Chapter 3 The Prince Who Hid Me

The word execution had not finished echoing before the prince moved.

He hauled me off the floor by the arm, not gently, and put his body between me and the kneeling guard. "She's mine to deliver," he said. "I caught her. I'll bring her to my father myself, when I'm ready, and not before."

The guard rose. "The order was clear, Your Highness."

"And I outrank the order." Heat rolled off him in a wave that made the air ripple. "Unless you'd like to explain to the King why you put your hands on his heir's prisoner. Go back to the palace. Tell him she'll be there when I say she will."

The guard hesitated. That hesitation was the only thing that saved my life, and I watched it happen and filed it away. Even the King's men were afraid of the King's son.

Then the prince was pulling me out a side door, fast, through corridors that twisted up into the towers where the heat grew thick and the windows looked out onto open black sky. My bare wrists ached where the chains had been. Silver light still pulsed faintly under the mark, fading like a held breath let out slowly.

He shoved me through a heavy door and bolted it behind us.

His rooms. They had to be. A wide cold space of dark stone and red glass, a bed against the far wall, a hearth burning low, weapons mounted in a neat line that told me he cleaned them himself. No clutter. No softness. A room that belonged to someone who had been taught not to want things.

"Sit," he said.

I did not sit. I put my back to the wall and kept the door in my sight, the way my father taught me before he stopped teaching me anything at all.

"You just told a royal guard you'd hand me over for execution," I said. "And then you locked us both in a room. Pick one."

"Quiet." He paced once and turned. "Do you have any idea what you did down there? Every dragon in this academy felt it. By morning my father will have a dozen reports saying the trial stone burned silver. Silver, when there is nothing left alive that can make it burn that color. Nothing except you."

"I didn't ask for it."

"That doesn't matter." He stopped in front of me. "What you are, what your blood is, the people who carried it tried to take this kingdom apart. I was raised on the stories. Moonfire heirs burn whole cities. They turn loyal men against their kings. They are the reason my father sleeps with a guard outside his door. And now there's one standing in my room with my own chains melted off her wrists."

"So why am I not dead?" My voice came out steadier than I felt. "You could have let the guard take me. You could have done it yourself. Your family murdered mine in their beds twenty years ago. Why are you protecting me?"

He had no answer. I watched him not have one. It frightened him more than the silver fire had.

"You have one night," he said finally. "Until dawn. You prove to me you're not what the stories say, that you can't do what they did, and maybe I find a way to keep you breathing. If you can't, I deliver you myself and I don't lose a minute of sleep over it. Understand?"

"And how am I supposed to prove a thing I don't even understand?"

"Show me the mark."

"No."

"Show me the mark." He reached out and took my wrist before I could pull away, and turned it to the light the same as he had in the hall.

This time something different happened.

The instant his fingers closed over the silver tracery, it answered. Not slowly. All at once, a bright cold flare that ran up my arm and leapt the gap into him, and he did not let go, he could not, I saw his hand lock against my skin as if some current had seized us both. Silver fire poured out from where we touched and wound around our joined hands, up his forearm, up mine, a living rope of light that bound us together and pulled.

I felt it pull. That was the part I had no word for. Something deep behind my ribs that I had carried sealed and silent my whole life suddenly turned over and reached for him, recognized him, the way the stone had recognized my blood. Mine, it said, in a voice that was not language. Mine.

His breath had gone ragged. The pale gold of his eyes had blown wide and dark.

"No," he said. His voice cracked on it. "No. That's not. That can't be what that is."

"What is it?" I was shaking again. The fire did not hurt. That was the unbearable thing. It felt like coming in out of the snow. "Kael. What is it."

He flinched at his own name in my mouth like I had struck him.

The fire sank back. He let go and staggered a step away and stood with his marked hand pressed flat against his chest, staring at me with something that was not fear of the Moonfire anymore. It was older than that. It was worse.

"A bond," he said. "A mate bond. The thing dragons spend their whole lives waiting for and most never find." He laughed once, low and without any humor in it at all. "My father killed your entire bloodline. And the one heir who survived, the one girl in the world I am sworn to destroy, is the one the fire chose for me."

The hearth popped. Wind dragged at the red glass windows. Somewhere far below us in the academy, boots were moving again, and voices, and the heavy grind of the main gate opening to let riders out into the dark, toward the palace, carrying their reports.

He heard them too. He crossed to the door and listened, one hand braced on the bolt, his back to me, and when he turned around again something in his face had settled. Decided. He looked at the door, and then he looked at me, and the cold prince was gone and in his place was a young man who had just thrown away the only future he had ever been allowed to have.

"If my father finds you, he will kill you," he said. "So from this moment, you stay with me."