Chương 240: 43. Appraisal 1

When I woke up, the first thing I felt wasn't morning. It was absurdity. Not the dizzying blur of having drunk too much the night before, nor the blank disorientation of waking from a nightmare unsure which world was real. This was something else entirely—a wrongness born of too much quiet, too much warmth, as if someone had deliberately turned down the volume on my own breathing.

The light beyond the bed curtains was pale, slanting in through the high windows and slicing the room into layered bands of cold gold and grey. A morning in the Dragon Kingdom's capital should have carried the sound of wind. Instead, the first thing I heard was something else. A soft, steady breathing. I turned my head. Ignicia was asleep beside me. Her red hair lay scattered across the pillow, stripped of the aggressive sharpness it carried when bound up during the day.

It looked, instead, like embers that had finally burned themselves down and agreed to go quiet. She lay on her side, close enough that if I so much as shifted, I'd feel the faint heat radiating from her shoulder. Asleep, she looked nothing like herself awake. Gone was the coldness that belonged to a princess. Gone was the fierce heat that belonged to a fire dragon. Even the ruthlessness from the night before—the kind that left no room for retreat—was gone.

For a moment, I genuinely felt as though I hadn't finished waking up at all, still suspended somewhere in the middle of the night. I stared at the canopy for a while, then turned back to look at her, and a remarkably stupid thought surfaced in my head— What if all of it—becoming a Rider, being named by the Emperor himself, lying here in her bed right now—was just some fever dream I'd cooked up after getting too badly singed? The thought had barely finished forming when the person beside me stirred.

Before I could react, she'd already opened her eyes, and with the faint, sleep-roughened huskiness of someone not quite awake, she leaned in toward me at her own unhurried pace. Then, without the slightest ceremony, she bit me lightly on the side of the face.

"... Ow." It wasn't a hard bite. It barely qualified as painful—just the tip of a tooth dragging with deliberate mischief across skin, leaving behind a faint, warm sting. My hand flew up to cover my cheek on pure reflex, and that finished the job of waking me up completely. She watched me, the last traces of sleep still clinging to her eyes, amusement already sitting comfortably ahead of them.

"Awake?" I looked at her for a long moment before managing: "Is this your idea of a wake-up call?"

"What else would it be?" She propped her chin on one hand, watching me with the unhurried laziness of someone with absolutely nowhere to be.

"You had that look—the one that means you're about to start questioning the entire premise of your own existence. I was doing you a favor, pulling you back."

"You call that a favor?"

"It worked, didn't it?" I couldn't help it. I laughed. And it wasn't until that laugh actually made it out of my throat that I was certain I wasn't still trapped in a dream. The bed was real. The morning light was real. And the notoriously bad-tempered fire dragon lying beside me, who substituted biting for saying good morning, was very real indeed. Once she'd confirmed I'd properly returned to my senses, Ignicia shifted a little closer.

Her forehead nearly brushed my chin, her hair sliding against the side of my neck—ticklish enough to be distracting. My hand moved on its own, touching the ends of her hair. She didn't pull away. She only looked up at me, as if timing exactly how much longer I intended to stay frozen like this. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Cedric," she said suddenly, voice low.

"You look blanker right now than you did standing in front of my father yesterday."

"That's because yesterday I at least knew where I was standing." I looked at her.

"Opening my eyes to find myself right next to you—is a little confusion really so unreasonable?"

"It is," she answered immediately.

"You knew exactly where you were last night, didn't you?"

"..." She was doing this on purpose. I looked at that face—composed and serious on the surface, sparks of mischief buried underneath—and in the end could only sigh. Seeing that I wasn't going to take the bait, she leaned in closer still, until the tip of her nose nearly brushed mine.

"What, run out of things to say?"

"I'm simply wondering," I said quietly, "whether it counts as abuse—a Dragon Kingdom princess tormenting her freshly appointed Rider first thing in the morning." She let out a short sound through her nose, as if the comment wasn't worth dignifying, and yet reached out anyway, fingertips hooking lightly into my sleeve.

"Stop playing the victim." Her words were sharp. Her hands were considerably quieter. Outside, the sky was brightening by degrees; the room still held onto the last of the night's stillness. She was close—close enough that I could catch that faint scent that was simply hers. Not perfume. Not the powder any court would manufacture. Something closer to metal cooling after intense heat, or stone washed clean by fire. I'd known that smell for a long time now.

It had always come wrapped in wind, in battlefields, in her unreasonable orders. Having it settle this quietly, in a place like this, left me at something of a loss for how to respond. She caught me staring and lifted an eyebrow.

"Now what?"

"Nothing," I said.

"It just feels... fake." She fell quiet for a moment, as if she understood exactly what I meant. She didn't lecture me. She didn't laugh at me. She simply reached out, pressed me back against the pillow, leaned down, and rested her forehead lightly against mine.

"Then take your time getting used to it," she said. The words came out very soft. And for some reason, they landed more solidly than every word about Rider that had come pressing down on me in the Twilight Audience Hall the night before. I was about to say something else when my left hand, bracing against the mattress, registered something wrong. Cold. Not the temperature of the sheets. Something on the back of my own hand—a texture I didn't recognize, pulled taut to the point of near-rigidity. I froze.

Looked down. The next instant, I was completely, thoroughly awake. Near the web of my left thumb, a small patch of unfamiliar texture had appeared out of nowhere. Not a scrape. Not a scab. A layer, impossibly thin, of something that plainly didn't belong on human skin.

That small patch of scale clung flush against my flesh, dark in color, with the faintest line of red-gold showing at its edge in the morning light—as though fire had been pressed flat into the thinnest possible plate of armor and left there, perfectly still, resting on my blood and bone. I stared at it. My mind went blank for a second. Then a cold wave shot straight up my spine.

"What is this?" Even to my own ears, my voice sounded wrong. Ignicia had still been half-leaning against me. The moment she saw my expression change, she followed my gaze. When she saw the patch of scale, there wasn't a flicker of surprise on her face—only a soft, quiet "ah," like someone confirming that something long inevitable had finally arrived. Watching her react that way made the weight in my chest sink even further.

"Ignicia." I grabbed her wrist outright.

"What exactly is this?" She looked at me. My expression must have been genuinely bad, because whatever loose, sleepy quality remained in her face finally cleared away entirely. She sat up, pulled my hand toward her, and studied the newly formed scale closely, her fingertip brushing lightly along its edge. The texture alone was uncanny enough to raise gooseflesh. But the instant her finger made contact, something beneath the scale pulsed with a faint warmth. I yanked my hand back immediately.

"Don't touch it." She looked up.

"Are you frightened?"

"Obviously." I stared at the thing that had no business existing on my hand, throat tight.

"I wake up and there's something distinctly non-human growing on me. You expect me to be calm about that?" She let two breaths pass in silence. Then, instead of leading with her usual jab about how unimpressive that was, she withdrew her hand, sat facing me properly, and dropped her voice lower than before.

"Fine," she said.

"Let me explain this properly. Don't let your imagination run wild. This isn't a disease. It isn't a curse." I said nothing. I just watched her. She studied me for a moment, as if choosing her words carefully, then spoke slowly.

"It's a bond." I frowned.

"... A what?"

"The first step of becoming a Rider." She looked at the new scale on my hand, her tone even.

"First, a bond has to form. Between you and your own dragon." I blinked.

"My own dragon?"

"Yes," she said.

"Not a war-dragon assigned to you at random by the Dragon Court. Not a beast ridden by ordinary knights. Not some arrangement where someone lends you a mount for a single flight and calls it settled. A Rider is different. A Rider's dragon is not a mount. It is not a weapon." She paused there, and looked straight at me.

"I am your dragon." My throat worked, but nothing came out right away. Seeing that I still hadn't fully caught up, she made it blunter.

"When my father acknowledged you last night, he wasn't only handing you a title. He was acknowledging that you'd already been drawn into this lineage." Her fingertip tapped the scale on my hand.

"So the bond has begun to grow. The dragon's mark surfaces on your body first." I looked down at the scale, still instinctively unsettled.