Chapter 12: In the Dark

We left at dusk the next day.

Bettris wanted to come.

Wystan told her somebody had to hold the Hold, and she threw a boot at him.

"You held it fourteen months without me," he said. "Hold it four more days."

She threw the other boot.

Then she hugged him so hard his ribs creaked.

The youngest of the Wing was asleep by the kitchen fire with the cook's cat on his chest.

I didn't wake him.

Wystan shifted in the yard.

Dorrit climbed up behind me with a saddlebag of clothes and bread strapped to her back.

"Three naked boys," she said. "And one naked king. I've packed for four."

We flew south all night.

The cold up there was knives.

Dorrit pressed her face into my back and swore steadily into my coat for the first hour.

I lay along Wystan's neck and sang under my breath whenever his heart started racing.

Every time, it slowed.

Once, over the moors, he turned his great head and looked back at me with one grey eye.

I put my cold hand flat on his scales.

He rumbled, deep in his chest, and I felt it right through me.

We came down before dawn in a pine wood above the river, a few miles out from Highcrag.

I sang him back.

He knelt in the pine needles, naked, steaming in the frost.

Dorrit threw a pair of breeches at his head without looking.

"Thank you," he said gravely.

"I've seen more dragon men's backsides this month than I have in my whole life," she said. "And I've worked in the Eyrie for eight years."

We hid in the wood all day.

At dark we walked down to the quarry.

It was a great white bite out of the hill below the city, with the Eyrie's towers black against the stars above it.

There were guards at the top, round a brazier.

Keep reading free with an account. Start After My Husband Abandoned Me, I Rule All Dragons from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.