Page 66 of A Matter of Destiny

His voice sounds like the underside of a mountain. Mothers, he must be as old as the Historian. Or, I realize with a pang, as old as the Historian was.

“I need you to—” Wendolyn hesitates, as though she’s catching her breath. “Keep an eye on him,” she finishes.

The spines on Nyrgin’s face contract as he swings his massive head toward me. His nostrils flare, revealing twin crescents of deep ember-red.

“Until tonight?” Nyrgin asks, his gaze fixed on me.

“Until tonight,” Wendolyn agrees.

She sounds relieved. She shakes her head, then her body, her scales clicking and murmuring. When she turns to me, it’s with a strange sort of apologetic gleam in her wide, emerald eyes.

“Wait—” I start, but she’s already spreading her wings.

The wind catches the rest of my words and tosses them against the mountainside as Wendolyn leaps into the air, letting the updraft pull her outstretched wings and carry her sailing over the edge of the ridge.

I feel like she’s taken something with her, the last of my strength perhaps, and I sink to the stones. Despite the sun beating down on the rocks, the wind swirling around this ridge is cold. My mind drifts back to Cairncliff, where the sun must be warming the narrow streets already, and the markets must be ringing with voices.

And that’s all gone now. Rayne is gone to the Mothers only know where. I should be tearing these mountains apart searching for her, but instead Wendolyn stuck me on this mountainside under the hoary eyebrows of a guard. Me. With a guard. As though I’m some kind of a threat. I close my eyes and let my snout sink to my claws.

“Doshir,” the massive silver dragon rumbles from just above me.

I crack open an eyelid. If Nyrgin the silver dragon is going to threaten me, I’m just going to roll over and pretend to be dead.

“It’s been a while,” Nyrgin says.

His voice is so low I can feel it reverberating through the stones beneath my scales. I close my eyes; the last thing I want to do right now is waste the day reminiscing about the bad old days in the Iron Mountains.

Nyrgin seems to sense my mood, and he falls silent. There’s a clattering of stones, and then the ground thuds as he settles his body into the mountainside. Sun sinks into my scales as my mind spins in wide arcs, gyrating wildly between imagining all the ways Rayne could be dead or injured and all the ways I could rescue her. If I wasn’t being guarded.

If I could talk my way out of being guarded.

I take a deep breath, then open my eyes. The old silver dragon is watching me with an intensity that makes my skin crawl, as if maybe he suspects I’m actually Rensivar the Wicked in disguise. His mouth yawns open; sunlight sparkles on the serrated edges of his front row of teeth.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the dragon finally rumbles.

I blink. He turns away, suddenly focused on his own claws.

“T-Thank you,” I stammer.

“Your mother was a great queen,” Nyrgin continues, still examining the curve of his front claw.

I nod, blinking frantically. I’d imagine she was a great queen. Perhaps I would have even been able to find out for myself, if I’d ever taken her up on her many invitations to visit the Iron Mountains. Nyrgin snorts, sending a cloud of dirt out in front of him, and then places his claws delicately back on the mountainside. They click against the stone.

“I can’t imagine she was an easy dragon to live with, however,” he adds, in his deep rumble of a voice.

I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again, and wait for the words of an appropriate response to fly into my mind. When they refuse to arrive, I twist my neck and stare down the mountain’s flank into the thick, mossy green of the forest far below.

Had she been hard to live with, my mother? Perhaps. All these years, I’d assumed I was the problem. If I’d been tougher, fiercer, if I’d worked harder, then perhaps I would have been the dragon she’d wanted me to be. Perhaps I’d have served on the Council of the Iron Mountains with her, instead of fleeing to Cairncliff like the spider, tick, and clam she’d compared me to.

“I remember your application to join the Council,” the old dragon says, as though he were reading my thoughts off a scroll.

“Great,” I mutter.

My head sinks to the stones as that day rolls back over me like a wave. Greimbyss sneering as he told me my application had been rejected, that a weakling like me would never hold a seat on the Council, no matter who my mother was. His voice, like stones grinding against one another, floating through the hallway outside Wendolyn’s chambers days later.

Nyrgin sniffs, and a long, shifting rustle fills the air as he adjusts his massive length. I keep my eyes closed. If I could sink into these stones, I would.

“I supported your application,” Nyrgin says.

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