Shadow of Flame

by Caitlyn McFarland

  “Juliet.” Ashem’s voice held a warning.

  She gave him a long, cool glare. “Ashem.”

  Kavar’s gaze slipped down the woman’s body, deciding it was attractive, after all. At the very edge of her sleeve, he caught an opalescent glimmer of her indicium.

  His lip curled. “Wingless.” Kavar spat at her feet.

  Ashem moved so fast Kavar barely had time to register his brother’s fist flying at his face before his head snapped back. Pain thundered through his cheek. His knee hit the stone floor. Light flashed on and off.

  “Ashem!” The woman’s voice was reproving. “He’s baiting you. Don’t.”

  “Get back, Juliet.” Ashem held out an arm, but the girl dodged beneath.

  “You’re the one who hit him. Look, he’s bleeding everywhere.”

  Blood? Kavar touched a hand to his cheek. His fingertips came away red.

  The girl knelt in front of him, and he recoiled. Ashem reached for her, but she slapped his hand away.

  “Knock it off, both of you. That’s going to have to be cleaned.” Frowning in a no-nonsense kind of way, the woman put a hand under Kavar’s chin, tilting his head back.

  His vision went dark.

  Something tore inside him, like old curtains yanked down to reveal a yawning, empty cavern. It hurt to be empty. It hurt to be alone.

  Light poured into the space, filling the hollow parts of him until he was complete. Only half-aware, he pushed toward the light. His chains creaked, their anchors groaning within the stone.

  But something was wrong. The light struggled, screaming, pulling away from him...

  Kavar opened his eyes. The light wasn’t screaming. The woman was.

  “Juli,” Kavar whispered.

  “Juliet!” Ashem staggered as if drunk. The bronze skin of his face grayed. He turned on Kavar. “You. What did you do?”

  Kavar’s teeth cracked together as Ashem’s fist connected with his jaw. He let out an oomph as Ashem’s other fist buried itself in his stomach. Kavar opened his mouth, but his lungs were paralyzed. White-hot pain speared his mind as Ashem attacked him with magic as well as fists.

  If he could breathe, he would have screamed.

  “Don’t hurt him.” Juli gasped, her voice tight with pain. “Ashem, stop! Don’t hurt him. I can feel it.”

  The agony stopped. Kavar gasped, sucking in a trickle of air.

  Juli was crouched a few feet away, her eyes darting from one brother to the other.

  Kavar touched her thoughts, though he shouldn’t have been able to through the binding magic of the chains. He closed his eyes, reveling in the feel of another mind against his. Reveling in the closeness, the wholeness.

  She was within the range of his chains. Hardly in control of his actions, he knelt and brushed fine, blond hair from her face.

  Ashem shoved Kavar into the wall. Kavar snarled. Even after all these years, it was just like Ashem. Always brushing him aside, never letting him do things.

  Kavar lunged against his chains as Ashem pulled Juli to her feet, leading her away from him, out of the cell. “No!”

  Juli made a distressed noise and stopped. “I need to sit down. I need to stay here.”

  Yes. Kavar wanted her to stay. But no, he didn’t. She might have stolen some of his brother’s essence to make herself more, but at the core the girl was human. Lesser.

  Confused, he lifted his bound hands and rested them behind his head, resisting the urge to reach out. “The question, brother, is what did she do to me?”

  Heartsworn.

  The word echoed through Juli’s mind in Ashem’s voice. She leaned into him. Kavar felt her seeking Ashem’s strength. Comfort.

  Jealousy wrapped itself around Kavar’s heart. Whether he was jealous of the way the girl clung to Ashem or the way Ashem looked at the girl, he could not say.

  “Heartsworn? No. That can’t be right. I’m heartsworn to you. I didn’t kiss him.”

  “You only have to kiss if one of you is human,” Ashem said, his voice ragged. “You’re Wingless, Juliet.”

  Ashem turned away, and to his shock, Kavar had the distinct impression he was trying and failing to hold himself together.

  Heartsworn. The thought bounced around in Kavar’s mind, which felt like a much larger space than it had been. Juli jumped.

  Interesting. He could use this. Heartsworn meant stronger. If he could lunge, grab Juli, use her as a hostage...

  Juli’s eyes widened. Ashem spun on him, expression feral. “If you touch her, I will kill you.”

  “She’s mine.” Kavar couldn’t suppress the thought. Though he didn’t send it down the ancient, disused path that used to connect his mind to Ashem’s. Rather, it went through Juli. Ashem heard it because they were so deeply intertwined there was almost no separating them. “Heartsworn. Let’s see who’s stronger now.”

  Juli shoved away from Ashem and approached Kavar. He needed to touch her, but she stayed beyond his reach. She stared at his bound hands, though, temptation writ large in her dark, wide eyes.

  “Get this straight,” she hissed, her mind cold as ice. “I don’t belong to him, and I definitely don’t belong to you. I am mine.” Then, as if she couldn’t help it, she reached up and brushed her fingers along his knuckles. Unhappiness welled through their bond, and she turned to Ashem. “Send for warm water and a cloth.”

  Ashem looked from Juli to Kavar, and pain flashed across his brother’s face. “Aziz-am, he’ll heal on his own. He doesn’t need your help.”

  “I do,” Kavar said into her mind. “I need you.”

  Juli paled and pressed her hands to either side of her head. “Quiet! Both of you! Ashem. Water. And. A. Cloth.”

  To Kavar’s surprise, Ashem turned on one heel and pulled open the door. After a brief conversation with the guard, he closed the door and nodded at Juli. “They’ll bring it, but you have to leave.”

  She was still looking back and forth between them, her face tight, and Kavar felt her shoving down the fear that was tearing her apart. She didn’t want to be bonded to Kavar. She loved Ashem. How could she fix it? There was always a way to fix it.

  Kavar barked a laugh. “You are a child, Juliet King.”

  Ancients. No, she wasn’t. He wanted her.

  Juli pressed her hands over her ears. “It’s impossible. This is impossible.”

  “It should be.” Ashem’s voice was raspy with...what? Kavar wasn’t sure.

  Someone knocked. Ashem yanked the door open, revealing a guard with a half-full bucket of water and a towel over one arm.

  “Tend him,” Ashem snapped. “Juliet, we’re leaving.”

  Juli paled. “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “Please, jāné del-am, come away.”

  Ashem was begging. In almost three thousand years, Kavar had only heard his brother beg once.

  He truly did love this girl.

  Kavar chuckled, but his laughter died in his throat as Juli took the water and cloth from the guard. Mentally, he swore. Here was one of the puppet king’s key players, putting herself within his grasp. Here was a chance to weaken his brother, one of Rhys’s greatest allies.

  But he couldn’t. The thought of hurting her made him ill.

  “Stop thinking.” She knelt and dipped the cloth into the water, gently dabbing at the cut below his eye. It burned, but Kavar held still as stone. Or he tried. One hand snapped up of its own accord, encircling her wrist.

  He expected her to jerk away, but she didn’t. He ran his thumb in circles along her skin, and her breath hitched. Then she gently pulled her wrist away. “Kavar, be still.”

  Her magic washed over him, and Kavar’s bravado melted into awe. The double-heartswearing, if that’s what it was, had made her strong. Stronger than anyone he’d ever en
countered. He looked to his brother.

  “Do you feel it?” he asked in Old Persian.

  Ashem hesitated, then nodded. He reached for Juli again. “Let’s go.”

  This time, she went. As she moved farther from him, Kavar’s restlessness and discontent grew. He wanted to see her. He needed to be with her.

  Ancients, was this what real torture felt like?

  Given time, his brother may have broken him.

  Perhaps Juliet King already had.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I Surrender

  “Spin it.”

  “What?” The waterfalls sang in Kai’s ears. Rhys had suggested the island in the atrium as the safest place to learn to control her fire, which made sense, considering her history.

  Rhys stepped closer. “Spin the heat into a ball at your center, like the core of the earth. Imagine gravity, holding it in like it’s a sun. Spin it so it stops moving outward and rotates in on itself.”

  Kai tried not to be distracted. “I am spinning it.”

  “More.”

  She glared at him and the ball of flame above his raised palm.

  She’d woken with her head pillowed on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. She gave a tiny hum of pleasure at the memory. There hadn’t been any more kissing. Yet.

  Squinting, Kai focused on the power inside her. At first, nothing happened. Then, slowly, it twisted into a whirlwind, gaining momentum as it pulled in on itself.

  “Good. Now, pinch off a tendril and draw it out like wire. As small as you possibly can.”

  Kai grasped the slippery maelstrom of energy, forcing the smallest bit into being above her hands. A pinprick of light appeared. It grew to the size of a golf ball, then a softball, then a volleyball. Wincing away from the expected explosion, Kai mentally pinched off the wire, wrapping it into the ball and knotting it.

  It didn’t unravel. The air shimmered and rippled, a little fire blazing over her hands. “Holy crap! I did it!”

  “You’re a wizard, George.”

  Kai gave a surprised snort of laughter, and the ball of fire bounced. She thought of Rhys and the fire-garden he’d made shortly after they’d met, a dozen or more balls of light whirling around him. Kai pushed a floating bubble into the air, away from her. She created another, this one smaller.

  Rhys smiled. “Good.”

  Creating the balls of light was the hard part. Once she’d made them, they were easy to move around. She spun them in a circle above their heads, then tried a more complex pattern, zooming around herself and Rhys.

  With a smirk, she buzzed Rhys with one of the fireballs. He swore and stepped forward. Kai squeaked and did the same, having forgotten—like a smart person—that bringing in the thing’s orbit would make it hit her, as well. She and Rhys collided in the center of the circle, body against body. His hands came around her elbows.

  At the contact, the maelstrom expanded, filling her. Kai tilted her face up and rose onto her toes, a little nervous. She and Rhys could count the number of times they’d kissed on one hand—barely—but still, it was new, and she wasn’t sure—

  He leaned down and pressed his lips against hers, softly at first. But the contact sizzled, and she found herself leaning into him, demanding more. He slid his hand to the small of her back. Her senses thrumming with the closeness of him. His warmth and wild scent, his solid strength.

  Kai’s fireballs flared then winked out. She broke the kiss, dizzy. “Damn it!” Rhys’s ball of light still hung over his shoulder. “Yours didn’t go out.”

  He glanced at the ball. “It’s going to take more than a kiss for that.”

  “Oh?” Kai raised her eyebrows. “Do you challenge me, your reptilian highness?”

  His hands glided up her back. He leaned down. Kai melted a little as his breath brushed the sensitive skin of her ear. “It’s ‘Majesty.’”

  Though she knew she might regret it, Kai slipped a hand under his shirt and ran her thumbnail just beneath his low waistband. She waggled her eyebrows. “Calling me pretty names won’t stop me from storming your castle.”

  She’d meant to counteract the touch with the silliness of her words, but it didn’t work.

  Rhys’s breathing was uneven, his voice hoarse. “Dw i’n ildio.”

  He took her mouth with his.

  Though Kai spoke no more Welsh than she had the day before, the meaning of his words leaked through the ever-widening cracks in her walls. I surrender. Kai’s eyes were closed, but she knew when Rhys’s ball of light went out.

  Oh, hell.

  Bang! The sound of the door ricocheting off the wall made Kai jump. She let go of Rhys, disheveled and aching.

  “Rhys! Sunder it. Help me!”

  Kai’s stomach dropped. The voice belonged to Ashem.

  * * *

  Kai left Juli’s room exhausted, her head pounding with repressed tears. Juli had started out the day okay, if dazed. But as time went on, she’d bounced from half-conscious to weeping in Ashem’s arms to fighting tooth and nail to get out of the room, shouting for Kavar.

  “Voices,” she’d muttered in one of the too-few rare moments when she’d been lucid. “Too many voices...”

  Ashem’s pronouncement that Juli had been heartsworn to Kavar had rocked Kai to the core. Rhys had called everyone else in the vee up to his rooms, and from the looks on their faces, they hadn’t taken it any better than Kai.

  “How is it possible to be heartsworn to more than one dragon?” Kai asked, looking from Rhys to Ashem to Ffion.

  Ashem was pale, his eyes so distant, Kai wondered if he was about to pass out. Seeing him like this, vulnerable and broken, was terrifying.

  “There are legends...scraps...but I never thought...twins are so rare.” Ffion bit her lip. “You and Kavar are the only identical twin dragons in existence, did you know? Unless another pair has been born on Owain’s side in the past thousand years. But that seems unlikely. Identical twins are rarer than gold dragons. Even in the days of the Ancients.”

  “Does that make it possible for them to heartswear to the same person?” Deryn frowned at Ashem in concern.

  “It happened,” Morwenna said, “So it must be possible.”

  Evan’s face was pinched. “How do we fix it?”

  Ffion folded her arms over her belly. “It could be sundered by someone with the mantle. Rhys—”

  “No.” Ashem’s voice was like gravel. “Too much risk. There has to be another way.”

  “I can look into it.” Ffion didn’t sound hopeful.

  Kai was exhausted and heartsick. She hadn’t seen Rhys since this morning. After Ashem’s announcement and the impromptu meeting with the vee, they’d all agreed it would be best to keep Juli and Kavar’s heartswearing a secret.

  The secret part had been Ashem’s idea. Understandably, Rhys had been the hardest to convince. He’d had enough of secrets. But in the end, he’d come around. Who knew what the Council would do with Juli if they found out about her connection to Kavar?

  Kai rubbed her temples, trying to massage away the stress headache building there. This had knocked both Juli and Ashem on their asses. It scared her. Kai kept racking her brain. There had to be a way to make it better.

  But there wasn’t.

  One thing was for sure, Kai couldn’t leave on her dragon honeymoon with Rhys. Not with Juli as bad as she was. Ffion thought things would get better once the first, intense days of heartswearing had passed.

  Please let her be right.

  Kai was so distracted that she nearly jumped out of her skin when someone grabbed her arm. When she saw who it was, her adrenaline doubled.

  “Morwenna!” Kai yanked her elbow from the taller woman’s hand. There was literally no one she wanted to see less at the moment. “What the hell do
you want?”

  Morwenna was hardly more than a silhouette in the light of the few dim fires that still lit the rotunda. She hooked sleek brunette hair behind her ears and gave Kai a scowl worthy of Ashem. “Ffion is asleep and Jiang is off somewhere. I’m your bodyguard tonight.”

  “I don’t need a bodyguard to walk from Ashem’s room to the stairs.”

  “And I have better things to be doing than babysitting you.”

  Kai stalked to the stairway that led to Rhys’s rooms. “I’m on the stairs now. I think I can make it to the top. Leave.”

  Morwenna ignored her and started to climb the stairs herself.

  Kai had never wanted to hit someone so badly. “What do you want, Morwenna?”

  Now it was Morwenna’s turn to whirl. “You had the lifespan of a mayfly, and now you’re here, in my home, and I’m supposed to call you queen?” She gave a shrill, bitter laugh. “Kai Monahan, Wingless. Worthless. You were nothing to him two months ago, you’ll be nothing to him two months from now. He was mine, and he’ll be mine again.”

  Kai refused to fall back under the assault. “What do you mean, he was yours?”

  Morwenna paused. Then she laughed again. Unlike the last one, this one was soft and tinkling. “He didn’t tell you, did he?” She sighed, a satisfied sound. “Well, I guess you weren’t his only secret. Don’t get too comfortable, Wingless. There are still dragons in Eryri who want you in a cell like the breeding bitch you are. Someone like you could never be a queen.”

  Kai slapped Morwenna so hard the skin of her palm stung and her shoulder burned. Not waiting for a reaction, she strode to Rhys’s door, pushed it open and slammed it right in Morwenna’s face.

  She clenched her stinging hand into a fist, shaking. Hitting Morwenna hadn’t felt good. It felt petty and mean.

  It felt like Morwenna had won.

  I guess you weren’t his only secret.

  Kai hugged herself and made her way through the atrium and up to her room. The door to Rhys’s room was open, and he must have heard her coming, because he appeared in the doorway, once again shirtless and in the low-slung pants. He looked as exhausted.