Page 2 of FoolSilver
“Now you sound like a bitter old man.” He chuckled. “You should probably get laid more often.”
“I get laid plenty.”
“That’s not what I hear.” His voice dipped into something knowing. “Word is you’ve been driving women out of your bed.”
I wanted to roll off my bedroll, cross the tent, and shatter his jaw. The urge was so vivid, I could almost sense the impact in my knuckles.
He wasn’t wrong.
Even before the Sorting had revealed her true gender, Max Morning had wrecked me. Every woman I’d tried to take to bed since the day she arrived, every attempt to pretend my body still answered to anyone else, had ended in epic failure.
Delia had noticed, and I’d told her it was exhaustion from the outpost deployments. She’d believed me, or pretended to. Either way, I’d stopped calling on her.
I wouldn’t admit my dilemma to anyone, not even to Caspian. He’d stopped bedding his rotating lineup of women the moment he’d carried Max in from the Scorched Wastes.
“Fuck off, wolf,” I grated. Then, before I could stop myself, “And I’m not the one who let a woman get between us.”
The words detonated in the tent.
That was the real wound. Not the sexual frustration, the sleeplessness, or the DarkVeil vibrating menace mere blocks away.
It was the betrayal that cut deep.
All three of them—Aelindor, Nikolai, Caspian—had known Max was a woman from the moment they pulled her out of the wasteland.
They’d looked at me across briefing tables and war room maps, knowing what I didn’t, and said nothing. They’d watched me interrogate her for three days, bark at her on the track, design an entire Sorting around testing the loyalty of a cadet I believed was male—and they’d held their tongues the entire time.
My brothers. The only family I had left in this world.
They’d indulged her deception. And I’d been the fool standing in front of the entire assembly while my dragon fire stripped her bare, and the shock on my face had told everyone what my brothers already knew—that the General of the Zodiac Covenant was the last heir to figure it out.
If the fire hadn’t exposed her, my brothers would still be laughing behind my back.
The hurt was old now, weeks old, but it hadn’t faded. It had calcified, sitting in my chest like a stone I couldn’t cough up, pressing against my ribs every time I looked at one of themand remembered that they’d all chosen her over me. Over the brotherhood we’d forged in blood and war and the ashes of our murdered families. Over the only bond I had left.
Max isn’t just any woman, Drakken.My dragon stirred, his voice a rumble at the base of my skull.We’ve felt the same pull toward her, and we don’t like it.
“That’s not fair, Drakken, and you fucking know it,” Caspian said, his smugness gone. His voice carried a sharp edge. “We don’t let anyone come between us. We made a call, all right. The three of us looked at a half-dead girl in the desert who’d clawed her way out of a slave mine, and we decided that if you found out what she was before you understood, you’d have her throat cut within the hour.”
“I would not have?—”
“Yes, you would have.” Caspian sat up. I could see the outline of his broad shoulders in the faint campfire glow that bled through the canvas. “You smelled the White Witch’s bloodline on her, and you wanted her dead on the spot. If you’d also known she was a woman who’d been lying about it, a woman hiding behind a disguise in your academy, under your command, you would have called it treason and skipped the tribunal. Don’t fucking pretend otherwise.”
My jaw flexed. Smoke curled from my nostrils.
“You couldn’t fucking know what I would have done!” I yelled at him.
“We know exactly what you’d have done.” Aelindor’s voice cut through our argument.
I turned my head. He hadn’t moved from his bedroll, but his eyes were open now, deep blue like frozen water.
That was Aelindor—even in sleep, he was never truly off guard.
“We rescued a slave girl running from the worst of the Pallid Court’s mining operation,” Aelindor continued. “She wasstarved and dehydrated past the point where most humans die. She had nothing except the rags on her back and a dagger that burned Caspian’s hand black. And now we know it was a Coldiron blade.”
He paused, letting silence cool my temper. I stared at the canvas above me.
“She carried a magical scent I’d been hunting for nearly a century.” Aelindor sat up on his bedroll, resting his forearms on his knees. “You would’ve had to figure it out yourself. That was the only way it would work. You needed to see her for yourself and watch her survive the barracks, the track, the Sorting before the truth could land without you killing her.” His gaze held mine in the dim light. “And I won’t apologize for it when it comes to Max. She’s too important, and she’s precious to me, to us. Tough love, little brother.”
