"Why are there two mattresses?"

Meya paused with one foot into her and Coris's shared tent. Coris nudged her in the rest of the way with a featherlight finger on her forearm, then turned towards the hay-stuffed mattress on the right.

"I'm not fit to lie by your side. I never have been." He rested his behind upon it, sighing in its place. His silvery eyes flicked to answer her puzzled gaze briefly, before he dipped his head in shame,

"That didn't stop me taking advantage of your trust, time and again."

Meya blinked, surprised and somewhat miffed, which in turn surprised her again. On one hand, she was satisfied that he was sensible enough to know he had been scratched off her good books. But on the other, he seemed to have given up on winning her back even before he had tried. And that all-too-familiar resignation rankled her. Wasn't he in the least inclined to right his wrongs? To better himself?

And Zier was saying he loved her? What dung.

"It's not entirely your fault." She somehow ended up consoling him as she settled down on her separate mattress. She found Coris's raised eyebrows waiting as she looked up, and shrugged, "I sort of pressured you into it. We should have taken more time to get to know each other."

Coris's lips tightened in distaste as he averted his eyes; he despised it when she justified his sins, as she often did out of sheer habit. Then, he hitched up a slight smile, glancing up at her with a tilt of his head,

"Does this mean our short-lived contract is back in effect?"

Meya started. Annoyance frothed in her at the sight of his glinting eyes, and she pointedly thrust her chin to the side.

"Yeah. Go shag Agnes. I'll see if I can spare a rat's fart."

Coris chuckled in triumph, having seen through her act as simple petulance. As amusement faded, silence seeped back in. Coris's gaze wandered as he wrung his hands, hesitant, then finally braved a timid proposal,

"Since it's clear we're both attracted to each other nevertheless, what do you say we experiment with courtship?"

Meya's heart gave a leap as she whipped around, then pained at the sight of Coris's fidgeting hands and pursed lips, his wavering eyes doing their best to weather her scrutiny and convey his sincere intentions. He had not surrendered, after all, and her anger subsided. Still, some kinks needed to be ironed out before they could proceed.

"Could we call it a courtship if our parents don't even know about it? And we have no clue if we could ever wed?"

Coris bit down on his lip, his eyes sealed in anguished defeat. Meya sighed and leaned forth, hands draped over her folded knees.

"Do you see us getting married and having a babe, Coris?" She voiced her long overdue demands, her voice gentle even as she tested him, "What exactly is it that you want out of our affair?"

"What I want, I could never have." Coris's reply was instant and bitter, but unrevealing. He was cautious as ever when it came to voicing his true desires. He met her eyes, and tenderness replaced cynicism as he continued in a whisper,

"What I could have is you by my side, in whatever capacity. That I already do, and I'm content."

"Well, I'm not."

Coris froze, fear now evident in his widened eyes. Meya told herself to be staid.

"I can't have you dying on me again, Coris." She shook her head, her voice breaking as a flash of his seemingly lifeless, broken form flitted by her eyes. "You have your duty as a Hadrian. Your betrothed. Your shortened life. Your prodigal brother. You have valid reasons why we couldn't marry. And I can take all those, but this?"

She produced a vial of laudanum from her pocket and rattled it before him; Coris was to take dwindling amounts of laudanum daily to ease withdrawal and assist with his recovery, and she was in charge of it. For a long, excruciating moment they stared. She could see relief in his eyes as he realized the true cause of her reluctance, and she doubled down to make sure her message got through his haze of delight,

"You could die for anything, anyone. Just not for nothing." She spat as she thrust the hated phial under her pillow, whirling back to glare right into his eyes.

"I want a man who would try to live until he really couldn't, who wouldn't leave me unless he really had to. And who also wouldn't go behind my back in every—single—thing!" She hammered out, each word heralded by a forceful thump on the mattress, then jabbed a shivering finger towards the pale, rigid, enduring young man,

"I told you that day—no more lies, no more secrets! I need to be able to trust you!"

The nervous air rang with her outburst. Meya's outstretched arm dropped lifelessly to her lap, yet her eyes clung on to Coris's, her whisper hoarse and choked with tears,

"And if that's more than you're willing to commit, then perhaps we are never meant to be. No matter how strong our feelings are."

Their stare lingered. Despite her foreboding proclamation, Coris's resolve only seemed to solidify as the seconds wore on, and Meya's heart was bolstered at the sight. He was no longer the dying boy of that night that she must convince to fight; he was beginning to live once more.

"I understand. All I ask is permission to prove myself worthy." He accepted her conditions, his voice solemn as his piercing gaze. Meya struggled to keep her lips from curving up in pride as she nodded and gave her cavalier reply,

"And you shall have it."

Coris cracked a smile so meltingly warm that Meya had to avert her eyes lest her cheeks grew hot enough the pink began to blossom on them. The young lord shifted on his mattress as he clasped his hands together, asking with replenished optimism,

"So, what are the rules?"

"Standard courting practices. Sex is off the table. So is kissing. Holding hands and hugging permitted for emotional situations only."

"No sex? Are you sure?" Coris's grin became devious. Meya glowered.

"Dead sure."

Coris cocked his head to and fro in seeming compromise.

"Understandable. My impressive manhood would hold great sway over your judgment."

If there were a furnace inside her, Meya would have burst into flames and blasted the unrepentant donghead to a cloud of sooty smithereens. As it happened, she cracked an ear-to-ear smile lined with grinding teeth as her words hissed out of her mouth like tongues of flame,

"I'm more concerned for you, actually. Until I deem you trustworthy, you're not getting a taste of these—" She jabbed two thumbs at her proudest possessions. Coris sealed her lips just in time with a friendly tap of his finger.

"—We're still courting. We shouldn't be discussing our sexual attributes so soon."

Growling, Meya batted his spider-like digit aside,

"You started it, donghead!"

Their eyes met. Their hands caressed. Their lips parted in unuttered words. In that frozen split-second, all seemed forgotten but pure, mad lust.

After a charged, ominous moment, the young lovers tore their welded gaze apart with great effort. Panting at the close shave as her pulse pounded in her ears, Meya confessed with a sigh,

"Wish Arinel were here."

"Wonder if Zier would chaperone." Coris muttered in agreement. Meya cast her eyes about the spartan tent, hoping for a new form of distraction, as banter seemed to be serving the opposite purpose.

"You brought Heist?" Coris shook his head, "Chess?" His eyes lit up at the suggestion, and Meya hitched up a sly grin, "We could play a match or two. For old times' sake."

"Are you prepared to be annihilated?" Coris unfurled a lopsided smile of scorn.

"Underestimating me already?" Meya thrust him a sneer just as nasty to cover up her shudder. Coris didn't need to know she hadn't touched a pawn since gamble chess nearly landed her a spot in Meriton's Greeneye brothel just last Fest.

"Coris Hadrian does not over- nor underestimate. He simply estimates." The pale prodigy graced her with his statement of what he considered uncontestable truth.

"—And exaggerates." Meya added. A crease of mock ire appeared between Coris's brows.

"How impertinent. I'll make sure to include that in our next vocabulary drill. Along with impertinent."

After taunting Meya's smoking fangs with a smirk of triumph, Coris edged over to his chest of belongings and extracted the folded chessboard.

Perhaps we could pull this off, after all—Meya reassured herself as she watched Coris set up the miniature battlefield with well-acquainted fingers—we could learn to be friends before man and wife.

In typical Freda fashion, they were only five turns in when Coris broke the sacred silence of friendly competition.

"Meya, there's...something I've been keeping from you."

Meya looked up. Remembering Coris's startled glance, that evening he revealed their plans to Simon and Christopher—his horrified gaze, that time she relayed her recollections of the Crosset Famine—she couldn't decide if she should feel betrayed, gratified or delighted, and settled on indifference for the time being.

"I'm aware." She fell back on her propped arms, puffing breath from her slit-like nostrils, her face deadpan save for a raised eyebrow, "Was it singular or plural, again?"

Coris winced at her scathing remark, then bowed his head, ashamed,

"I wasn't even doing it purely for your sake; I was worried that it would derail my plans, should you react like last time and reject your dragon body." He shook his head as he cradled his temple in his palm,

"In the end, I'm no better than those I condemned. I, too, was planning to exploit your powers. Zier's right; I'm the monster, not you."

Meya narrowed her eyes, fear gripping her at that ominous preamble. What horrors about her dragon nature had he kept from her now? Surely nothing could be worse than learning you were a dragon, could it?

"Old habits are hard to shake, I guess. At least you're taking a step forward." She eked out a witty retort, topping it with a shrug she hoped was nonchalant as can be, yet her voice trembled as she challenged,

"Is this why you brought those five Greeneyes? To use as backup in case I won't fly you to Everglen?"

Coris blinked, aghast and hurt, then hung his head and shook it again,

"No, I've just realized this after we left Hadrian. It's still a theory. I don't have proof yet."

He looked back up at her, his voice stronger now and his gaze willful,

"But, regardless of whether I would turn out right or not, know this: it is not your fault."

As silence drifted down between them, freezing fear permeated every inch of Meya, such that if Coris would touch her then, she reckoned she would have felt cold to him even without her Lattis. Shivering from the phantom chill, she willed up every last ounce of courage for her numb lips to thaw,

"Tell me, Coris."

Coris sagged under the weight of the truth, as if it had duplicated in anticipation of being divulged to a second soul. His head bowed over the abandoned chess match, his voice was no louder than a trick of the wintry gale whistling through gaps in wattle and daub.

"Meya, I—I think you may have actually brought about the Crosset Famine."

⏳

For a moment, there was no sound but that of the night wind pummeling the walls of their tent. The leather rippled at the peripherals of her eyes, like the gleams in Coris's eyes.

Meya had heard this statement before. Countless times. She had never contested it, yet she also had never once believed in it. And she would have done the same this time had it not been uttered by him. The man who had just urged her kind to rise above the predujice hammered into their heads their whole lives.

"What makes you think that?" She challenged, soft and level. It was as if she still held out hope that there would be a pitfall in his theory. Coris squeezed his joined hands, his eyes roaming the bare gravel at their feet.

"You said that the crop failings in Crosset began after you were flogged at the town square. From what I've heard of the Famine, the phenomenon was limited to Crosset. Neighboring manors had regular harvests and reported nothing of the sort."

Church bells were ringing in her head, but the connection was still out of reach. Shrouded by her soul's last attempt, perhaps, to preserve her sanity. Yet, Coris did not relent.

"My theories are; One, in a moment of vengeful rage, you may have wished for Crosset's demise. Or two, your battered body may have reacted to your fear of death, tried to heal your grievous injuries, and overcompensated."

Meya started. Was it the tent flapping? It sounded like the clap of the whip when it broke through her dress and split her flesh. Heavy chains with links thicker than her thumb erupted in jingling giggles as she fell facefirst onto the stake it was coiled around, clinging for balance. She ground her teeth over the bridle's bit. She didn't know if the metallic taste was from the rusty bit or from the blood oozing out of her tongue or both. The whip came down again. Again. The once sharp claps now had a waterlogged, slippery ring to them.

She wrenched her eyes open against the pain and looked up. Lord Crosset. Spiteful old man with empty eyes like ice-chips. His three daughters all had them, too, and she loathed them all. All around her the crowd jeered. They flung brown mud at her, and it slid off her red. Somewhere, she heard Mum scream and sob for mercy, for restraint, for the chance to take the blows in her place.

Lord Crosset could always hear Alanna's Song. It was the only thing he chose to listen to. It was that realization that sent rage roiling inside her like she had never felt before.

If I'm getting the whip and the bridle anyway, she thought, I might as well have earned them.

Icy fingers on her numb arms pulled Meya back to the present. She blinked and saw Coris hovering over her. That was when she realized her elbows had buckled from the force of the truth, and she was hanging halfway on her back.

Coris was pale with worry. Avoiding his gaze, she picked herself upright and warded off his fretting hands.

"Go on."

After a wary pause, Coris nodded in defeat, but settled down by her side on the mattress, nevertheless.

"In any case, with your dragon ability to absorb nutrients from the earth, you absorbed all nutrients in Crosset's soil into yourself." He continued with a sigh, "That would explain why you were fully armored when you transformed, that night you rescued me. Even when you were fed human proportions of food all your life, and had weathered months of starvation."

Coris glanced around and met her eyes. He remained silent. He didn't seem inclined to ask which it had been—vengeance or fear, and Meya turned away in relief. She couldn't bear to see his disgust and disapproval as well. Not when she was already disgusted enough with herself.

She longed to crawl out of her skin and inhibit anyone else, anything else. Fyre, even a rat might be preferable. A rat never killed a hundred of its kin out of sheer spite. There was no taking back what she had done. There was no redemption. Even death was not enough to escape this sin. Their blood would follow her to Fyre's Lake and she would sink to its bowels. And she deserved it.

"Like I said, it's still just a theory, and none of this is your fault, Meya."

Coris's voice echoed in her delirium, like a ripple on the face of the tarlike water. She struggled to believe it. She knew she should believe it. But she also didn't want to believe it.

"You were a child. You didn't know better. You were treated unjustly. You were in unimaginable pain. You were never taught about your powers—let alone to control them. You were scared and angry, and no-one could blame you for that. Not even Fyre himself!"

Coris shook her arm, desperate at the sight of her listlessness.

"But now that you've grown and we know better, we must make sure this would never happen again. As I've said, your only duty is to learn to control it."

Silence fell as Coris exhausted his well of words. As the heat of his gaze intensified, Meya succumbed to a nod. Her eyes remained lost as she remembered the insults the villagers had hurled at her, six years on, that day as she dangled from the Ice Pillory. A smile stretched her lips.

"Well, guess that's one thing the folks back home got right all along, huh." She remarked with a chuckle, doubling down with a shrug even as she felt Coris's glare of disapproval, "I mean, I wouldn't want a hundred deaths on my hands if I could help it, but now that I know for sure that it wasn't Freda's damnation, that I wasn't wrong for working in the fields, the truth did set me free, sort of. Only to stab me in the back out of spite. Typical Freda."

"It's not—your—fault, Meya!" Coris hammered down each word, then turned away and tore at his hair in frustration, "Oh, Fyre."

Meya could guess what he was thinking, and she tugged on his sleeve to stop him. Still, she didn't know if she regretted hearing the truth—if she would hear it again if she had the choice to go back.

Guilt was too terrible to bear. Hope was nowhere in sight. And Meya dealt with her turmoil in the one way she knew best—sarcasm.

"So, looks like I could wipe out a whole town with sheer willpower." She chuckled, then cocked her head as she mused, "That's going on the list next to lizard limbs and relieving men of their manhoods."

Coris let loose a string of swears. Meya had never heard him curse this long, yet it seemed she had lost the capacity for surprise, numbed by the hatred she felt for herself. Suddenly, his arms bound her, tugging her into his embrace. She fought and strained back as she felt she had begun to thaw at the cold of his bony chest.

"I don't think—this counts—as an emotional situation." She grunted as she pulled and wriggled, but for once, Coris trumped her with masculine strength. Burying his face into her shoulder, he whispered through gritted teeth,

"You forgave all of us." He tightened his embrace as she continued to resist, "Now forgive yourself."

At his command, Meya let go. Overwhelmed by her tide of anguish and grief, the young couple couldn't hear the quiet sobs leaking from the women's tents. Nor the crunching footsteps of sleepless Greeneyes as they slunk away to the privacy of solid darkness. Throughout the night, for the first time in millennia, the desolate plains of Caesonai echoed with the song of dragons.