Eithne indicated a small hourglass by the bed. “Small sips of water, just as you said.”
“Maybe a little more from now on. You’ll be even more dehydrated now,” Nuala said to Kett, then turned to her husband. “Lift her up so I can change the sheets.”
“For gods’ sakes, Nuala, I’m fine,” Kett said, but her father picked her up anyway, as if she weighed absolutely nothing. Kett considered what she’d had to eat and drink in the last five days and figured that was probably about right.
“I can stand,” she said.
“No, you can’t,” said Tyrnan. “I haven’t seen you this bad since you came back to life.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t look so hot then either,” Kett snapped. She attempted to fold her arms, which didn’t go very well. Her right shoulder was heavily bandaged. “Look, at the risk of asking a very trite question, how the hell did I get here?”
Her father smiled, although it was too tense to be convincing. “A dragon dropped you off in the garden,” he said. “Quite literally. You and Jarven. Who, incidentally, is in even worse shape than you are.”
Kett opened her mouth then closed it again. The smoke. The fire. Gods, had that actually been real? “Jarven? But-I was in Asiatica. With…Bael.”
Come to think of it, where the hell was Bael?
“Well, now you’re here. With Jarven. And both of you look like you’ve been set on fire.”
Fire.
Fear gripped her. “Is he-will he be okay?”
“Eventually,” Nuala said. “But I wouldn’t advise any dragon training for either of you for a while.”
Bed made-who knew her princess stepmother could do something so menial?-Kett was allowed to lie down again. “And Bael?” she asked.
Her parents and sister looked at each other. Cold dread spread through Kett’s body.
“We haven’t seen him, sweetheart,” Nuala said.
I’m staying here.
“Kett, what happened?” Tyrnan asked, and she closed her eyes, images of fire and smoke and strange pictograms dancing across her vision.
She’d been nearly dead from starvation, dehydration, infection, blood loss…
And yet she was still alive, and as healthy as if she’d had weeks of medical care.
“I have no idea,” she said honestly.
Two days later, close to fully healed but no closer to figuring out what her increasingly vivid dreams meant, so bored she contemplated going down to the gryphon paddocks and picking a fight just to see what would happen, Kett woke in an armchair in one of Nuala’s many drawing rooms. A fire flickered in the grate and someone had covered her with a blanket, but she was stiff from sleeping curled up and when she stretched, she hurt everywhere.
She’d been feeling better, much better than she ought to given only two days of rest. Nuala was so confused she’d even called Striker to see if he’d had a hand in Kett’s healing, but he denied all knowledge of it.
He was fairly interested in the fire at the dragon ranch, however. “Sounds like nice work,” he’d said, and laughed when Kett swore a blue streak at him.
She sat up straighter and ran her hand through her hair.
“Good morning,” her father said, and Kett looked at the clock in mild alarm.
Then she caught the sarcasm in his voice, realized it was past midnight and said, “Hah.”
It came out as a croak. Tyrnan grinned and went back to his newspaper.
Kett cleared her throat. “What are you still doing up?”
He shrugged. “I’m reading a very interesting editorial about the king’s views on immigration.”
Kett stared at him.
“Well, I could be,” he said defensively.
“Alternately, you could just ask him,” she said. “Him being your best friend and all.”
“That was the conclusion I came to,” Tyrnan said, and Kett peered closer to see he was reading the sports pages.
She smiled and rearranged her blanket, then looked up and realized her father was watching her.
“You looked cold,” he said, dropping his gaze. “And I remember when you got here, you were frozen solid. Nuala thought you were going to have frostbite. She thought you might lose your fingers.”
“I could always grow some more,” said Kett, wondering what, exactly, would happen to a shapeshifter who lost a limb or two.
“But someone had already patched you up.”
Just stay alive, sweetheart, just stay alive. “Yeah. Well.” She tugged at a fold of the blanket. “I don’t exactly remember.”
Tyrnan sighed. “You don’t remember, Jarven hasn’t regained consciousness long enough to be coherent-Kett, what the hell is going on? What happened in the mountains?”
Fire. Death. Pain.
And Bael is still there and if he hasn’t contacted anyone by now he’s probably dead.
And if he is dead, I don’t know whether I should cry or cheer because he ordered me to be locked up and starved and said he wanted to kill me.
Her father was watching her. She gave a shrug. “I really ain’t got a clue.”
Tyrnan gave her a shrewd look. “Did it happen in the mountains?”
“Is it any of your business?”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“Because I’m your father, and I’ve seen you die once and I don’t want to do it again.”
“Fine, then I’ll die somewhere else next time.”
She glared at him, but he didn’t even have the grace to glare back. “Kett-” he began, then stopped. He rubbed his face, looking older than Kett remembered, and said, “I saw Lya earlier. She looked at those symbols you copied down from the cave. She says they’re kelfish pictograms but they don’t make sense. Like random words thrown together.”
Kett frowned. “I know I copied ’em down right. And…” She hesitated, unsure how much to tell him when she wasn’t very sure how much she’d imagined in the first place. And I saw them crawling all over Bael’s naked body in my dreams didn’t sound like the musings of a sane person.
“Chance called me while you were asleep,” her father said. “She said Bael had contacted her a couple days ago, said he knew some mage or wizard who was conducting a ritual involving a Nasc and a shapeshifter, and he wanted to warn Dark and as many other Nasc as he could.”
“Kind of him,” Kett said. The scarred man. Bael’s eagerness to destroy the shapeshifter. Fire, dragons, blood, smoke. Her brain felt like soup. How much had she imagined?
A Nasc and a shapeshifter, strung up together in a cave. Symbols, fire, angry words and broken rituals.
How much had Bael been involved with his mentor’s plans?
“Kett,” Tyrnan began then stopped again, chewing his lip. “Was it the mage who did this to you?”
“Hah,” Kett said again, curling down farther under her blanket. “You could say that.”
“Could you?”
He was giving her that shrewd look again, and Kett wondered exactly when he’d started to give a crap about who did what to her.
“Look,” she said. Not that she cared about this, but she needed to change the subject. “Bael told me his mother was killed by a kelf. He said he’d been told this all his life. But then I heard his-his-” Her mouth twisted at the memory of Albhar, and she swallowed. “Then he was told it was a shapeshifter who’d killed her. Now, I reckon that was just a ploy to get him to bring me in, but-”
“He didn’t know you were a shapeshifter,” Tyrnan finished. “Did you kill his mother?”
“No! I’d never even met any Nasc before Chance brought Dark home.”
“But I don’t reckon it was a kelf, either,” Tyrnan said. “Only kelf who ever killed a human was Lya, and that was her old master.”
“Bael’s mother wasn’t human and- Wait a second.” Something was tapping on her brain, trying to get her attention. “Lya killed her old master?”