Then again, perhaps he would handle sundering better than his father had.
Owain laughed.
* * *
Kai watched the world pass below, arctic islands and frigid sea giving way to pine forests and the occasional glow of lights from a tiny town or lonely house.
She couldn’t believe it.
She was free.
But they’d left Juli behind.
“She’s intelligent and cunning. She’ll do all right.” Rhys’s voice was gentle in her head. Soft. Comforting.
Kai tried to feel comforted. Maybe she could even forget. All the terror, pain, hopelessness. If the door stayed locked and she threw away the key, maybe none of it would come back.
She’d probably get the hang of feeling the good things again.
She lay against his scaled neck, wind whistling across the metal feathers of her white raven mask. It felt safe behind it, like she might be able to be someone...not Kai. Someone who hadn’t been tortured and nearly executed.
That got too close to unlocking the door, so she pushed the thoughts away, losing herself in the thrill of flying. Leaning over the side of Rhys’s neck, she grinned at the stomach-dropping sensation of looking down. Emotions were all well and good, but she’d rather feel alive. Flying was a start. Once they got back to Eryri, she could climb again.
And there was Rhys. He could make her feel that thrill with his hands, his body. Yes. That would be exactly right for forgetting. “How long until we land?”
Rhys shuddered almost imperceptibly, sensing her need, his own rising up to answer. “We need to put distance between us and Cadarnle. And I want to fly far enough south that you can see the sun when it rises.”
The sun. She hadn’t seen the sun for fourteen days. “Thank you.”
They flew on in silence, perhaps not as tightly intertwined as they could be, but comfortable enough.
Kai couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment the pain started. It began as a pressure in her chest. Not much, just a little every time her heart beat.
Within a minute, the pressure grew into discomfort. Kai sat up and rubbed her heart. Rhys was having issues, too. He raised one of his claws and brushed it against his breastbone like something beneath his scales itched.
The discomfort blossomed into an ache. Kai shifted, trying to relieve the feeling, but nothing she did seemed to make it go away.
Holy crap, am I having a heart attack?
She tried to remember the signs. Wasn’t her arm supposed to hurt?
“Rhys.” She reached out to him. Maybe she just needed to walk around a little. For some reason, sending him the thought was like shoving it through molasses. Like their connection was supposed to be liquid, but it was icing over, becoming brittle.
Breakable.
“Kai?”
She heard his thought as if from a distance. He hurt, too. His chest. The pressure building like someone had stuck a balloon into his ribs and was blowing it up.
No. No, no, no. She might have been emotionally shut down, but she just needed space. Whatever this was, this horrible separation, she didn’t want it.
The pressure ratcheted up. Turned to pain. To agony. The night flickered. Or maybe not the night. Maybe she was the one winking in and out, emptiness threatening to sweep her away.
Rhys’s wings missed a beat.
A great ripping, shredding, tearing, sliced through Kai, like an angel had taken a fiery sword and cleaved her soul. She was bleeding. No, not bleeding. But something vital streamed from her. The things that were her and Rhys and them had been almost severed, invisible insides streaming out into the air.
The forest below rose up to meet them. On the horizon, a sliver of light.
The sun.
Before its light could touch them, Rhys plummeted, the wind and Kai both shrieking. Kai thought she saw the strands that had bound her and Rhys together, like chains of golden light. Most had been severed, loose ends waving, unfixed.
“Rhys!”
“K—”
The last chain broke.
And then, nothing.
* * *
Kai woke propped against a splintered tree trunk. There was fire in her shoulder, and her chest felt as if someone had smashed through her ribs and ripped out her still-beating heart. Kai clenched her jaw, willing her brain to stop buzzing, and tried to get her bearings.
She was in a pine forest, dark needles stark against the pink-washed dawn sky. From the thoroughfare of downed trees, she guessed Rhys had crashed. She couldn’t remember the impact, but either she’d jumped clear or the straps of the harness had snapped, because the row of broken trees continued past where she lay. Randomly, Kai wondered if some scientist would find the destruction and think a meteor had crashed. Sorry, science. Just dragons.
She sat up and gasped. It felt like her shoulder was dislocated. She knew the feeling. The same thing had happened the last time Rhys crashed. It hurt like a mother, but it was nothing compared to the pain lower in her chest.
Kai staggered to her feet, arm useless by her side, and bit back a yelp of pain.
“Rhys?” Her voice echoed in her own head. Empty.
Alone.
No. Oh, no.
She stumbled over a fallen branch and landed on her knees, bruising one on a stone that protruded from the ground. Her breath came sharp and fast. She couldn’t quite get her bearings, like someone had cut off an ear and cut out one eye, so that her ability to take in the world was half of what it had been.
She was half.
Kai pushed back to her feet, dead pine needles scattering. Months ago, when Rhys had come to her parents’ home in Colorado to bring her to Eryri, he’d told her he’d come because Seren had a vision.
A white raven. Owain pulled out its heart and crushed it in his hand.
They’d thought it meant Owain would murder her.
No. Seren had foreseen...this.
Owain crushing Kai’s heart.
Her heart.
“Rhys!” Kai staggered toward the end of the line of trees laid on their sides like a row of tipped dominoes. At the end of a wide swath of destruction, a redheaded man lay facedown in a churned mix of dead pine needles and snow. She searched desperately for him in her head, but he wasn’t there.
Dread scooped out a hollow place in her middle. She skirted a fallen log and ran for him as best she could, leaping over splintered branches and lifting her feet high to keep them from the clutching, snatching roots of the overturned trees, every step jarring her shoulder.
He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.
The future loomed over her like a vast black tsunami, threatening to sweep her away. Thousands of years without Rhys. So long. So empty.
No, that was wrong. If Rhys was dead, there was no future.
The sun flashed off red-orange scales high above. The other dragons were circling, searching the dense forest for a place to land. They didn’t matter. All that mattered was Rhys.
She reached his side, skidding on her knees into the snow, rocks shredding through her pants and slicing open her shin. Rhys had one arm pinned beneath him, one stretched forward, reaching. The side of his face was crosshatched with bloody cuts. His eyes were closed.
Kai touched his hair, afraid to take his pulse like she knew she should. Slowly, she slid the fingers of her working hand from his hair down to his back.
He inhaled.
“Oh, hell.” The door behind which she’d hidden all of her emotions was open, and everything was gushing out. All the times Owain’s thugs had hit her. Fried her. Burned her. Cut her. Tried to take everything from her. The world went dark around the edges. Blood rushed in her ears, deafening.
The pain. Holy shit, the pain in her chest blossomed anew, spiking into something wors
e than the sundering itself. Another tear splashed onto the back of Rhys’s shirt. She opened her mouth and panted, like she could breathe around the agony. A whimper tore from her throat.
Too fast. Too much. Close the door. Don’t remember. Don’t feel anything.
Rhys was alive. She needed to be calm. She needed to know if he was hurt.
He groaned and rolled over onto his back. The eye Kai had been able to see was swollen shut. His other eye blinked open. He clutched his chest, his face contorting, and inhaled through his teeth. A few clipped Welsh words flew from his lips.
It took two eternal minutes for the pain to ebb. By the end, tears were streaming from the corners of Kai’s eyes and she was rocking back and forth as best she could without jarring her shoulder. Like if she could just find the right position, the pain would ease. It didn’t.
Finally, the agony released them.
“Cariad?” Rhys pushed himself up. Aside from his face and a few other cuts, he was in better condition than her. He curled a hand around the back of her neck, fingers rubbing soothing circles against her skin. “Are you all right?”
She reached for him with her mind—an action that had become as instinctive as breathing, but still, there was nothing. “I can’t—you aren’t—where are you?”
“I can’t feel you, either.” He rubbed his chest. “It hurts like it did in the cave.”
After he’d heartsworn to her, before she’d sworn to him. It felt like someone had impaled her with a branding iron. “It felt like this? You lived with this to give me a choice?”
“And you wondered why I didn’t tell you.” He started to laugh, but it ended as a groan. “Ancients, I’d forgotten how much it hurt. I think...I think we’ve been sundered.”
Sundered. The word called up emotions that were too big, too horrifying. Fast as she could, Kai shoved them behind the door.
Besides, it wasn’t like it was forever. Or real.
He shifted, the weight of his arm coming down on her shoulder.
“Ow!”
Rhys flinched like he’d been burned. “I’m sorry, I thought—I’m so used to being able to feel your pain—” He feathered his fingers over the wrongness of a bone popped out of joint. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
The sound of footsteps swishing through dead pine needles cut off Kai’s assurance that it wasn’t his fault. Ashem, Cadoc and Morwenna came running through the fallen trees.
Ignoring them, Kai gripped Rhys’s shirt. “Kiss me.”
That’s how heartswearing worked between dragons and humans. The dragon became sworn and kissed the human to complete the bond. They would kiss and their heartswearing would be fixed.
It had to be fixable.
She didn’t need to ask him twice. Careful of her injury, he braced his hand on the back of her neck and brought their lips together in a desperate clash. The kiss was hard and needy. When the first one didn’t work, Rhys kissed her again, deeper. Harder.
Nothing.
“Stop that and tell me what happened.” Ashem examined Rhys, then Kai.
Kai was only aware of his pat down in a distant way. Caught in Rhys’s fire-blue eyes, she touched his cheek. Everything behind them, lost to her forever.
He slid his hand over the back of hers and pressed it. “We’ve been sundered.”
“Sund—” Cadoc bit off the swear. Sunder me. The breaking of a heartswearing was considered so vulgar that it was, as far as Kai could tell, the dragons’ worst curse.
“How do you know?” Ashem’s voice was considerably softer, this time.
Kai curled her fingers in the hair at the nape of Rhys’s neck. “We know.”
A kiss hadn’t worked. Maybe something more...intimate might? Automatically, she tried to send Rhys the thought. It didn’t go through. She dropped her forehead to his shoulder, wincing when the movement jarred her arm, and squeezed her eyes shut. He was right there—but not there at all. The loss of him was like falling from the top of a rock wall. She expected to feel him—for the belay to kick in—but it didn’t. She hurtled endlessly through space with nothing to break her fall and no mats to soften the blow when she landed.
Ashem heaved a sigh. “Let’s bandage you up. Then we need to move. We’re an hour from the cave. Owain will have sent search parties, and we have no way of knowing where they are.”
Ashem helped Kai up and Cadoc pulled Rhys to his feet.
“This is not going to feel good,” Ashem said.
“What?” Kai asked.
He shoved her dislocated shoulder back into place.
Pain. Kai blacked out, but only for a second. When consciousness returned, Ashem was holding her steady.
“All right?” he asked.
Rhys was pale-knuckled and glaring at Ashem. “Warn her next time. Ancients, warn me.”
Kai fought down the residual urge to vomit and the question that burned her lips. Why? You can’t feel it anymore. Instead, she said in a high, unsteady voice, “I’ve had worse.”
“Worse is yet to come.” Ashem’s face was set in grim lines. “I was there when Ayen was sundered. The moment it happens is difficult to endure, but the magic ripples back, like aftershocks—only worse than the original pain. You two have a rough—” He shook his head. “I don’t know how long it will be. A few days. A month. The rest of your lives. Ayen was dead before his stopped.” He looked away. “You lived through the initial shock. You should survive the rest.”
Kai swallowed, forbidding the tears pricking the inside corner of her eyes to fall. She’d thought she was done with torture. I lived through that. I will live through this.
She took Rhys’s hand. Despite everything, she marveled at the realness of his palm, strong and callused. Even before Owain had uncovered Rhys’s army, a part of her had thought she would never touch him again. “We will.”
There was a brief argument over whether Rhys would ride or fly, but Ashem won. The others transformed, and Rhys and Kai climbed onto his back. Kai showed Rhys how to strap into the harness, then clipped herself in and wrapped her arms around his waist.
She pressed her face against his back and he intertwined their fingers in his lap. She would not think about the last wave of pain, or what would come with it. Possible insanity. Maybe death.
And if they got through that, war. Because there was no way either she or Rhys would let Owain live after this. She didn’t have to be connected to him to know that.
And if they got through war...what? Keep living together, sundered? She’d barely known Rhys five days before he’d heartsworn to her. Ten before she’d agreed to heartswear to him. They’d been separated and/or under extreme stress for their entire relationship. Not the most stable of beginnings. They’d never had time to find their rhythm as a normal couple. And now...
Kai breathed in Rhys’s scent—wind and smoke and that nameless, masculine whatever it was. That, more than anything else, told her this was real. She was here, with him.
Sundered.
Did he love her, or had it all been the magic?
Did she truly love him?
Once, she’d thought bad things happened to other people. She would’ve assumed things would work out for the best. That they had to.
She knew better now.
Whatever the future held, she would face it when it came.
Chapter Ten
Bloodlines
Kavar burst through the door. Juli cut off her conversation with Ashem. Frantic, she jumped off the Roman-style couch, which had been made for reclining rather than sitting, and leaped for him, the chains around her wrists rattling.
That was the first kink in her plan. Kavar had taken the manacles and collar from Kai’s room and put them on her. For the moment, she was effectively useless.
But that wasn’t why sh
e wanted to scratch his eyes out.
“He sundered them!” The words were shrill. She’d told herself she would remain calm. Screaming and foot-stomping never solved anything. She hadn’t realized the depth of her rage.
Kavar caught her clawed hands, dark curls tumbling over silver eyes. “Yes.”
“How could you let him? You were supposed to help me save her, not throw her into more danger. You should have told us that this is what he planned! This wasn’t our deal!”
Physically, at least, Kai was safe. Ashem had gotten Rhys and Kai to the cave where they’d set up a rendezvous with Cadoc’s rogues, who’d flown there with all their gear when the rest of the army left for Eryri. But that didn’t mean Kai was out of danger.
Kavar’s hands tightened around Juli’s wrists until she hissed at the pain.
“I told you, I serve him. We may be heartsworn, but I am not your pet.” He shoved Juli to one side. She stumbled and caught herself on the antique coffee table.
Kavar paced around the little den, feet silent against the deep pile of the rugs scattered around the floor. For an unused set of rooms far on the unpopulated outskirts of Cadarnle, these were certainly well furnished. “I didn’t think he’d go through with it.”
Juli’s laugh was bitter. “Why not? He’s done it before.”
“Yes, when we were little more than boys. Before he’d been heartsworn himself. He couldn’t have understood what he was doing then. I thought—”
Juli swiped her hand through the air. “Spare me. I’ve seen Kai’s memories. Owain ordered a heartsworn pair to kill each other yesterday. What makes you think he’d have qualms about sundering?”
Kavar seemed to realize that he was pacing and stopped. Juli both saw and felt the moment when he pulled on his nonchalant persona. “I don’t know.”
“Be careful, aziz-am,” Ashem warned. “He is volatile. He always has been.”
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