Chapter 694: I Know.

Dexmon’s jaw set.

The setting was immediate. Hard. The kind of jaw-lock that belonged to a man whose body had received information his mouth had been refusing to process, and the refusing had been deliberate, and the deliberate was cracking under the pressure of a best friend standing in front of him bleeding from the nose on the back of a storm dragon in the middle of a war trying to have a conversation that was going to change everything.

"I know."

Two words. Cold. Flat. Carrying zero surprise and zero warmth and the comprehensive, devastating weight of a man who had already done the math.

"Save it. We have a kingdom to defend." Dexmon’s voice was iron wrapped in ice.

The sentence closed a door. Locked it. Put a deadbolt on it and bricked over the frame. That conversation was being postponed indefinitely by a man whose kingdom was under siege and whose priorities were being managed by fury rather than forgiveness.

He was angry. The anger was volcanic, vast, sitting beneath the iron composure like magma beneath a crust that was thinner than it looked. Gavriel could see it in the tendons of his neck. Could see it in the way his grip on the blade had tightened by a degree that turned holding into strangling. Could see it in the gold of his eyes, which was burning hotter than combat required, fueled by something that had nothing to do with Dark Fae and everything to do with a woman whose name neither of them was going to say on this dragon.

But the anger did not override the blade. Did not override the jump. Did not override the eight words that had arrived with the kill and meant exactly what they said.

Get away from my best friend, you fuck.

Best friend. Present tense. Spoken in fury. Spoken in the middle of knowing the worst truth possible and the present tense had survived. The friendship had survived, which meant the anger was going to be terrible and long and deserved and the friendship was going to outlast it because Dexmon Drakenfell had just used those words while knowing and the knowing had changed the weight but the words had stayed the same.

Gavriel gave a nod. Small. The nod carried everything his mouth was being denied. Gratitude and guilt and love and the crushing, suffocating relief of a man whose worst secret had been received by the one person whose reception mattered most, and the reception was fury, and the fury was survivable, and survivable was the only outcome he had been praying for.

"LAND!" Dexmon roared at the storm dragon beneath them, his voice carrying enough authority to rearrange the dragon’s nervous system.

???

SHADOWCLAW - WEST WALL - DAWN

Over one hundred dragons had landed on Shadowclaw’s field throughout the night. All cleansed.

Red Death arrows scattered across the perimeter like broken promises, every single one stopped cold by the enchantment Aeron’s mages had cast at Serena’s instruction. The miasma pooled in harmless puddles twenty paces from where each arrow fell, the red gas dissipating in the morning air like smoke from a candle that had been snuffed before the fire could reach the curtains.

Zero casualties. Zero injuries. Every wolf and mage on Shadowclaw’s walls was standing, breathing, whole.

The flanking dragons descended first.

Four frost-scaled riders touched down in the grey-gold light of a sunrise that had the decency to arrive after the killing was done. Their dragons folded their wings with the exhausted grace of creatures whose bodies were running on instinct because their adrenaline had punched out an hour ago. Riders dismounted. Spotters followed. Each one of them moving with the quiet, bone-deep weariness of professionals whose shift had been long and whose shift had been successful and whose success was settling into their muscles as relief.

Talon landed last.

The prince’s dragon touched the frozen ground with a control that said everything about the animal beneath Serena and nothing about the woman standing on his back. The frost on his scales caught the first real light of morning and threw it sideways in fractals that painted the field in cold silver.

Serena stood on Talon’s spine. Both boots planted. Bow at her side.

Her face was calm. Her training suit was soaked through with rain from hours spent inside a thunderstorm at altitude. There was a bruise under her eye. Her lip was busted. There was a thin cut along her jaw from a scale edge she’d caught during one of the dragon-to-dragon transfers.

She looked wrecked. She looked beautiful. The two had never been mutually exclusive on this woman and tonight they had merged into something that belonged on the wall of a castle rather than standing on the back of a borrowed dragon.

She jumped off Talon’s back, landing on her boots.

The field was silent.

Two hundred wolves lined the walls. Every archer. Every guard. Every officer whose post had been on that battlement since she gave the order to deploy. Their faces were carrying the dawn the way soldiers carry dawns after battles they expected to lose, with the stunned, fragile disbelief of people whose survival had been uncertain eight hours ago and whose uncertainty had been replaced by a woman whose name they were still learning.

Aevamorra Vyracarum’s dragons filled the field behind her. One hundred of them, wings folded, scales gleaming, riders still mounted, each one carrying the posture of a military force whose deployment had been requested by a girl with a bow and whose deployment had been commanded by their queen and whose deployment had ended with zero losses on either side.

Serena’s eyes found the Queen of Aevamorra Vyracarum, who was standing at the field’s edge.

Their eyes met across the field. The queen’s chin lifted by a fraction. The fraction was approval. The fraction was also amusement, which was a combination the queen deployed rarely and aimed carefully.

"I gave you one hundred dragons," she stated. "You needed four."

Serena’s mouth curved. Small. Exhausted. The smile that showed up when her body was empty and her chest was full and the two were competing for which one would determine the expression on her face.