Page 47 of Dragon Cursed
He launched.
12
Poppy
The launch wasa pull in her stomach as the world dropped away.Alsander’s dragon wings beat once, twice — and she marveled at the dragon’s strength, his power.
She was in the air.Flying.On adragon.
She screamed and laughed and whooped in pure joy as the clearing dropped away.
The sound of the raging waterfall became a distant thunder or gentle rain.
The forest merged into an endless undulation of green.His wings caught a current of air she couldn’t see and they rose.They soared above it all.
She wasn’t cold.
That was the strangest part.The wind should have been cutting through her cloak and sweater into her bones.It wasn’t.She could feel the wind on her face.She could see her hair stream out behind her in his slipstream.But the cold of it was somewhere else — somewhere beyond the warm tether he had wrapped around her body.The warmth washim.The warmth was his magic.
She sat in the cradle of it on the back of a dragon at the break of dawn and she couldn’t breathe for the wonder of it.
She didn’t have to hold on.
She tried, once, to grip the ridge of his shoulder.The magic loosened the moment she did, as if the dragon had felt her uncertainty and answered it.She let go.The magic settled tighter around her.
She put her hands flat against the warm scales in front of her — not for grip, but for the joy of touching him — and she felt the great slow drum of the dragon's heart through the bone.
"Oh, you," she whispered."Oh, you beautiful, gorgeous dragon."
He banked.
The world tilted.The forest tilted with it.The sea came into view at the edge of the world.She saw Cuanfirth like a string of small lit beads along the curve of the bay.The harbor.The lighthouse.The cottages of women she had known her whole life, as small as toys below her, sleeping under their thatched roofs with no idea that the sky above them held adragon.
She laughed again, unable to contain herself.
It came out of her without warning.A great, helpless sound that the wind took and shredded and threw out behind her.She laughed again.Then she was crying and laughing at the same time.Her face streaked with tears.Her hands flat against his warm scales.The wind in her hair.
This was what she had been waiting for.To be on the back of the last dragon.To be the woman the line had been making for three hundred years.
To be doing the thing she had beenmadeto do.
"I love you," she said into the wind.
She had only said it once before — on the floor of his lair, with his shoulders shaking against her in a way that had nothing to do with pleasure.She hadn’t been sure he heard her.
She said it again now, far above the forest, far above the cares of the world below, with the wind taking the words almost before they left her mouth.
He couldn’t have heard her.He couldn’t have.
The dragon's great head turned.Just a fraction.Just enough that one slitted golden eye caught her at his shoulder and held her there for one long beat of his wings.
He had heard her.
Both times.
"Oh."Her hand pressed flat to his scales."Oh, you cheating thing.You heard me."
The dragon made a sound she felt rather than heard — a deep contented rumble that rolled up through his bones and into hers.
