Chapter 1
Sgaeyl wakes me two hours past midnight with a single name, and it's the one name I've spent the whole day refusing to think.
"Sorrengail."
I'm upright before my eyes adjust, fingers closed around the dagger under my pillow. The room is dark and cold. My shadows have slid off the floorboards and up the bedposts, restless because I am. "What about her?"
"She is on the flight field. Alone." A pause, which from Sgaeyl is never empty. "Mostly alone."
I already know what happened at Threshing. Everyone in the quadrant knows. I watched from the ridge with the other wingleaders while Tairn came down out of the sky and landed in front of the smallest first-year in the valley. Tairn. Black, enormous, the most dangerous morningstartail in the Vale, a dragon who hadn't bonded since the rebellion took his last rider. I felt it happen before I understood it. The bond between Sgaeyl and me pulled tight as a bowstring, then pulled further, in a direction it had never gone, and settled there like a stone in my chest.
Tairn is Sgaeyl's mate. Mated pairs don't outlive each other for long. Which means that as of this afternoon, my life is tied by a thread I can't see to the life of a girl whose mother oversaw my father's execution.
I'm dressed in under a minute.
The halls of the rider quadrant are empty at this hour except for the drip of condensation and one second-year asleep against the wall outside the latrine, who I decide is not my problem. I take the long way, past the rotunda, out under the arch where the wind off the mountains smells of snow that hasn't arrived yet. The flight field opens below me, gray under a half moon, scored with talon marks from the day.
She's sitting on the low rocks at the far edge, knees drawn up, her braid coming loose, the ends pale as frost. And curled against her side, head resting on her knee as if it has every right to be there, is a dragon the color of struck gold.
I stop walking.
I'd heard the rumor at dinner and dismissed it. Feathertails don't bond. They don't come to Threshing at all. They're too rare, too precious to the Empyrean to throw in with a first-year who might be dead by spring. But there it is, small enough that its whole body would fit in the shade of Sgaeyl's wing, breathing slow and deep against Violet Sorrengail's hip.
"Two," I say, out loud, because I need to hear it.
"Two," Sgaeyl agrees. She sounds, and I would never tell her this, delighted. "Tairn is in a foul mood about it. I find that I enjoy him in a foul mood."
Violet's head snaps up. Her hand goes to her thigh sheath faster than I'd expect from someone who looks like she hasn't slept in two days, and she has a dagger out and angled before I've taken another step. Good. She's exhausted, but she isn't stupid.
"Riorson." Her voice is hoarse. "Come to finish it while nobody's watching?"
"If I wanted you dead, you'd already be dead." I keep my hands loose at my sides and walk until I'm close enough to see her face. A bruise is rising along her jaw, and a long scrape runs down her forearm, crusted dark. Someone came for her in the forest today. More than one someone, from the look of it. "You should be in the infirmary."
"I should be a lot of places." She doesn't lower the blade. "The scribe quadrant, for one. That didn't work out."
The golden dragon opens one eye. It's the eye of something ancient set in a body that isn't, and it fixes on me with an expression I can only call unimpressed. Then it lifts its head off her knee and shows me a neat row of teeth.
"She doesn't like you," Violet says.
"She doesn't know me."
"She says that's not the point." Violet frowns, as if listening to something just behind her ear. "She says you smell like Tairn's mate and you're scowling at me, and she's deciding whether that's allowed."
Sgaeyl makes a sound in my head I've only heard from her twice before. It takes me a moment to recognize it as laughter.
I crouch, so I'm not standing over them. The dragon tracks the movement. "What's her name?"
Violet hesitates. Dragon names belong to riders. You don't hand them to people who might use them against you, and I'm the person in this quadrant with the best reasons to use anything I can get.
"Andarna," she says finally, and the fact that she tells me sits under my ribs like a swallowed stone.
"Andarna." The teeth disappear, slowly. "You know what Tairn did today. You know what it means for me."
"He told me." Her mouth twists. "He was very thorough. He made it sound like I'd personally conspired to inconvenience the both of you."
"You have."
"I didn't ask for any of this." She lowers the dagger, not all the way. "I didn't ask to be here. I didn't ask to be chosen by the biggest dragon on the Continent, and I certainly didn't ask for him to be mated to yours. If you think I'm happy that my survival is now a matter of your personal interest, you're wrong."
"I don't think you're happy." I look at the cut on her arm. It's deeper than it looked from the path. "I think you're bleeding."
She glances down at it as though it belongs to someone else.
There's a version of this night I planned years ago, lying awake in the months after Aretia burned, when my father's name was still raw in everyone's mouth. In that version, I find General Sorrengail's children and I make them understand what it costs to lose everything. I've carried that version folded up inside me for so long the creases have gone soft.
It doesn't survive the sight of her trying to hide that she's shaking.
I unbuckle my flight jacket and hold it out.
She stares at it. "What is that?"
"Leather. It's for wearing." When she doesn't move, I lay it across her knees, carefully, keeping clear of Andarna's head. The dragon allows this. "You're losing heat, you've lost blood, and Tairn will take it out on me if you catch a fever before your first flight lesson."
"Is that how this is going to work?" She pulls the jacket around her shoulders anyway, and it swallows her. "You keep me alive because if I die, you die."
"Yes."
It's the simplest answer. It's true enough. It isn't all of it, and I watch her decide not to believe the parts I've left out, which is exactly what I want and exactly what I hate.
"Fine," she says. "Then I'll keep myself alive, and you can stay out of my way."
"You'll keep yourself alive," I repeat, "against Barlowe, who's going to come for you again the minute he's walking, and against every marked one in my wing who thinks a Sorrengail in the quadrant is a debt waiting to be collected, and against your own body, which dislocated something in that forest today. Don't tell me it didn't. You're favoring your left shoulder."
Her jaw goes tight. She doesn't deny it.
Andarna shifts, uncurls, and stands. Standing, she's taller than I expected, her neck long and narrow, the feathers along her tail lifting in the wind like the edge of a flame. She steps over Violet's boots, walks the three paces to where I'm crouched, and stops with her snout a hand's width from my face.
I hold still. I've been around dragons since I could walk. I've never been examined by one this closely, this personally.
"What is she doing?" I ask, very quietly.
"I'm not sure." Violet sounds almost as startled as I feel. "She says she can see you."
"Everyone can see me."
"No. She says she can see you." A pause. "She says you came out here in the cold at two in the morning, and nobody does that for someone they want dead."
The dragon blinks once, slow and deliberate. Then she turns, walks back, and lies down against Violet's side as if the conversation is over. As if she's won it.
Sgaeyl isn't laughing anymore. "That one," she says, "is going to be a problem."
"For whom?"
"For you."
I stand. My knees ache from the cold. Violet is watching me over the collar of my jacket, eyes dark in the moonlight, and there's a question in her face I'm not going to answer tonight or for a long time after.
"Infirmary," I say. "Nolon's on duty. Tell him the wingleader sent you and he won't make you wait."
"And if I don't go?"
"Then I carry you, and everyone in Fourth Wing hears about it by breakfast."
Something that isn't quite a smile catches the corner of her mouth before she kills it. She gets up, slowly, and yes, favoring the left, and murmurs something to the golden dragon, who tucks her head under one wing and goes still. Then Violet walks past me toward the arch, wrapped in leather three sizes too big, and doesn't look back.
I give her ten steps. Then I follow, close enough to see anyone coming and far enough that she can pretend I'm not there.
Halfway across the field, I glance over my shoulder. Andarna's head is out from under her wing again, gold catching what little light there is, and she watches the two of us all the way to the arch.