Page 13 of Davoren
"For twenty years." She moved closer, and I caught her scent—amber and clean linen, with an undertone of volcanic minerals that suggested even perfume adapted to this place. "Long enough to know that you're the first to arrive in such . . . dramatic circumstances."
The pause before 'dramatic' carried volumes. First to arrive bloodied. First to arrive half-naked. First to arrive looking like she'd fought the Fire Wastes and lost spectacularly.
"The scenic route had its charms," I managed, testing whether humor might work on someone who'd carved efficiency into an art form.
"I imagine it did." Dry as volcanic sand, that tone. She reached into air and somehow produced a robe from nothing—or more likely from some cleverly concealed pocket in her architectural dress. "The thermal baths will ease your wounds."
The robe was silk, because of course it was. Everything here seemed to be silk or obsidian or impossible beauty. But the color caught my attention—deep blue, like mountain lakes I'd only seen in paintings. Not red like her own dress. The distinction feltdeliberate, a line drawn in expensive fabric. You are not like me, the color said. You are something else entirely.
I accepted it with hands that only trembled slightly, hyperaware of her watching as I struggled to maintain modesty while donning it. The silk felt like water against my abraded skin, too soft after hours of volcanic glass and dragon scales.
"Master Davoren will join us once you're settled."
The mark on my shoulder flared to life at just the thought, sending heat cascading through my body. My knees, already unsteady, threatened complete betrayal.
I saw the exact moment she noticed my reaction. Those amber eyes sharpened, and something that might have been sympathy flickered across her controlled features. "The bond is still new," she said, tone gentling fractionally. "The intensity will . . . adjust."
Adjust. Like this consuming need was something that could be filed properly and placed in the correct column of a ledger.
"This way." She turned with that same measured precision, every movement calculated for maximum efficiency. "And Lady Lyris? Whatever circumstances brought you here, whatever you fled or sought—none of that matters now. The mark has chosen. Best to accept that quickly."
Easy for her to say. She moved through this impossible Keep with the confidence of two decades' familiarity. I followed her. The mark pulsed with each step, counting down to something I couldn't name but my body already knew.
Water, my tutors had insisted, flowed downward. It sought the lowest point. It certainly didn't cascade upward in spirals that twisted through air before forming pools at different elevations,each one feeding into another through channels that seemed to run sideways and sometimes backward.
But here, in Davoren's domain, water obeyed different masters.
The bathing chamber itself had been carved from—or perhaps grown into—a natural cave formation. Columns of flowstone rose from floor to invisible ceiling, their surfaces polished to mirror smoothness by centuries of mineral-rich moisture. Between them, pools of varying sizes created a liquid staircase that my eyes couldn't quite follow. Steam turned the air opaque, like trying to see through expensive silk, and with it came a scent that made my knees weak for entirely new reasons.
"Dragon's blood orchids," Scarlet supplied, noting my reaction. She moved through the steam like she'd been born to it, never slipping on the wet stone, never hesitating at which pool to approach. "Cultivated in the Keep's greenhouse specifically for their healing properties. Master Davoren maintains the only surviving collection outside the Twilight Reaches."
Of course he did. Why have normal bathing chambers when you could have impossible water features perfumed with flowers worth more than small kingdoms?
I sank into the lowest pool with a sound that might have been a whimper. The water was exactly the temperature of fevered skin—hot enough to be therapeutic but not quite enough to hurt. It accepted my damaged body like an embrace, and I felt my muscles begin to unknot for the first time since I'd fled the caravan.
No, that wasn't quite true. They'd been perfectly relaxed during my involuntary climax on dragonback, hadn't they?
Scarlet arranged bottles along the pool's edge with precision. Each one found its perfect place in a pattern I couldn't decode but recognized as deliberate. This was a woman who foundcomfort in order, in knowing that everything had its place and purpose. I understood that need intimately.
"How many others has he bonded to?" The question escaped before I could properly phrase it, driven by a need to understand my place in this impossible situation.
Her hands stilled on a bottle of golden oil. The pause stretched long enough that I wondered if I'd committed some grievous breach of protocol. When she finally spoke, her voice carried a weight that made the steam seem thicker.
"None." She turned to face me fully, those eyes holding mine with uncomfortable intensity. "Ever."
The word dropped into the pool like a stone, sending ripples through more than just water. "Ever?"
"Dragons bond once, Lady Lyris." She uncapped the golden oil, and immediately the scent of smoke filled the chamber. "They wait eternally if necessary. When the bond doesn't manifest..." A pause as she poured oil into the water, watching it spread in golden spirals. "They simply continue. Alone."
The word 'alone' echoed off stone and water, carrying more meaning than its single syllable should hold. I thought of the platform where I'd knelt, of the thousands of landings he must have made there. All of them solitary.
"How long?" I whispered.
"How long has he waited?" Scarlet's precision reasserted itself, as if exact numbers could somehow make the incomprehensible manageable. "It is impossible to say. Tens of millenia, at least."
She continued speaking, something about records going back to the fourth century, but her words faded into meaningless sound. Tens of thousands of years. I couldn't grasp it. My mind kept trying to make it smaller, to fit it into a scale I could understand.
My entire life was twenty-two years. My parents' marriage had lasted eighteen before my mother's death. The oldest person I'dever known was my grandmother, and she'd died at seventy-three.
