Chapter 49: DO YOU KNOW HIM?

DIANA’S POV

Diana had expected Vharos to occupy her dreams.

He occupied breakfast instead.

She had barely finished spreading frostberry preserve across a piece of bread when a Dragonkeeper arrived at her apartment. Alma looked at the man, then at Diana. Neither asked whether the visit concerned the black dragon beneath the Citadel.

There were some conclusions even Master Clair would probably allow without three repeated tests.

The Dragonkeeper bowed. "Your Grace. Master Clair requests your presence at Vharos’s cavern."

Diana set down the knife.

Alma asked, "Is Vharos worse?"

"He refused his morning food."

Diana reached for her slate.

The man corrected himself before she could write. "He accepted part of his feeding yesterday. He refused the remainder and has refused everything offered since dawn."

Better.

Master Clair’s habits were spreading.

Diana dressed for the lower cavern in the plain charcoal wool she used for household work and took her slate. The dragonstone remained beneath her collar, as though it had appointed itself to every dragon-related problem without consulting anyone.

Raigoro was already at the secured gate when she arrived with Alma.

He stood beside Master Clair and Senior Dragon Healer Sera Lou. Healer Lou held a narrow chart in one hand.

"Temperature unchanged," she said. "No new abdominal tenderness. Breathing is slightly faster than yesterday morning, though still better than after he stood."

"Pain?" Raigoro asked.

"Present. Not enough change for me to call it significantly worse."

Master Clair acknowledged her arrival.

"Your Grace."

No praise for arriving. Simply acknowledgement.

Diana preferred that.

The gate opened.

Vharos lay on the broad stone shelf where Diana had left him. Even while still, he occupied enough of the cavern to make everyone else look temporary.

One black wing rested partly unfolded beside him.

The scar across it caught Diana first.

Her feet stopped at the marked line without instruction.

Memory stirred behind her eyes.

"Remain there for now."

Diana nodded.

Vharos opened one eye.

His head shifted toward her.

The dragonstone warmed beneath her collar.

Diana kept her hand away from it.

Vharos neither roared nor attempted to rise. His breathing changed slightly, although Diana could not tell whether it had actually improved or whether she had begun wanting every change to mean something.

Master Clair lifted one hand before anyone approached the dragon. A younger keeper checked a sand timer while Healer Lou watched Vharos’s chest.

After several breaths Clair asked, "Rate?"

Healer Lou gave him the count.

"Lower," she added.

Only then did Clair look toward Diana.

"His breathing slowed after you entered, and the movement in his foreclaw stopped."

Diana lifted her slate.

HE IS CALMER.

Master Clair read it.

"Perhaps. What you can record is that his breathing slowed and the foreclaw stopped moving."

He had used considerably more words to avoid saying calmer. Diana erased the sentence anyway.

Healer Lou approached once Master Clair confirmed that Vharos remained stable enough for examination. Two keepers watched his head and near foreleg while she checked his mouth, eyes, and the painful area beneath his ribs.

Vharos tolerated the examination with the expression of a creature who had decided murder required more energy than he currently possessed.

Diana understood the principle.

When the healer finished, she withdrew before speaking.

"I want food in him."

Master Clair signaled one of the keepers. A shallow tray came forward containing warm meat cut into smaller pieces.

Vharos smelled the food, then turned his head toward Diana.

Diana immediately disliked that everyone else noticed.

Everyone waited.

The old dragon finally took one piece, chewed slowly, then took another.

Alma leaned closer to Diana. "Apparently you have acquired breakfast duties."

Diana turned her head.

Alma raised both hands. "Observation."

A remarkably quick recovery.

Vharos ate less than half the tray before lowering his head again.

Healer Lou looked at what remained. "I’ll take that over nothing."

Master Clair ordered the exact amount recorded. No one offered more simply because the first attempt had worked.

Raigoro remained until Vharos’s eyes closed again.

Then he turned toward Diana.

"Walk with me."

The phrase had developed an unfortunate history.

Still, he headed toward the upper Dragon Heights rather than an interrogation room, which improved its chances considerably.

Diana followed.

Alma remained far enough behind to give them privacy while staying within sight of Diana’s hands. The Household Guards followed farther back.

They climbed from the secured cavern route into a Dragon Heights passage crossed by winter daylight. Beyond the open arches, the remaining Winter Muster companies were being reassigned or cleared to leave Blackharrow.

A bronze dragon stood on a lower landing while two keepers examined a front harness strap. Farther down, a young red-brown dragon was refusing to cross a patch of melting snow.

Its Dragon Host officer walked across first.

The dragon watched him.

Then carefully stepped around the wet ground.

Diana slowed when the dragon carefully avoided the wet ground.

"He dislikes wet feet," Raigoro said.

Raigoro continued walking as though the information required no explanation.

Apparently, the feared dragons of Blackharrow could be defeated by puddles.

She caught up.

Yesterday, Raigoro had asked what she remembered.

Diana had given him pieces.

WING. FIRE. CHAINS.

He had accepted that the pieces did not yet make a whole.

There was another distinction Diana wanted him to understand.

She took out her slate. I REMEMBER VHAROS.

Then: I DO NOT KNOW HIM.

Raigoro stopped.

Diana added: I DO NOT REMEMBER ENOUGH TO KNOW WHAT HE WAS TO ME.

Raigoro read the three lines.

"Is this something you do not know, or something you are not ready to tell me?"

Diana considered the question.

THIS TIME I DO NOT KNOW.

He waited several seconds.

"All right."

That was all?

Diana looked at him.

In Valence, uncertainty had usually been treated as refusal until Diana produced whatever answer someone else expected. Raigoro had accepted something narrower. She remembered Vharos. She did not yet understand the history between them.

Diana understood that better than reassurance.

They resumed walking.

Below them, the bronze dragon finally allowed the keeper to remove the damaged harness strap.

Vharos, struggling through half a tray of meat, came back to her.

She wrote: WAS HE ALWAYS ILL?

"No."

She waited.

Raigoro understood that one-word answers were rarely enough once she had the slate out.

"His condition worsened over the years. There were periods when he recovered enough to fly normally. Other periods were worse than this one."

Diana looked back toward the mountain beneath them.

DID HE FLY WITH YOU?

"Yes."

IN BATTLE?

"Often."

Raigoro had asked nothing in return.

Diana realized it only after several questions had already passed between them.

Most conversations with him had begun because he wanted something from her: an answer, an explanation, some piece of Odran’s deception she was refusing to surrender. This one had turned the other way. Diana was asking about Vharos, and Raigoro was simply answering.

She did not know what to do with that.

Perhaps this was only what Blackharrow gave its Grand Duchess. The thought cooled the unfamiliar ease almost immediately. Every formal page still called that woman Selena Valence. Even Raigoro, whatever he suspected, was married to her under Selena’s name.

Diana could not tell how much of this new openness belonged to her and how much belonged to the woman everyone believed she was.

She asked another question anyway.

Until now Diana had known Vharos as a sick creature beneath the Citadel, or as fragments from a childhood room she could not fully remember. Hearing that he had once flown into battle with Raigoro gave her something else to imagine.

Those black wings above a battlefield. Raigoro and Vharos together.

A Dragon Warlord and the dragon everyone below the Citadel now discussed in feeding amounts and pain measurements.

She wrote: DOES HE MISS IT?

Raigoro took longer before answering.

"I don’t know."

Raigoro leaned one forearm against the cold stone rail.

"The bond gives me more than most people can receive from a dragon. It does not turn everything Vharos feels into language."

Diana waited.

"I know pain through it. Fear. Anger. Sometimes intention when he feels strongly enough. Sometimes I know what he wants because I have known him long enough to recognize what he is about to do."

He paused.

"Other times he is deliberately unhelpful."

Something in Raigoro’s face changed when he spoke about Vharos. Diana would not have called it softness. Familiarity was closer, the kind built over years of knowing exactly how deliberately unhelpful a dragon could be.

She wrote: WHEN HE STOOD FOR ME, WHAT DID YOU FEEL?

Raigoro became still.

Diana almost erased it.

The battle had barely ended when Vharos tried to stand. Raigoro had been miles away and still felt enough through the bond to know the attempt was happening.

He looked through the arch toward the northern mountains.

"Recognition was the clearest part."

Diana’s fingers tightened around the chalk.

"And grief. Enough protectiveness that I thought he might injure himself trying to remain upright."

Grief stayed with Diana longer.

Recognition told her the broken memory belonged to something real. Grief suggested Vharos remembered enough of it to hurt.

She wanted to ask what he had been grieving for, but Raigoro had already told her the bond did not turn feeling into explanation.

Diana wrote: BECAUSE OF ME?

Raigoro looked at the sentence.

"Because you were there."

She waited for more.

"I don’t know whether those mean the same thing."

Diana had wanted a clearer answer, but Raigoro had already given her the only one he could support.

Raigoro knew Vharos better than anyone she had met, and even he was capable of saying he did not know.

Perhaps that was why Master Clair tolerated him.

Perhaps.

They walked again.

Before they reached the household crossing, Raigoro said, "Master Clair will decide when you return to Vharos."

Diana stopped.

WHY?

"Ask him."

She gave him a look.

"He is responsible for Vharos’s handling and safety."

Infuriating.

Correct.

Diana lowered her slate.

Another question remained.

She wrote:

WILL VHAROS EAT TONIGHT?

Raigoro read it.

"I don’t know."

This time, the answer did not close the conversation. Raigoro had spent most of the walk telling her what he did know and stopping exactly where that knowledge ended.

Diana looked back toward the secured cavern route.

She wanted to see Vharos again tomorrow.

Whether she would was apparently Master Clair’s decision.