Page 35 of Exquisite Monster
All at once, his body deepened into a rich sapphire I’d never seen him turn before. Deep and glimmering. Much darker than Sirrus’s light, vibrant blue.
“That’s beautiful.”
He preened and chirped softly, letting his scales fade back to the gentle purple.
The light and magic faded to nothing, and Gleym looked up from her trance. “Here.”
She threw something, and I caught it blindly. A leather bag. The strap was long enough so it could sling over my shoulder and settle at my hip. “What is it?”
Varíclimbed down my shoulder, sniffing and poking his head inside out of curiosity. He chirped in alarm and fell into it, disappearing entirely. I gasped. “Varí?”
His head poked out of the bag a moment later, and he blinked before disappearing again. “Where are you?—”
I opened the bag further and stopped. That… couldn’t be right. It seemed like I was looking into a bag that was… huge?
“Remember that I control the relationships between things,” Gleym said. “This close to asheyten, that power includes the relationship of something and what is inside it. It will hold whatever you need, and you will not feel the weight.” Then she smiled faintly. “Varícan fetch things for you from within it. He won’t leave your side.”
I took a breath as relief swept through my chest. This was for him. It would help me, but it was more for him. If he was with me, helping me the way he loved and protected within the bag, he wouldn’t be as likely to throw himself into danger for my sake. “Thank you.”
“You can take everything you’ve brewed until now, and anything you create before you leave. I will make you enough darts.”
My heart sped up asVaríclimbed back out of the bag and shook out his wings. “There’s still one more potion in the book.”
“I told you before.” Gleym’s staff echoed off the floor. “I will not teach it again. If I could wipe the knowledge from the minds of humans and let it die, I would do so.”
“So… I am finished?”
She nodded once. “I have not yet solved how to return you to the surface. But make your preparations. Whatever you think you need, make more of it. You may take whatever you wish.”
“That is kind of you.”
Gleym shrugged and continued on her way. “You’ll likely need it more than I, if you insist on continuing down this path.”
I clenched my teeth and followed her, keeping my pace as slow as hers. “What would you have me do? Stay here forever?” My voice was sharper than I’d intended, but then again,Iwas now sharper than I’d ever intended, and it was in no small part thanks to her.
“It would be the safer course. But humans rarely choose what is safest for them. Even less if they are as,” she hesitated, “entangled as you are.”
Despite spending nearly three turns of the moon down here with her, we didn’t often speak of things beyond the training. Almost everything was too hard for me to think about without dissolvinginto grief or anger, and Gleym did not care. Not the way a friend would. We were useful to each other.
I hadn’t figured out what she was using me for, but I didn’t believe she was helping me out of the goodness of her heart. But if we were going to speak about it, then we were going to speak about it. “I know you hold little love for your own kind after what they did to you. But do you want them to lose themselves entirely? Because as far as I can tell, my mates are the only dragons who have a chance at standing against what is happening.”
She turned on me, eyes blazing with power. “They have no chance. None. You saw it when they were taken. How do you expect them to fight back when they are not strong enough to resist the commands of the Six?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your lovers are competent,” she said. “I remember them enough to know. But the rules of dragons cannot be bent or broken. Many have tried. All have failed. So when I say you send yourself to your death by leaving, I mean it as a certainty. No matter how prepared you are, they cannot defeat the Elders as they are.”
I swallowed. “You could release them,” I said. “Unbind Endre’s power.”
With a sigh, she kept walking. “No, I cannot.”
“But why? If you are the Elders’ equal, and from what I have seen, you are, then why couldn’t you undo it?”
We entered the kitchen and Gleym poured herself a drink. “Because his binding is not a simple command of power. If it were, it could be lifted. But in the same way that he bound his magic to thesheytento keep the Elders from undoing it, they bound their command to themselves.”
My stomach dropped to my feet. “What?”
“A vicious little twist.” Gleym smiled grimly. “Binding his power to their own life force, so as long as one of them remains alive, the binding remains. Unless one of them releases it, of course.”
