Page 5 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

I don't have a word for what I feel standing here with a bad ankle and dried blood on my hands. The stories Father Corren told — the monster stories, the cathedral-is-cursed stories, the don't-climb-the-mountain stories — none of them had room for this. For columns that took years to carve. For a hall clearly designed to hold a community, not a threat. For the remnants of what looks like an enormous stone table surrounded by smaller ones, with markings along the edge that repeat at regular intervals like some kind of formal script.

The puzzle piece doesn't fit. I keep turning it over, trying to find the angle, and it keeps not fitting.

"You are supposed to be in the chamber."

I spin too fast. My ankle gives out and I grab the nearest pillar to stay upright, and when I turn, Tovian is standing twenty feet away in the dark looking at me like I have personally offended every century he has ever lived through.

"I went for a walk," I say.

"Your ankle?—"

"Is none of your business." I straighten against the pillar as much as I can manage. "What is this place?"

He goes still.

"Come back to the chamber."

"Answer the question."

He moves but I don't fully track it. One moment he's twenty feet away, the next he's in front of me, and the pillar I'm leaning on is at my back and his wings have spread slightly, just enough to block the empty space on either side of me. He leans in and I stop breathing.

He's not looking at my face. His head dips, just slightly, and I realize with a jolt that he's inhaling. Long, slow, deliberate. My neck. My pulse point.

The heat coming off his chest is extraordinary. He smells like cold rain and old stone.

"You are not a prisoner," he says, very quietly. "You are mine. The difference matters."

I stare up at the amber eyes, the horns, the sheer impossible scale of him.

The fire in my torch gutters.

4

TOVIAN

She sleeps like something holy.

That is the first thought that comes to me when I pull myself from the ground beside her, and I hate it immediately. The ache in my joints, the way centuries of stone have pressed themselves into them and left their mark. She is curled on her side against the cave wall with her dark braid loose across her face, one dirty glove still on, one missing, and she has stolen the only fur I found in the ruins and wrapped it completely around her small body like some kind of declaration.

She looks absurd, like something I should not touch. I leave before the thought can finish forming.

The moment I clear the fissure and the open sky swallows me whole, my wings catch the freezing dark and every joint in my body screams. Stone Sleep leaves its marks. Centuries of stillness does not shake loose easily. I feel it in the first beat, the crack and grinding stretch of muscle waking where there was only granite before. And then the second beat, and the third, and then my inside remembers, and I stop thinking about pain entirely.

I climb.

The cold hits my skin like a blade. My wings slice through it. The air tastes like iron and snowmelt and the particular emptiness of a sky that has not seen me in centuries, and I press higher and higher until the mountain peak is below me and the valley is nothing but a scatter of amber light in the dark.

I stop there. Suspended. And I look down.

Blackstone Valley.

My valley.

The sight is not what it used to be.

Flickering hearth fire bleeds through wooden shutters. Smoke rises from chimneys too close together, too low to the ground, buildings crammed into the valley floor like frightened animals herded into a pen. Humans built themselves right into the bones of my territory while I slept inside the mountain above them, entombed. And now they live there, fat and oblivious, in the shadow of what they destroyed.

My grip on the air tightens.