Bound by Blood and Fire

In the Mud

That evening, alone in her borrowed quarters, Ravenna let herself remember, for the first time in years, the last real conversation she'd had with him.

They'd been sixteen, crouched in the mud at the edge of the border stream, arguing — as they always argued, easily, without any real heat behind it — about whose people would win a fight neither of them actually wanted to see happen.

Wolves are faster, she'd said. You'd never catch us.

Dragons don't need to catch you, he'd said, grinning in that unguarded way he only ever wore out here, away from both their courts. We just wait until you're tired.

That's not a strategy, that's laziness.

It's efficient.

She remembered laughing — really laughing, the kind she hadn't let herself do in front of her own pack in years, because laughing meant looking soft, and soft wasn't something an alpha's heir could afford. She remembered thinking, with the particular clarity of being sixteen and certain of very little else, that this — this boy, this stream, this stolen hour neither of them was supposed to have — was the only place in her whole life that felt like it belonged entirely to her.

Three days later, the raid happened. She never saw him again.

Until now.

She pressed her palm flat against the scar at her collarbone, an old habit she'd never managed to break, and wondered whether he remembered the mud and the stream and the laughing too — or whether six years of believing her a traitor had burned all of it out of him completely.