Though he still had a finger under my chin, I closed my eyes. I couldn’t let him see my reaction, not when I didn’t, couldn’t, understand it. How long had he been waiting to tell me? Had he been afraid to say the words out loud? Was he afraid now? At his utterance of the word mate, I’d felt a warm sense of belonging I hadn’t felt since Mother’s death or since I’d had a home. The sensation was stronger than what I’d felt at the elm tree, more personal.
Yet our past stretched between us. Not just the manipulative way he’d broken the Blood Oath. His dark, terrible years of enslavement. The barely scarring wounds left inside me. People with battered souls shouldn’t make decisions like this. Surely that could only lead to disaster.
He wasn’t asking me to sit next to him at a gathering or to make him nectar a few times or dance with him. Tyrrik was asking me . . . I frowned, realizing he hadn’t asked me anything.
I freed myself of his grip and looked at him. In the brief moment I’d spent with my eyes shut, he’d smoothed the expression from his face, and he wore the impassive mask I was most familiar with. “What does it mean exactly? That I am your mate?”
“We are each other’s mates,” he corrected, a hint of a growl in his voice as emotion lit his eyes. “And it means we are made for each other. Drae only ever have one mate. They can only bear children together.”
“So, we can just have children together.” Why did this stuff always come back to dancing the maypole? My fault for asking about children, I suppose.
“Amongst other things,” he said. Tyrrik turned and took several paces toward the front of the cave before sitting on a shelf of rock.
I simultaneously felt relief and a bone-deep cold at the distance. But I wasn’t done. “Like?”
27
Tyrrik settled like a raptor on a branch. Despite his obvious fatigue, everything about him was predatory. His inky gaze remained fixed on me. “You’ve felt the connection between us. I’m able to hear your thoughts, and you hear mine. If we keep that bond open.”
I flushed, remembering the time I’d severed the emotional tie with him when flying over the mountains.
“The connection doesn’t just allow us to speak,” he said, glancing at his hands. “In our culture, the male is the protector. The female—”
“Do not tell me I’m meant to be peaceful again. I have perfectly violent tendencies myself.”
“I was not going to say that.” He raised a brow, but his expression remained dark. “Drae females are perfectly capable of defending themselves. But their role in a mated couple is to balance the male’s violence, to ground him, and when they are threatened, to strengthen him.”
Despite myself, I edged closer, not wanting to miss a single word. Leaning toward him, I asked, “Strengthen him how?”
He glanced up, meeting my gaze for only a moment before looking away.
I studied the hang of his shoulders and bit my lip. Even though I was filled with confusion, the prominent feeling racking me was guilt. Tyrrik had divulged the truth to me, and I couldn’t find it within myself to give him what he so clearly wanted. Why did that seem like such a grave offense?
“You have felt the push and pull of Drae energy,” he finally answered. “You’ve practiced pulling the tendrils of power that flow between us back into yourself.”
Our lesson in the mountains felt like so long ago, but I remembered asking him how to protect my thoughts from the emperor. “Yes.”
He shrugged. “Instead of pulling the tendrils into yourself, you push them into me.”
I stirred uneasily at the thought. Putting more into the tendrils weaving between us? When I used my Phaetyn powers on Tyrrik, it was almost business-like, the same as I’d do for anybody with an injury. I saw the problem, and I healed it. But the tendrils of Drae power between us . . . they were different. I knew they were specific to us. The idea of expanding the threads of force that connected us, increasing them in size and strength so the attachment was more powerful, made me feel faintly unwell. I didn’t want to be chained to Tyrrik; I didn’t want to be chained to anyone. I changed the subject. “Anything else I should know?”
“Plenty you should know, but not much you’ll want to.”
I crossed my arms, irritated that he seemed so confident in his assessment. “Try me.”
A ghost of a smile lit his face, and his eyes warmed. “Your sudden obsession with shiny objects.”
My hand went to the top of my corset, and Tyrrik chuckled. Inside the corset sat my ruby and golden pill box. “What about them?”
“It is a courtship ritual between male and female Drae, just as my scales reflect the color of your scales to show I am the right mate for you.”
A courtship ritual. “Me collecting precious things does something . . . for you?”
Scales appeared on his shoulder and climbed up his neck. “The way you care for precious things does.”
My face slackened. “You’re right. I don’t want to know any more.”
His face closed off, and the guilt gnawing in my chest roared in protest.
I sighed and went to sit beside him on the rock. Dyter could come back as soon as he liked in my humble opinion. “Tyrrik,” I said. “When did you know we were mates?”
He slowly turned to me, and I saw the scales had a lapis lazuli glow to their onyx shine. His gaze dropped to my lips, and he said, “When I first touched you.”
“The nape of my neck,” I said. I remembered the moment; it was seared in my memory.
A shiver rippled down him, and the twist of his neck was decidedly Drae. “Yes,” he rumbled, his guttural voice filling the rocky shelter. “The nape of your neck, though it could have been anywhere.”
I remembered the pain, falling to my knees, knowing something had just happened to me, and chalking up the sensation to the Lord Drae before me. He’d known from the very first moment, our first meeting. He’d kept this to himself the entire time? His actions in the room with my mother took on new meaning, his desperation to get me out of my bedroom and away from the guards to save me from the king. My heart clenched as I thought of Tyrrik as Ty and about all the information he’d disclosed, the effort he’d made to be close to me while in prison. I thought of his tender ministrations as Tyr. He wasn’t just trying to clean up my blood to keep me from being discovered by the king. Tyr hadn’t needed to be gentle to wash the evidence away. He’d risked a lot to even bring me food. I thought of the emotion in his eyes when he’d come as Irrik to give me a bath. I’d thought I was part of some game, and I was right, just not about who he was playing for. My throat clogged with feeling. I swallowed the lump as the memories washed over me. Was Dyter right?
Tyrrik had been watching my face, and he slowly raised his fingers toward the nape of my neck.
His scent made me dizzy; his eyes stared to the deepest recesses in me. My head and my heart were no longer in agreement of the certainty I’d known a few minutes ago. That’s what made me jerk my upper body away.
We were both panting hard with only an arm’s length between us. With wide eyes, we stared at each other.