I wasn’t entirely sure it was a lie. At least bantering with her, trying to draw out her secrets as she seemed to try to tease out mine, made the day’s ride pass quickly.
When we stopped for the night, she walked away toward Jaik and Talisyn. Jaik kissed her hello, then raised his hand to wave to me in thanks.
I didn’t want that kind of gratitude. I turned away.
Chapter
Thirty-Two
Honor
Without flying, the trip between the academy and the northern retreat took two days of travel. Some of the shifters set up tents. The wolves and bears bedded down together.
“Do you want a tent?” Talisyn frowned at the tent poles and canvas that someone had left scattered on the ground for us. “Because I have a better idea, and it doesn’t involve embarrassing myself with my non-existent construction skills.”
“What is it?”
In a flash, he’d transformed into his dragon-self. He bumped me playfully with his snout. Talisyn as a dragon was a gorgeous beast with purple and gray scales across his back and a bluish-gray underbelly, all the better to blend in with the sky and drop down on his enemies. But the mischief dancing in his large green eyes would have told me that it was Talisyn no matter what form he took.
When he turned into a dragon, part of me yearned to transform so much that I felt a ripple of pain dart across my skin. I folded my arms over my chest as if I could hold the dragon in, startled, as I was shot through with a sudden jolt of fear.
Talisyn didn’t notice. He was walking in a circle like a cat, before he wrapped his tail around me and used it to push me close to him. He settled down, resting his head on his front paws. Despite the long, wicked claws that sank into the soft earth, I felt totally safe as he drew me against his body and wrapped his tail around me. I sank back with my head on his scales, then sat up and frowned. “You’re not very comfortable, Tal. You’re all spiky.”
“Here.” Jaik threw a pillow to me. “You’ll be warm enough all night with our heat.”
He curled up beside Talisyn, the two of them forming a cocoon around me. I smiled. I’d heard rumors of dragons nesting, but these dragons were my nest. My home.
In the middle of the night, I jolted awake, gasping for air. In my nightmares, I’d been in so much pain, I hadn’t been able to breathe.
The coiled body of the dragon curled around me shifted, and an enormous horned head rose. Golden eyes stared into mine. Jaik.
In seconds he’d transformed, back to the handsome man with a worried face and tousled dark hair. He climbed over Talisyn’s tail to sit beside me, wrapping his arm around my shoulder and drawing me into the warmth of his side.
Together the two of us leaned back against Talisyn.
“What is it?” he asked gently.
“Nothing. Just bad dreams.”
“That’s not nothing. More memories?”
“Maybe. But I don’t even remember anything useful now. I just remember being scared.” Embarrassment flushed my cheeks red. I hoped Jaik couldn’t see in the darkness.
He tugged me close, pressed his lips to my forehead. “We’ll unravel the past together, Honor.”
“Maybe someday, my body will realize the past is in the past. I don’t need to panic with every wisp of memory.” I let my eyes drift shut. “I wish I could be strong like you.”
“Like me?”
I nodded, but I didn’t want to go on. It felt like it was too hard to be vulnerable in front of Jaik when he was always so strong.
“Honor, you’re the strongest person I know,” he said quietly. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking hard and strong are the same. Maybe my life made me strong, but it made me hard too. How much more strength does it take to be like you, both sweet and strong?
Did he really believe that, or was he just trying to make me feel better?
“I need to find a way to unravel my memories. Chasing these wisps… it’s not enough.”
“We’ll figure it out together,” he promised. “And the healer is coming with us.”
He gestured across the field to the tents were some of the staff were sleeping. I’d glimpsed Caldren over there, briefly, before he raced off to yell at the wolf shifters.
Jaik went on, “Before you know it, you’ll be able to shift again.”
He might not understand why I cared so much about being a squirrel, but at least he was trying.
“There’s a spell I’ve been thinking about,” he went on. “We’ve been trying to break the enchantment on your memories, but we can’t find the source spell. Maybe something else would work. There’s this spell that helps us draw lost memories back to the surface.”
“Let’s do it.”
“I had Lynx make me some of the potion. We can try it when we get to the northern retreat.”
“Why not now?”
“Now? All right.” To Jaik’s credit, he didn’t protest that it was the middle of the night, with the rest of the camp sleeping peacefully around us.
He drew a bottle from his bag. It was an emptied-out liquor bottle, half filled with a viscous pink liquid. He’d come prepared with more than one dose, which made me think of how he’d drunk those dregs in Lynx’s workshop.
“You think maybe you’ve forgotten some things that never should’ve been left in the past.”
“Maybe.”
“Drink it with me.”
He hesitated. Then he took a long swig from the bottle and passed it to me. I did the same. The drink trickled thickly down my throat as if it were resisting being swallowed. I gagged but managed to keep it down.
“Now what?” I asked.
“It’s supposed to be easier to get at the memory sideways so think about something else.”
I closed my eyes and leaned back against Tal’s side again. “I’m thinking about the first days I remember. Wandering around my parents’ house.”
“What do you remember?”
“Mostly eating sweets. My father was always sneaking me something sweet.”
Jaik reached for Branok’s bags and rifled through the pockets in the front. I wondered if Branok would even mind. He drew out a bag of sugar cubes and passed one to me.
“Do you think I need taming?” I teased.
“Always,” he said.
I let the sugar cube melt on my tongue. The memory of when I was a little girl lounging in front of the fireplace in the Music Room, turning pages in my book and sucking on a candy drop, made my heart pound. I’d lain on that floor never knowing there was an old well concealed beneath, that one day it would become my prison.
And the memories shifted from lying on that rose-covered rug to trying to sleep on cold flagstone floors. “You’ll be all right, Honor. Hang in there.” A guard’s face rose in my memory, and my whole body tightened with fear. He’d been the one to choke me unconscious earlier that day, his face the last thing I saw before I fell into the dark. “You’re your father’s daughter.”
Had he said that to me, or was that something I’d told myself?