She wrenched free, barreled through the gathered group. Knelt beside him.
He was so bloody she could not at first tell where the worst wound was. When she saw the gaping rip in his side, the steady pulse of blood draining, she knew. Her heart denied the assessment of her mind.
At first she thought him already gone, but she knew she would have sensed it, would have known if he’d passed from this world, from this life. Then he opened his eyes. Those bright blue eyes that were his Graymist legacy, through his mother, from this world. They were dimmer, dark with pain and ebbing life force.
“Shay.”
It was so quiet, so weak, that hope curled up and vanished within her.
“Don’t try to talk, Lyon,” she urged, touching his cheek.
“I must. Must tell you—” He stopped, and she nearly cried out herself at the rasp of his voice and the rattle of his breath. “I wish we had awakened sooner,” he finally got out. Another rattling breath. “You. You are the real treasure.”
He knew. She heard it in her mind, not in those words, but in the growing faintness of the contact. He knew he was dying.
She grabbed his bloodied hands in a fierce grip. “No. Don’t do this.”
“Shay . . .”
Desperately, as if they could hold him, she said the words she had never gotten to say before, amid the chaos that had erupted around them.
“I love you.”
“Yes. Almost as much as I love you.” Urgency came into his voice. “Quickly. You must . . . we must bond.”
“What?”
He pulled his hands free, and Shaina realized with a gut-level shock that she could have stopped him, he was so weak. “Bond with me. Now.”
He tugged at his ring. The signet that symbolized the royal family of Trios.
“What are you saying?”
“Please, Shay. You must have all rights due my bonded mate.”
His gaze compelled her. It was as if he were pouring the last of his strength into convincing her. The royal family had the power to conduct bonding ceremonies, she knew that, but she somehow doubted one had ever conducted his own. Not that that would stop her Lyon.
He smiled at her then, as if he’d heard her very thoughts. As perhaps he had. “We have never played by all the rules, have we?”
He looked over her shoulder, and she instinctively turned. Kateri stood there, tears streaming down her hitherto steadfast face.
“Will you . . . witness?” Lyon asked weakly.
“It would be my deepest honor,” the woman said, and knelt beside them. Shay tried to quell the trembling, but it was seizing her now, and she didn’t know how long she could hold it back.
Lyon reached for her hands, first one, then the other, as if the effort to take both at once was too much. He began to recite the ancient words, the pledges, the sacred oath that would bind them. The words that would make her forever a part of the royal family of Trios, that would bind that noble lineage and the Silverbrake line into eternity. She could no longer doubt the rightness of it, but the truth of what was happening now, why it was now, was tearing her apart.
She spoke the vows from the depths of a heart that had only so recently awakened, forced the words past the mind that was crushingly, almost cripplingly angry that it had come to this end when it should be only the beginning.
The declarations made, the bonding complete, he slid the bulky ring onto her hand, having to use her index finger because of the ring’s size. She leaned down, kissed him gently, then more intensely, as if that could hold him. Already he seemed cold, and the tears she’d been fighting broke through, too much even for she who never cried.
“My fierce Shay, don’t cry. Better now than before the meadow.”
She choked back a sob. She was unused to crying, and realized now why she had ever fought it. It hurt too much. Too much to bear.
“I love you,” she said yet again.
“And I . . . you.” His eyes fluttered closed.
He was slipping away. She could feel it, could feel the distance growing between them. She threw herself over him, as if she could somehow protect him that way. In that moment she bitterly thought she knew why her father had never told her who she really was, because he’d known she wasn’t up to the task. She had had only to keep Lyon safe, and she had failed completely. He was dying, and she could do nothing. Nothing but hold him as his life ebbed away.
Something was pressing hard against her ribs. She tried to ignore it. No pain could match the pain she was feeling as his breathing grew more labored, slower.
A thought niggled around the edge of her mind, trying to break through the cloud of anguish. She brushed it aside—nothing else mattered anymore. It might never again, for the rest of her life. A life full of endless days without him.
She wondered if a chosen flashbow warrior ever turned it down.
Then again, obviously the choosing wasn’t always right. Had anyone else ever failed at the job, or would she be the first in history?
It didn’t matter. Nothing did. Not now. But again it tickled, tormented, a fleeting memory of words spoken in an old man’s voice. . . .
. . . the power to heal.
The orb. That was what was pushing against her ribs. She clawed at his jacket, digging for the inside pocket where he had secreted it. The garment was soaked with his blood, seemed reluctant to surrender the small crystal sphere, but at last she had it free.
Uncertain what to do now, she placed the orb on his chest. Watched it.
Nothing happened.
It would only work for a true child of Graymist, the old man had said. Perhaps he needed to hold it. She tried to rouse him, but he was too far away now. She placed his hands on the orb, hoping somehow he might, even unconsciously, have enough life left to hold it.
His hands fell away.
The labored breathing stopped.
He was gone.
Chapter 54
“RINA, YOU’RE CLEAR? And Tark? Safe?”
Silence. Dax put the fighter into a pivot, to look once more to the east. The Coalition troops were still in chaos.
“We are.” At last her voice echoed in his ear through the earpiece, and relief shot through him.
“I’m watching the eastern quarter. I can practically feel the cannon fire from here. They’re falling like a swarm of drunken zipbugs. Give Tark my congratulations.”
“With pleasure.”
It was a common phrase, but something in her voice told him he had been right in his assessment of how things stood between them. It gladdened his heart, to know she had at last found what he had found. She certainly deserved it more than he ever had.
“He’s a good man, Rina.”
“Yes.”
“He’ll love life on Trios.”
“I hope so. But wherever he is, I will be.”
He felt an odd sensation, some combination of satisfaction tinged with loss. They were well launched now, both his girls and Dare’s son. They had found their way, their path, and he wasn’t sure where he would fit in their lives now. But they would work it out.
“How about my girl?” he said, grinning proudly even though no one but the fighter’s computer screen could see him.
Rina laughed. “I knew it had to be her or Lyon the moment I saw the explosion.”
Dax laughed. “I felt it first, on my way here.” A shock wave had rocked the little fighter from behind. He’d slammed the controls, whipped it around. Scanned the ground, then the sky.
And had stared in shock. The Coalition mother ship had clearly taken a huge hit, by the color of the flames it was from a nitron torpedo. A torpedo their ground forces did not have, and he himself had not fired. In the moment he realized it, a voice had echoed in his ear.
“Dax?�
�� He recognized the voice. Crim, one of Tark’s men. “See anything interesting up there?”
“I’m looking at it now. What in Hades?”
“That,” Crim said, sounding awed, “was your daughter.”
He blinked. “Shaina did that?”
“She said it was one of your old stunts. And the king’s. With a torpedo-equipped Coalition transport she just happened to find.”
He laughed out loud, joyously. He was prouder of his girl in that moment than of anything he himself had ever done.
And more grateful that she had apparently forgiven him than he’d ever been since the day Califa had agreed to bond with him. And his mate would be just as proud.
“I’m heading back to the pass,” he said to Rina now. “Congratulations to you all.”
While the air fighters hadn’t been able to reach Galatin thanks to the fusion cannons, they’d had free space over the pass, and he’d barely had time to breathe trying to keep them off the Arellian forces below. But now his girl, practically single-handedly, had chased off the mother ship, and most of the fighters with it. And then Lyon had managed to block the pass, trapping that force, while Rina and Tark had demolished the forces sent to invade the city. They were winning. Perhaps had already won.
He was thinking how he and Califa might celebrate once she arrived with the Evening Star, which should be soon, when a voice on the ground frequency had crackled in his ear.
It was Kateri, who had been directing his fire, and very adeptly, since the start of the fight at the pass. She was a canny thinker, this woman, and had often come through with a direction in the same instant he had seen it from the air. The little fighter had lived up to all of Larc’s promises and more, and he was going to buy the genius a lifetime of lingberry when this was over.
“Dax here,” he answered.
“Dax . . .”
Something in her voice pulled him out of the pride-induced exhilaration.
“What is it?”
“Prince Lyon.”
Dax went rigid in his seat. An icy cold swept through him. “What?”
“He was hit. One of the Coalition fighters on a strafing run.”
“Where is he?”
“On the ridge, above the slide. He went up to send the rest of it down, to trap the last forces in the pass with no retreat.” For a moment he just sat there, unable to move. “It worked perfectly. We have them now.”
“How bad?”
“Your daughter is with him. She . . . knew, somehow.”
Shaina. His stomach knotted even tighter.
“Dax.” The woman’s voice held a note he’d heard too often not to recognize.
“No,” he said.
“I’m so sorry, Dax. He’s gone.”
Dax banked sharply, kicking the fighter to full speed. He flew up the pass at low altitude, dodging around corners, barely missing outcroppings of rock, and caring nothing for any of it. He saw the bodies of Coalition thugs strewn thick, and didn’t feel a thing. Not even triumph at the obvious victory.
No.
A memory of Lyon as a child, endlessly curious, quietly fearless, shot through his mind. He was the best of Trios, her hope for the future—this could not be.
He careened recklessly around the last corner. He set the fighter down with a thump, heedless of scraping the perfect surface. He popped the hatch and scrambled out.
He saw the cluster of fighters. One of them saw him coming, signaled the others, and they parted to let him through.
His heart gave up its last hope when he saw Lyon’s body. He had seen too much death to mistake it here, however much he might wish it otherwise. Dare, he thought. I am so sorry, my brother.
Shaina was kneeling beside Lyon, staring at some object that lay on his chest. When he reached them, she lifted her head. He never again in his life wanted to see a sight like the look in his daughter’s eyes.
He knelt beside her, wishing he had some gift for words, but then realizing no words could ever ease this. He knew from his own nearly unbearable pain that hers must be crippling.
“It was supposed to work,” she said brokenly, shifting her gaze down to hands stained with Lyon’s blood. “To heal. He said it would.”
“What?” he asked, not knowing what else to say.
“That,” she spat out. She grabbed up the object from Lyon’s chest, the thing he now saw was a small rock that looked made of crystal of some sort. “Bedamned, useless thing. Will you kill me now, for blasphemy? Do you think I care, now?”
Her voice had gone wild, rising as she clutched the polished rock, her knuckles whitening as if she were trying to crush it with her bare hands. The orb, he thought suddenly. This must be the thing they had spoken of, the Graymist Orb.
“You were supposed to heal him,” she howled, looking around as if for something to smash it on.
He put a hand on her shoulder. “Shaina—”
She shook him off, raved on. “The old man said you could heal, and here is the truest child of Graymist and you let him die.”
He grabbed her then, pulled her close. She sagged against him. He could feel the shudders that wracked her, yet she did not cry. His fierce girl did not cry, although he knew she had to be broken inside, beyond even his imagining. He was filled with the very real fear that he would lose not only the boy he loved as if he were his own this day, but his girl as well.
He reached to take the orb from her, to get this thing that was obviously only adding to her pain away from her.
It was glowing. Faintly. Now stronger. And stronger.
What had been a translucent stone was now a deep, dark red.
“Shaina,” he said, but she had already realized.
“It’s warm,” she said, staring down at her hands. “No, hot. But not blue. Red.”
He didn’t understand what she was talking about, but sensed silence was his best course, and didn’t speak. He had seen some strange things in his wanderings, and whatever this was definitely qualified.
Shaina pulled free, and he let her go. She scrambled back to Lyon’s body, the glowing rock still in her hands. She placed it over the grievous wound Dax could barely stand to look at. His girl was made of sterner stuff. His girl was her mother’s daughter as much as his.
He felt an odd sort of tingling, much as he had when he’d cut his way through the screen below the tunnel. He knelt once more beside them, his daughter and his prince. He had never doubted they would find each other, in the way they had been meant to. He had seen it himself, had he not, before she had even been born? That they had, at last, had been clear the first time he’d seen them together when he’d gotten here.
But what was the point, if it was to end like this?
“Please,” he heard Shaina say, in a voice he’d never heard from her before. “Please.”
His proud girl was begging, and he could do nothing. Lyon was gone, and he could do nothing. He’d never felt more helpless.
The orb-like rock she held was bright red now, pulsing. Still she held it in place, although he could tell from her face it was burning her fingers. He wanted to take it from her, but she seemed so intent, as if she knew what was happening.
The orb flashed a starburst of brilliant red. Then faded, returning to its former state almost immediately. Shaina, shaking now, let it drop. Dax held his breath without really knowing why. He wanted to hold her, steady her, but some deep instinct held him back.
He waited.
Shaina waited.
The entire gathering seemed to be holding their breath.
A harsh, shuddering gasp came from that still form on the ground.
And Lyon opened his eyes.
Chapter 55
“BETWEEN YOU all, you left the Evening Star little to do but clean up,” Calif
a said. “I had to let the crew chase off a few of those ships just so they’d have some part in it all.”
Rina had been smiling from the moment Califa had arrived on the planet, and Dax had raced to greet her. Their joyous embrace had been met with cheers from the crowd; the skypirate and his mate had once more come to Arellia’s aid and were celebrated accordingly.
Rina accepted and returned an embrace of her own, savoring the words of the woman she thought of as mother and big sister combined. “Well done, my girl. Very well done.”
“I did my part,” she said. “But the plans, the tactics, were not mine.”
“So I have been told, at length,” Califa said, glancing at her mate. Dax grinned at Rina. And winked.
Califa turned then, toward where Tark stood, hanging back. She walked to him, halted before him. Rina sensed his uncertainty, wondered that this man who had been so assured, so decisive in a battle against incredible odds, would hesitate now.
Of course, he was facing the former Major Califa Claxton, the most renowned tactician in Coalition history.
“You took this . . . rather unorganized and reluctant force, a depleted arsenal of outdated weapons, a bunch of untrained civilians, including children, and you not only held off but pushed back the entire Coalition strike force. Commander Tarkson, it is an honor to know you.”
Rina grinned at his slightly stunned expression. Califa had not let her down, as she had known she would not. He opened his mouth, but no words came.
“And,” Califa added, “you are likely the only man I would deem good enough for our Rina.”
Tark’s mouth snapped shut, and he nearly winced. Rina barely managed not to run to him as he turned his head slightly, in the way she had come to know. He was hiding the scar, the patch. But she held—her position and her breath.
Califa reached out, and with one slender hand, touched his scarred forehead, then his cheek. Gently, she turned his head back.
“I know something of this,” she said softly. “Of scars carried for life, of hating the pity of others, of thinking yourself less because you are no longer whole.”
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