Draven didn’t speak as they walked back into the castle. Once Lex left their side, Draven turned as well, and Aydra stared at the back of his head as he descended down the hall.
“Where are you going?” she called.
“My room,” he said simply. “I shouldn’t like to think the Queen wants to consort with the enemy king now that she thinks I’ve unleashed terror in her streets.”
Her stomach knotted, and a sourness poured into her core. “How exactly did you expect me to react?” she said in a voice higher pitched than she realized.
Draven stilled, and when he turned to look at her over his shoulder, she saw a fear and surrender in his eyes that made her weight shift. Her breaths shortened, but she swallowed hard and turned the ring over on her hand.
“You once asked me a similar question,” she said slowly. “Did you not think such a thought would cross my mind?”
“I asked you that well before—”
“It shouldn’t matter when it was,” she cut in. She paused a moment, her body feeling numb of the positivity she usually felt around him, the equableness that normally filled her core. She felt as though her core were breaking, as though persons were stretching her in different directions all at once.
“I worried about this,” she managed under her breath.
“What?” he asked, turning full to face her.
“That we would be forced to one day choose between each other and our people. That the mistakes of our past kings would come between us—”
“Aydra, do you trust me?”
The stern of his brows made her shift. She avoided his gaze as she pondered the question. He’d risked the love of his people to help her more than once. He’d not done anything to make her think he wanted her kingdom. The way he’d stared at the Infi creatures with sadness and fear in his eyes, with the betrayals of his predecessors on his mind, filled her thoughts. And then she remembered how he would look upon her face, smiling that smile that made her heart melt and her mind cease of worry. The way he would look at her… it was something she knew could not be faked.
“I do,” she said upon meeting his sage orbs.
A great sigh left him as she closed the space between them, and he closed his eyes upon laying his forehead against hers. She pressed her hands to his cheeks and kissed his forehead before taking his hands in hers once more, and then she led him to her room.
There was no late night of lust on this one, no smoldering jokes or teasing arguments. Draven stripped himself of the bloodied clothes, and he got into the bed without saying a word. At first, she wasn’t sure what to do, how to act. But she sat up in the bed against the headboard, and he laid down atop the sheet with his back to her.
She watched his body rise and fall, obvious he was still awake as he lay there in silence. And when he finally readjusted himself, turning over to face her, she reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze. His eyes avoided hers, but he moved, and her entire body shattered when he wrapped his arms around her and laid his head against her stomach. She could feel the rapid beat of his heart, the tenseness in his body.
Her core wept for him.
So she hummed the Wyverdraki song, absentmindedly allowing her fingers to graze over his back, tracing the jagged extensions of his phoenix marking on his shoulder blade and bicep, her other hand laying over his forearm.
“Will you run?” he whispered after a while.
She swallowed hard, feeling his arms tighten around her. “I won’t,” she promised.
He exhaled heavily, and for a moment she thought he might not speak. But he sat up in front of her, and her core shattered at the sight of his struggling figure sitting before her..
“Do you know how it feels to have people look at you as the Dreamers did tonight?” he asked in a rasp, meeting her eyes. “To be condemned for the mistakes of your giver, of previous kings who spread nothing more than ill-witted violence and terror into other parts of our world? To know no matter how much of a different life I may want for my people, that they will never be looked upon by others as anything more than traitors and thieves?”
He paused, and she swallowed hard at the look in his eyes. His jaw was taut, frustration spread over his features. She could see the battle beneath the facade he so desperately clung to, the fight of whether he should go with previous kings or start a new journey for his people.
“I don’t,” she whispered.
He fumbled with his hands a moment, muscles straining to keep his core at bay, and she felt the wind encircle the room.
“When Parkyr died… I wasn’t crowned immediately. There was pressure from the older generation to change tradition and choose a new king, one of Venari instead of Infinari. They thought me unworthy of the phoenix crown because I was young. I was challenged for my leadership, forced to execute one of my own in combat beneath our giver’s tree. Even after I’d won the title, they didn’t respect me, but those of my own age defended me. During the first Dead Moons of my reign, I took Dunthorne and Bael out with me to Duarb. Parkyr had only ever allowed me to go with him to the birthings once. Said he would take me when I turned eighteen. But he died when I was sixteen, and I didn’t know what I was going to find. What we saw… those blistered red-skinned creatures that barely resembled infants. Yellow eyes and wailing screams. I decided right then, I would allow none to live, that if an Infinari child was born and
