it is. Two rows down and to the left, Violet Sorrengail is writing steadily, her braid over one shoulder, her pen moving in the neat small script she'd have used in the Archives if the world had let her. She hasn't looked at me once since we sat down. She hasn't looked at me in three days. Not since I kissed her, and then stepped back with her taste still on my mouth and told her it was a mistake that wouldn't happen again.
"Tell her I don't know what she means," I answer, down the bond.
"I am not a messenger."
"Then don't relay it."
"I already have." A pause. "She says you know exactly what she means."
Devera taps the map with a pointer and asks a question about supply lines. Someone in Second Wing answers it. I don't hear the answer.
The second message comes at lunch. I'm at the end of the leadership table with Garrick, who is describing something that happened on the challenge mat in loving detail, when Sgaeyl sighs at the back of my skull with enough force that I nearly put down my fork.
"The small one has observed that Silver One did not eat her bread."
I look up before I can stop myself. Across the hall, Violet is sitting with Rhiannon and Ridoc, and the roll on her tray is untouched. She's turning her cup in slow circles on the table.
"How does the small one know that? She's in the Vale."
"She is bonded. She knows when Silver One is hungry and is not eating. She feels it in her own belly, and she is offended."
"That's not my fault."
"She says it is entirely your fault."
Garrick has stopped talking. He's watching me with the expression of a man who's realized his story has been competing with a conversation he can't hear and losing. "You all right?"
"Sgaeyl," I say, which is true and explains nothing, and he nods like that settles it.
By the afternoon flight drills, I've received four more messages. The small one would like it noted that Silver One's shoulder is aching and she didn't go to the infirmary. The small one has asked Tairn to explain human courtship to her, and Tairn has refused in terms she found rude. The small one wants to know whether all wingleaders are this slow or whether Xaden Riorson is special. The small one is asking, in a spirit of genuine curiosity, whether I would like to be sat on.
I'm standing at the edge of the flight field when that one comes through, arms crossed, watching Fourth Wing's first-years run mounts. Tairn is out on the far side, enormous and motionless, a black hill with opinions. Violet climbs his foreleg the way she's been practicing, slow and careful, testing every hold. When she gets into the seat, Tairn turns his great head and looks across the field. At me.
I've had dragons look at me with contempt before. Tairn manages something worse. He looks bored.
"Tairn says," Sgaeyl reports, "and I am quoting him, that you are a fool, and you'll fix it or you won't, and he refuses to be involved."
"Then why is he staring at me?"
"Because he is involved. He is merely refusing to admit it." She sounds pleased. Sgaeyl is always pleased when Tairn is put out. "As for the small one, she is roughly the size of a pony. Being sat on would not kill you."
"Tell her no."
"She says she is going to grow."
"Tell her I'll be gone by then."
There's a long silence. Then Sgaeyl says, with something almost like sympathy, "She says you're lying, and that she can tell, because you always look at the ground when you lie, and she has been watching you look at the ground for three days."
I look up from the ground.
On the field, Tairn launches, and the wind of it flattens the grass for fifty feet in every direction. I watch them climb until they're a dark smudge against the clouds over the Vale, and I stand there long after the rest of the wing has moved on, telling myself it's because I'm assessing her seat.
Sgaeyl doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to.
The last message comes after dinner. I'm in my room with a stack of squad reports I'm not reading, and the candle has burned down a full inch while I've stared at the same paragraph about equipment requisitions.
"The small one says," Sgaeyl begins, and then stops, and the stopping is what makes me put down the paper. Sgaeyl doesn't hesitate. She considers that a human failing.
"Says what?"
"That Silver One is on the roof above the dormitory wing. That she has been there an hour, and she is cold, and she has been crying, a little, in the way humans do when they think no one will know." A pause. "She says that if you tell Silver One she told you, she will bite your boots. She says she has very sharp teeth now. I can confirm this."
I'm already reaching for my jacket.
The roof is reached through a hatch at the top of a narrow stair that first-years aren't supposed to know about, which means every first-year knows about it. The night is clear and bitter. The stars over the mountains are hard and very bright. Violet is sitting with her back against a chimney stack, knees up, arms wrapped around them, and when the hatch creaks she doesn't startle. She just closes her eyes.
"Let me guess," she says. "A little gold bird told you."
I consider lying. I consider the ground. "Yes."
She laughs, short and tired. "She's been at me all day too. About you. She thinks you're an idiot."
"She's communicated that. Thoroughly. Through two other dragons."
Violet opens her eyes. "Two?"
"Sgaeyl doesn't relay messages. She told me so six times today while relaying messages." I lower myself down next to her, not too close, my shoulder a hand's width from hers against the cold brick. Below us the courtyard is dark except for one lantern at the gate. "Tairn refused to participate. So he says."
"Tairn tells me nothing about you," she says. "Ever. He just makes this noise, like a landslide clearing its throat."
"That's his opinion of me. It's been consistent for years."
Her mouth twitches. Then it doesn't. She looks out at the mountains and says, quietly, "You didn't have to say it was a mistake. You could have just said it couldn't happen. I would have understood that. I'm not stupid, Xaden. I know what you are and what I am and whose daughter I am. But you didn't have to make it sound like you wished it hadn't happened at all."
Andarna is right. I've been looking at the ground for three days.
I make myself look at her instead.
"It wasn't a mistake," I say. "It was a bad idea. Those aren't the same thing."
She turns her head. In the starlight her eyes are very dark, and there's a wet track drying on one cheek that she hasn't bothered to wipe away, and I want to wipe it away so badly my hand actually lifts off my knee before I put it back down.
"What's the difference?" she asks.
"A mistake is something you'd take back."
The wind goes over the roof, rattling a loose slate somewhere behind us. She doesn't say anything for a long time. Then she shifts, just slightly, and the hand's width of air between our shoulders closes, and she's leaning against me, the whole warm weight of her, and neither of us moves.
We don't kiss. It's still a bad idea. It'll be a bad idea tomorrow, and the day after that, and I already know I'm not strong enough to keep it from happening again, eventually. But not tonight. Tonight she's cold and I'm here, and that's all I'm letting it be.
After a while she says, into my collar, "I didn't eat my bread."
"I know. I was informed."
She laughs properly then, low and helpless, and I feel it against my arm.
"The small one is satisfied," Sgaeyl tells me, sounding enormously put upon. "She asks me to tell you that she will be watching."
"She's always watching."
"Yes. She is a dragon." A long, aggrieved pause. "Now tell her to stop talking to me."