Chapter 48: WHAT HAPPENED TO HER?

RAIGORO’S POV

Raigoro received Daric’s message before the last battlefield dead had been identified and remained at the western line.

Vharos had stood for the Duchess.

The sentence stayed in his head while he reviewed casualty lists, approved the movement of wounded soldiers, and waited for scouts to account for the last two missing men.

One was found alive beneath a collapsed timber barrier.

The other was found dead after sunset.

Raigoro added the name to the confirmed list himself.

Only after Captain Arven had full command of the stabilized western sector, the engineers had enough material to hold the damaged line, and the wounded were moving safely toward Blackharrow did Raigoro turn home.

The return column reached the Citadel the next afternoon.

The company banners returned with the column, though two were torn and one was being carried beside a medical wagon instead of at the head of its unit.

The wounded traveled in the center.

Families had already begun gathering above the lower gate.

Tavia stood farther down the court beside the territorial quartermaster, checking returning wagon numbers against the transport ledger. Several of the teams she had sent out the previous day were still on the road with wounded soldiers.

Raigoro heard names being called as medical wagons entered the courtyard.

His wife stood beneath one of the covered walks beside Alma, Mistress Hale, and a household clerk holding the updated casualty list.

She found him in the returning column, then turned back to the wounded when another medical wagon entered the court.

Raigoro disliked that he had noticed the order.

A wounded soldier raised one arm toward his family.

A woman broke from the waiting line before the guard could stop her.

Nobody bothered trying a second time.

Raigoro dismounted.

He went first to the returning-unit reports, wounded allocation, casualty lists, missing equipment, and Dragon Host injuries.

His wife could wait until the men he had taken north were accounted for.

By the time Raigoro crossed the Citadel to the northern secured route and reached Vharos’s cavern gate, the bells had marked another hour.

Master Clair met him at the secured gate.

"How is he?"

"Exhausted."

"Eating?"

"Some."

"Pain?"

"Higher after standing. Lower this morning."

"Healer Lou checked him at dawn."

Raigoro looked toward the descent. "And the Duchess?"

"Physically fine," Master Clair said.

That was not what Raigoro had asked.

He let the man continue.

"She remembered something."

"What?"

"I don’t know. She recognized Vharos’s wing scar."

Raigoro stopped. "Recognized?"

"She said she had seen a scar like it before. Then the memory reaction began."

Master Clair gave him the sequence plainly. His wife had recognized an old scar on Vharos’s wing. The memory reaction followed. Vharos stood despite his weakness and placed himself between her and the approaching guards before settling again when she calmed.

Raigoro listened without interrupting.

"What did Vharos feel like through the bond?" Master Clair asked.

Raigoro looked toward the cavern.

The bond had given Raigoro nothing that fit neatly into a report. Recognition had been the clearest part of the surge, followed by grief, relief, and a protectiveness he had not felt from Vharos in years.

None of them supplied a name.

Dragons did not think in legal records. "He knew her."

Master Clair nodded. "That was our conclusion too."

Raigoro entered the cavern. Vharos lay where the keepers had arranged fresh bedding around him.

The old dragon opened one eye as Raigoro approached.

Their bond remained weak compared with the years before the illness, but yesterday’s emotional imprint had not disappeared.

Raigoro touched the scales beside Vharos’s jaw. "You know something I don’t."

Vharos breathed against his arm.

Unhelpful as ever.

Raigoro stayed until Master Clair reminded him the dragon needed rest.

He returned through the secured northern passages toward the Inner Keep.

His wife was in her writing room when he found her.

The guards announced him.

He waited.

The door opened.

Alma stood inside and his wife sat near the window with a slate on the table.

She looked tired.

Raigoro remained standing until she indicated the opposite chair.

Then he sat.

Alma stayed and Raigoro did not ask her to leave.

"This concerns Vharos."

The chalk stopped above her slate.

"I spoke to the keepers."

She nodded.

"They said you recognized his scar."

Another nod.

"From the dragon you encountered before Blackharrow?"

Her chalk touched the slate. YES.

Raigoro read the answer. "Did you remember where?"

The chalk remained still.

She lowered the slate without answering.

Raigoro could press the point with what she had already admitted about the chained dragon and every contradiction Odran had created. It still would not make a broken childhood memory clearer.

Raigoro changed the question. "Did the memory make sense to you?"

She looked up.

Then wrote: PARTS.

"What parts?"

Her hand hesitated again.

She wrote: THE WING.

Then: FIRE.

A longer pause.

CHAINS.

Raigoro read them.

They were the same fragments she had given him before, except now Raigoro knew Vharos belonged somewhere inside them.

She erased the slate.

She wrote each fragment carefully, the same way she had when he questioned her about her voice.

Whatever she was withholding, calculation no longer explained all of it.

"Vharos recognized you."

She looked at him.

"I don’t know why."

She wrote: NEITHER DO I.

Her uncertainty matched Master Clair’s account and what Raigoro had felt through Vharos.

He accepted the answer.

His wife continued withholding information, and Odran’s deception remained unresolved. Vharos’s recognition placed part of her hidden history years before their marriage, however.

Raigoro could no longer treat every missing answer as part of a deception that began beneath Selena’s wedding veil.

Raigoro stood.

She looked immediately wary.

He stopped. "I am not asking again tonight."

She set the chalk down, though she continued watching him.

He left her rooms, crossed the controlled passage to Command Terrace, and found Daric in the Command Archive.

Daric had already prepared the historical dragon-search report.

It was thin. "No official movement record places Vharos in Valence," Daric said.

"Does the record account for every period of his life?"

"No."

"Then that proves nothing."

"I know."

Daric opened the first file. "Dragon Host movement logs from the relevant years contain no authorized diplomatic deployment to Valence. There are also no ordinary military records of Vharos crossing the Southern Crown."

"Ordinary."

"Yes."

Daric moved to the next page. "If a dragon had been secretly transported, held, diverted, or moved outside formal Host orders, the standard ledger would not necessarily show it."

"Witnesses?"

"Mostly unavailable. A former clerk remembers rumors of restricted work beneath the Valence palace, but he never saw a dragon and cannot identify who told him."

"Not enough."

"No."

"What about the transferred embassy collection?"

"Possibly in Merovia. The provincial archive confirmed old Blackharrow boxes exist. They have not confirmed contents or condition."

"Timeline?"

"They refuse to guess."

Reasonable, and irritating.

Daric closed the file. "So we have Vharos recognizing your wife and no official record placing him anywhere near her."

"Yes."

"That is considerably more interesting than helpful."

Paper still could not tell Raigoro who his wife was.

Vharos had established something the records had not. Whatever history she was hiding had begun years before Odran put her beneath Selena’s veil.

Raigoro remembered the damaged royal-household pages Daric had shown him when the Muster began. The end of Queen Elara’s reign was already one of the places where Blackharrow knew its record failed.

"Change the search."

Daric looked at him. "To what?"

"Start with Queen Elara’s final years."

Daric waited.

Raigoro continued. "Find everything unusual inside Valence around the period she died. Royal illnesses. Restricted palace construction. Missing staff. Closed corridors. Diplomatic personnel transferred without explanation."

"Dragon reports."

"Yes."

"Anything connected to Vharos?"

"Anything people had reason not to record plainly."

Daric looked toward the already crowded archive table. "That is wider than the last search."

"Yes."

"And less likely to be indexed correctly."

"Yes."

Daric sighed. "At least you remain consistent."

Raigoro looked toward the door.

Daric asked, "What exactly are we trying to prove now?"

Raigoro thought of his wife in the cavern, frightened by a memory Vharos appeared to share.

"When I married her, I wanted to know how she was part of Odran’s deception."

Daric waited.

"Now I want to know what happened to her before Odran ever gave her to me."