I’ll call you every night.” Her voice caught on the words. She was trying to sound strong. “I’ll call every night until you come back.”
“And then you’ll stop calling?”
She let out a strangled laugh. “Yeah, then I’ll stop calling.”
A few minutes later, we clicked off.
I stood outside, weeping in the snow until I heard everyone in the tent climb into their sleeping bags. Only when I was certain they were asleep did I sneak back in and shiver myself warm.
The next week was a thousand times lonelier than those before it.
Thunder cracked, startling everyone awake.
We hurried out of our sleeping bags and scrambled for the door to the tent, but the sky was clear and deep blue with coming dawn. Sylph hovered around our campsite, warming the air.
The thunder didn’t return. Whit and Stef pushed back inside the tent to start breakfast, but Sam remained by the door, glaring at the sky as if his life depended on it. The thunder hadn’t been real thunder.
I wanted to reassure him somehow, but I had no words. Only the same awkwardness we’d carried since my birthday.
“Go inside with the others. I’ll fill up the water bottles.” Apparently, I couldn’t manage reassurance. Just instructions and letting someone know where I’d be. After I’d wandered out on my birthday and Cris had come after me, Whit had pulled me aside and lectured me about telling people where I was going. If I insisted on going after dragons, then I’d best not get myself killed out of stupidity.
Sam looked at me. Sort of through me. He nodded. “If you see anything, come right back.” There was a note of concern in his voice, but mostly he sounded hollow. He’d been worse since Armande died.
I put on my coat and boots and headed into the woods with an armful of empty water bottles. A few sylph trailed after me and hung close as I broke ice and filled the bottles in a fast-moving creek. While I worked, sylph dipped tendrils of shadow into the full bottles and boiled the water clean.
We were almost finished when thunder cracked again.
I glanced at Cris, my eyebrow raised, but he didn’t move. The other sylph, too, remained motionless as the snap of leather wings came again.
Above, I saw only pine boughs, stark against the infinite blue.
And then, just to the east, a sinuous body flitted above the trees, darkening the fragmented sky.
I placed the last water bottle on the snowy ground. “Will one of you take me to see it?”
Cris dithered, and the other sylph hung back awkwardly.
“If you won’t take me, I’ll just go see it myself and possibly get lost again.” I started walking, but after only a few steps, I turned and pointed at Cris. “Don’t tell the others. I don’t want them to scold me when I’m not even getting into trouble.”
Sullenly, the sylph trailed after me as I followed the occasional crack of wings.
Cris sidled up next to me. -Consider yourself scolded.-
I smirked and swatted at him, but a knot in my chest loosened a little. Whether or not he agreed with my plan, Cris still liked me. He and the other sylph stuck closer to me than my real shadow.
At last, we came to a break in the woods, and a cliff overlooking a white valley. Trees huddled under the weight of snow, majestic and silent. Above the valley, three dragons flew.
Their serpentine bodies slithered through the air, gliding without sound until they flapped their wings, which stretched as wide as their bodies were long. A deceptively delicate network of bones and scales shone translucent when a dragon veered and twisted toward the rising sun.
I gasped and took a step back into the woods. The dragons were so huge. After a year, I’d forgotten how big they were. But seeing them fill the sky as they flew through the air, my heart stumbled on itself. Templedark was not far behind us. I’d seen too many dragons then, seen the way they spit acid on the fields of the agricultural quarter or tried to land atop the city wall. One had been leaning over Sam and Stef to kill them when I arrived.
I’d almost seen a dragon kill Sam.
My heart ached as I stared at the sky and lowered myself to my knees. I couldn’t stand anymore. I couldn’t think anymore. I could only watch as a dragon switched course and dove into the valley, its wings folded along its sides. The immense golden beast disappeared into the forest for a heartbeat, then erupted a short ways beyond with a deer in its jaws. Ice and snow and branches sprayed behind it, having been caught up in the dragon’s path.
“Oh, Cris.” My words were hardly a breath. Just mist on the frigid air. “How am I supposed to even get close enough to one to speak to it?”
Cris curled around me, warm but silent. He offered no advice.