Page 43 of Dreams and Dragon Wings
For once, I fidgeted while I walked, my fingers combing my hair smooth and adjusting the circlet resting on my brow. I felt ridiculous crunching through the underbrush in a court outfit rather than something practical. Something better suited for traipsing through the forest like a bandit.
But I had wanted to look my best for one of the most important moments of my life—confessing to my dearest friend that her entire life was a lie. That she wasn’t even from the human realm. That she was a Drakaran like me.
And that I was the reason she could never come home.
I smelled her before I saw her. Aurelia was already out here in the woods, waiting for me.
I walked all the faster, impatient to see her again. Were it my choice, I would see her every night. I would spend every day in her company. But I couldn’t risk it.
I couldn’t risk my father discovering that a Jewel still lived.
When I stepped out from between two trees and caught sight of her standing on the edge of the forest, her head bowed, my steps hitched to a pause. I frowned. Something was wrong.
“Aurelia?”
She whirled to face me, her hands rubbing beneath her eyes as if she had been crying.
“Haiya,na’valraen.” A smile curved her lips as she so sweetly named me her favorite—the sort of smile that always stopped my heart in its tracks. Except this time, it didn’t quite reach her eyes.
In the span of a single breath, I closed the distance between us.
“Drae sol wae?”I whispered, searching her face, even as she ducked her head and looked away from me. “What is wrong?”
My thoughts swiftly spiraled, exploring every possibility for why she was upset:
Her parents were ill.
I had said something wrong in my last letter.
Someone had hurt her.
My jaw clenched as her silence ticked on. I resisted the urge to weave, to send threads of Earth hunting for any hidden wounds on her body that required my healing. I couldn’t possibly betray her privacy like that. If she wanted me to heal her, she knew all she had to do was say.
Instead, I wove together threads of Mind and let them gently seep into her thoughts, where I whispered a simple plea:“Tell me?”
Her head snapped up. Her gaze met mine. The threat of fresh tears shimmered within her sky-blue eyes.
“There is… something I must tell you, Bene,” she admitted at last, her voice little more than a breath between us. “But I’m… I’m afraid to do so.”
The irony hit me hard, luring an abrupt laugh from my throat. When she frowned at me, clearly confused by my outburst, I hastily explained, “There is something I want to tell you, too. But I’m… afraid to do so.”
A watery smile curved her lips. “Why don’t you go first, then?”
I didn’t dare. I shook my head and insisted, “Oh,naei.Youfirst.”
The silence dragged on between us. One moment. Two. Ten.
Finally, she blurted out, “I’m engaged.”
And with those two words, time stopped.
My heart stopped with it.
Aurelia continued speaking, her words a breathless tumble of sound as she explained that her mother had arranged it all, that the young man in question was some Lord Thomas Harcourt, that she barely knew him. That she didn’t even like him.
But I could barely hear her over the sound of my blood rushing through my ears.
“Bene?”
