A QUEEN RAISED BY DRAGONS

RONAN AND WREN

By the time I reached the gap between the forge and the grain store, Caspian had already gotten there ahead of me, and Ronan had already seen him coming.

"Not now," Ronan was saying, low and urgent, one hand still gripping the stranger's arm like he was steadying her or steadying himself, I couldn't tell which. "Whatever this is, Blade, it's village business, and it's got nothing to do with—"

"It has everything to do with why I'm here," Caspian said, "which you'd know if you understood why I'm here, and I'm beginning to suspect you understand that a great deal better than you've let on."

The stranger's eyes went wide and sharp at that, flicking between the two of them with the fast, calculating fear of someone doing rapid arithmetic on how much danger she'd just ridden into. She was younger than I'd first thought, seeing her up close now — younger than me, maybe, though something in her bearing made her seem older, the particular hardness that comes from having had to grow up faster than your years account for.

"Ronan," I said, and three heads turned toward me at once. "Who is she?"

I watched something pass across his face — not surprise that I'd followed, I don't think anything about me surprised Ronan by that point, not really. Something closer to resignation. The look of a man who has been holding a door shut with his whole body for a long time and has just felt it start to give.

"Ember." He said my name carefully, the way he had at the forge two days before, choosing his words like a man crossing unstable ground. "This isn't a good time."

"You keep saying that. Every version of everyone in my life keeps saying that. I would like, just once, to be told when a good time is actually going to arrive, because so far it seems to be a day that never comes."

The stranger looked at me properly then, for the first time — really looked, the way Caspian looked at things, cataloguing, assessing, and something shifted in her face as she did it. Fear, still. But underneath the fear, something that looked almost like relief.

"You're her," she said quietly. "Aren't you."

"I don't know who her is supposed to be," I said, "since apparently I'm the last person in this entire village who's allowed to know anything about my own life."

"Wren." Ronan's voice had gone tight, warning. "Don't."

"She has a right to know, Ronan, she has more right than anyone alive, and I did not ride two days on a dying horse to stand here and watch you keep protecting a lie that's about to get her killed—"

"Wren."

The name landed in the small space between us and stayed there. Wren looked at Ronan, and something passed between them again, that same silent confirmation I'd watched from across the square, except this time I understood enough of the shape of it to know it was an argument, not an agreement.

"I'm not going to stand here and watch you do to her what everyone else in her life has been doing," Wren said, quieter now but no less fierce. "Which is decide, on her behalf, what she's allowed to be told about herself."

Caspian, beside me, had gone very still — the particular stillness I'd learned meant he was paying closer attention than his face let on.

"Who sent you," he said to Wren.

"Nobody sent me. I came because I had to." She looked at him, weighing him the way everyone in this village seemed to be weighing everyone else lately, trying to work out which side of an argument he belonged to before committing a single word further. "You're the King's Blade."

"I am."

"Then I'm not saying another word in front of you," she said, and turned back to Ronan with something like an apology in her face. "I'm sorry. I know you asked me to wait. I can't wait anymore. There isn't time."

She wouldn't say more, not there, not with Caspian standing close enough to hear every word, and Ronan wouldn't either, though I caught him giving her one long, pleading look that she met with a small, stubborn shake of her head, the look of someone who had already decided the risk was worth taking and wasn't going to be talked out of it twice.

"Ember," Ronan said finally, turning to me, and there was something in his voice I had never heard from him before in twenty-two years of friendship — something that sounded almost like fear of me, or fear for me, or both at once, tangled too tightly together to separate. "Give me until tonight. One more day. I promise you I will tell you everything, I have wanted to tell you for three years and I have never once been able to, and I need you to trust me for a few more hours while I work out how to do it without getting either of us killed."

"Three years," I repeated slowly. "You've known something about me for three years."

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. His silence was answer enough, and it landed in my chest with a weight that made the whole square tilt slightly, another piece of my ordinary life quietly confirmed as a lie I'd been living inside without ever suspecting the walls.

"Tonight," I said, because I didn't trust myself to say anything else without my voice breaking. "You have until tonight."

I walked away before either of them could see what my face was doing, and I did not go back to the archive, and I did not go home. I went, instead, exactly where every instinct in me had been telling me not to go for two straight nights, because I had run out of patience for being told to wait, and because some part of me had already decided that if no one in this village was going to give me the truth, I would go and find it myself.

I followed Wren that night when she slipped out past the last house at the edge of Caldenmere, moving fast and sure toward the treeline like she'd walked that path a hundred times before, and I found her standing at the very edge of the Ashenwild, staring into the dark the way I had two nights running, and before I could say a single word to announce myself, she spoke without turning around.

"I know you're there," she said. "I've been waiting for you to follow me."