The Unwarded Heart

The mat burns against my shoulder blade when I hit, the impact a dull thud I let roll through me as I follow Violet’s momentum and take her with me. She exhales a sharp sound that isn’t pain so much as frustration, fingers tightening around the practice dagger I palmed her with ten seconds ago. We’ve danced this one a hundred times: her brain three steps ahead, her body one step behind, my job to pull those pieces together before someone else pulls her apart.

“Keep your elbow tucked.” I hook my calf behind hers, pivoting my hips to slide her weight rather than slam it. She’s light; I could toss her like a sack of grain. But I don’t. I never do. I lever her wrist off the handle, using the heel of my hand to press into the tendons, firm pressure, controlled angle. The dagger drops to the mat with a clack.

Violet’s eyes flash ice-blue annoyance and something like amusement. “I had you.” Sweat beads at her hairline, making silver strands cling to her temple. Her breathing’s measured, deliberate. She listens even when she bristles.

“You almost did.” I release her wrist but keep my palm cupping the bones a second too long, feeling the give of soft skin over fragile joints. Her condition makes everything a careful equation—pressure against ligaments, torque through a knee that might slide the wrong way if I’m careless. The knowledge sits like a constant in the back of my skull.

Around us, Basgiath snarls. The clang of steel, barked commands, bodies hitting the ground in a rhythm that ends with someone not getting back up often enough. On our small square of worn canvas, we make our own rhythm. I offer her a hand. She eyes it, wary, not of me, but of her pride. She takes it.

Her fingers are cool, damp, fine-boned. I pull with the same force I’d use on a heavier cadet but tilt my torso to absorb the lift, bringing her up without stress to her shoulder. She rises, chest brushing mine for a heartbeat. It’s nothing. It’s also everything. Heat flares under my skin and I shove it down where it belongs, beneath the muscle memory and the instinct to protect.

“Again,” she says, stubborn, that line between her brows cut deeper by determination. Lightning lives behind her eyes these days. I pretend I don’t see it in case it starts to see me.

We reset. She comes in low like I taught her, center of gravity close to the mat where no one can knock it out from under her. Her footwork is better today; she doesn’t overstride the pivot. My throat hums with approval I don’t voice. She reads faces too well. Praise makes her reckless sometimes.

She feints right, darts left toward my open side. I turn with her, catch her forearm with my palm, redirect her momentum past my hip. Our bodies slide in a narrow space, sweat slick, fabric rasping. She uses my movement to try to sweep me, and I let myself go enough to give her the sensation of advantage. The smile that cracks her mouth open for an instant is lethal-cute, and I hate the word even as it fits. Then I take it from her.

I capture her wrist again, rotate, press her palm flat against my chest to stop the twist that would spike pain through her joint. My other hand taps the base of her throat lightly with the dull edge of the dagger she lost a breath ago. “Dead.”

Her gaze flicks from the dagger to my mouth to the spot where her hand rests over my heart. My pulse is stupidly fast. I choke out a laugh that’s more release than humor and step back immediately, dropping the blade to the mat. “Reset. You’re telegraphing the sweep.”

Her nose wrinkles. “I hate when you say ‘telegraphing.’ It makes me feel transparent.”

“You’re not.” You’re complicated. You’re already carrying a thousand things, and I am not going to be another weight you can’t afford.

We circle. She shakes out her hands, flexes her fingers. I watch the give of her knuckles, memorizing which ones are redder than normal, which joints might need wrapping. Tairn’s presence is a pressure at the edge of consciousness, a storm cloud Violet keeps in check without realizing she’s doing it. Feirge is a calmer thread, a steady, green hum in the back of my mind. She approves of me giving the blade back to Violet. She approves of me, period. Dragons have always had terrible taste for what makes a life simple.

Violet lunges and I let her connect. We meet forearms. Bone to bone. I hear the soft awful pop that isn’t a break, just her body’s reminder that it’s not built for this. My gut clenches. I soften, roll my wrist under hers to relieve the pressure before it becomes pain. She notices. Of course she notices. Her eyes slice up to mine. “Don’t go soft.”

“Never,” I lie, because I will always go soft with her joints and hard with everyone else who comes near.

She uses my brief hesitation like the tactician she is, twisting, sliding her knee between my legs, leveraging my surprise to push me off balance. I let her take me. My spine hits the mat, and the shock snaps breath from my lungs. She straddles my hips, pinning my wrists to the canvas with more grit than weight. The position is a disaster flickering in the back of my skull, danger in the heat of her thighs bracketing me, the press of her pelvis. Her hair falls forward, brushing my cheek. The handle of the practice dagger digs into my trapped palm.

Her grin is pure victory. “Yield.”

“Not on your life.” The words come low, and I hate the growl in them. I buck; she anticipates, shifting, but her foot slips just enough with the sweat on the mat. I use my telekinesis in a whisper, not to cheat, but to nudge the fallen dagger away from our tangle to keep it from jamming into her ribs. Her head tilts—she knows when I use it. She lets it go. We both pretend we didn’t feel the brush of power.

I twist my wrists, break her hold, roll. We end up side-by-side, then I catch her arm, spin, and she’s on her back again, my knee planted beside her hip, my hand wrapped around the slim column of her forearm. Her breath shivers over my wrist. I can feel the notch of each tendon under my fingers. I loosen my grip so she doesn’t bruise. Her lips part like she’s about to say something that isn’t a critique.

“Good,” I say, and it comes out rough. “You used my hesitation. That’s the right call in a fight.”

“You hate that you’ve trained me that well.” Her smile flickers and goes, replaced by seriousness again. “Again.”

We run it until the light shifts on the walls and our shirts cling to us. Each time, I disarm her because I have to. Each time, she makes me work for it because she refuses to be the girl people carried over the parapet and called it kindness. The last exchange, I sweep her ankle—gentle, guided, just enough to put her down without torque. She hits, rolls, tries to rise. Her elbow buckles. I’m there before she hits again, hands sliding under her shoulders.

“Got you.” I pull her up slow, supporting her until I feel the tight quiver in her muscles ease. My palms are warm around the wings of her shoulder blades. Her skin is slick. She smells like effort and copper and the faint citrus of her soap. I shouldn’t catalog it.

Her eyes search mine, a question flickering that neither of us names. The space between us is a breath and a bruise. I let my hands linger one heartbeat longer than necessary—long enough to tell her I see the fragility, respect it, long enough to tell her I also see the steel that holds her upright in this place that eats softer things.

“Water,” I say, stepping back, swallowing what else crowds my mouth.

She nods, jaw tight, voice thin with the edges of exertion. “Yeah. Then library.”

I toss her the canteen, and she catches it clean despite the tremble in her fingers. She drinks, throat working, and I look away because I don’t trust my face. Outside, a dragon roars. Inside, we gather our weapons and our calm, and pretend that what just happened was only training.

The library is always too warm, heat banked in the stacks like the dragons have breathed in here and never exhaled. We take the table by the window anyway, where the light turns the edges of old vellum gold. Violet spreads books like battle plans, efficient even in chaos, and I accept the quill she hands me like a weapon.

“Okay,” she says, voice low to keep the librarian from sliding over like a ghost, “outline the Treaty of Hyross. Not dates—implications. Why did it matter, and to whom?”

Her hair is damp at the nape, curling into thin, darkened tendrils against her neck where it escaped her braid. I force my eyes to the text. “It shifted the balance of power from localized wardens to centralized command, which meant faster mobilization but less regional autonomy.” I pause, glance up. “It also put more pressure on supply chains because standardization always does, and the Wardens weren’t thrilled about losing their ceremonial power.”

Her mouth twitches. “You read ahead.”

“I listened in class,” I lie. She knows better. She likes me anyway. She reaches and flips a page, her hand brushing mine. It’s nothing and it’s too much. The paper rustles in the quiet, and her knuckles are still a little red from the mat. She holds the page with care like it could bruise.

“And the codicil regarding the use of bonded pairs in non-combat roles?” she prompts, watching me more than the text, like she enjoys catching me thinking.

“It looks like respect,” I say, tracing the faded ink with my eyes, “but it was about control. Keeping riders on shorter leashes between battles so they’re where command can see them.”

Violet smiles, not pretty for anyone else’s benefit but small and sharp for me. “Yes.” Her finger taps the margin, right next to a notation from some student two decades ago. She’s color-coded the sections for me; blue for treaties, green for rebellions, red for anything that got a whole lot of people killed for a reason that sounded good on paper.

She leans in when she’s explaining, shoulder bumping mine when she’s excited about a point. I don’t move away. I breathe slower, like the air might settle around the image of us nearly touching, like it could trap this and keep it safe. The room smells like dust and ink and her. When she gets to something that matters, her voice drops even more. “Look here—the third amendment. Everyone forgets about this because it’s quiet. But it’s the first sign of friction that turned into the Schism.”

I follow her finger. Our heads are so close I can see the pale constellation of faint scars on her temple where she hit a wall once and pretended it was fine. “That’s subtle,” I murmur. “Like—you can pretend it’s not about what it’s about.”

“Exactly.” She looks pleased with me, and the stupid swell of warmth that hits my chest is way out of proportion for getting a question right. I jot a note in my careful hand, the words neat because she told me once it helps her mind settle when things are tidy on paper.

We fall into an easy rhythm. She feeds me questions and I bite down, testing my own answers against hers like sparring with softer weapons. When I stumble, she doesn’t pounce, just slides the book closer and shows me where I zigged instead of zagged. Every now and then, our knees knock under the table. Every time, it’s an accident. Every time, it feels like a decision.

“Tell me about the symbolism of the royal crest revision post-Schism,” she says, sliding a sheet of rough paper to me. Our fingers catch, friction on skin. Her nails are short, uneven. My stomach flips the wrong way, the right way.

“They took the raven off,” I say slowly. “Kept the sword, added the scale. Justice over stealth. Or…pretending justice can stand in for the things they don’t want to admit they still do.”

Her eyes soften like I’ve surprised her. “Yes.” She writes something in the margin and I watch the movement of her hand because it’s safer than her mouth. Her breath tickles my cheek when she leans in to underline a line. “You’re good at this.”

“I’m good at not wanting to be executed for failing History,” I counter, keeping it light. She nudges me with her knee. It’s nothing, and it’s a press to my thigh that lingers. The warmth moves through my skin like a slow line of fire.

We’re a small island of quiet in a place that survives on quiet. Cadets whisper, books thump shut, someone coughs. I catch her looking at my hands when I’m not looking at her, and she doesn’t look away as fast as she thinks she does. It hits like it does on the mat sometimes—this edge of something we’re both pretending isn’t there. I swallow it, the way I swallow the urge to smooth the line of tension out of her brow with my thumb.

She’s mid-sentence—“so if you connect the petitions from the northern provinces with the supply shortages that winter, you can see why the—”

The light on the page dims. A shadow falls over the table and the hair on my arms lifts before my brain finishes the thought. Violet’s hand stills. The air thickens.

“Studying,” Xaden says, voice low enough not to carry and deep enough to root in bone. He doesn’t touch me; he doesn’t need to. His presence is a pressure against skin, a boundary drawn without a blade. He smells like leather and rain about to break, like the hollows of night. When he steps closer, the corner of the table is swallowed in his shadow, and the shift inside my chest is automatic and unwelcome.

Violet’s spine straightens. She tilts her face up, and the light catches in her hair like wire. “Rhiannon’s test is next week,” she says, her tone even. “She’ll pass.”

He looks at the spread of books, then at my notes, the way I’ve laid out the arguments the way she likes them. His gaze comes to me, glances off, comes back. There’s calculation there, and something harder I can’t read. He nods toward the empty chair by Violet. “Mind if I...”

He doesn’t finish asking. He doesn’t have to. He hooks a knuckle over the back of the chair and drags it closer, the scrape loud in the hush. He sits, taking up space like a fact. His arm slides around Violet’s shoulders without effort, and she goes, like she always does. He doesn’t pull her hard, just enough that her hip angles toward him and away from the line of my thigh. The heat of her knee vanishes. The absence is a cold bite.

I feel the pang hit sharp and low, a muscle that doesn’t get used tearing a little more. It’s ridiculous; it’s mine. I tamp it down, the way I tamp down the wild edge of my signet when I’m tired.

“New reading?” he asks her, ignoring me, or pretending to. His fingers find the end of her braid and slide along it, casual, firm. Possessive in a way that is probably comforting if you’re the one being held.

Violet nods, shoulders rigid for a heartbeat before she forces them to loosen. “Treaty of Hyross and its fallout.”

He glances at the title page as if he cares. “Sounds thrilling.”

“It is when she explains it.” The words are out before I can leash them. His gaze cuts to me fully now, pinning. He doesn’t move his arm. His mouth doesn’t even twitch.

Violet clears her throat, small sound. “Rhiannon was just making connections between the northern petitions and the supply shortages.” Her voice threads a bridge over a chasm.

“Was she.” He says it without a question. He looks at my notes again, then back to her like he’s cataloging every way we fit together. There’s a part of me that wants to bare my teeth. I keep my face calm.

“I should—” I start, reaching for a book to close it because the smart move is to leave before I drown in this thick air.

“Don’t,” Violet says quickly, eyes flashing to mine with something that feels too much like a plea. “We’re not finished.”

We hold there, the three of us, balance tilting one breath at a time. Xaden’s thumb traces lazy patterns over Violet’s shoulder through her shirt. I don’t watch it. I hear the librarian clearing her throat from three tables down, a soft warning. Out the window, the sky threatens rain.

“Go on, then,” Xaden murmurs, settling back, dragging the chair even closer so his thigh presses to hers. “Enlighten me.” He looks at Violet like she hung the moon and at me like I’m a knife left where someone could trip on it.

I lower my eyes to the text and find my voice, even, steady. “The petitions started as food requests and ended as leverage. The shortages weren’t an accident so much as an opportunity exploited by people who wanted power shifted rather than shared.” My hands don’t shake. I won’t give him that.

Violet hums approval, a soft sound I feel more than hear. Her knee finds mine again for a second under the table, quick as a heartbeat. Xaden’s arm tightens around her, small, casual increase of pressure.

I talk. She listens. He watches. And the little, quiet world we built between us shrinks to the size of a book’s margin while his shadow sits heavy over the page.

I finish the line I’m reading even though I’ve already lost it, the words turning to ink and blur while his thumb flexes against her shoulder. Violet knows these histories by heart; I’m here because she decided I should be, because she decided I shouldn’t fail. That truth sits beside the other one I won’t say aloud—the way my body adjusts to her nearness like it’s a habit I didn’t mean to form.

He leans, voice a brush against her ear, and the sound slides down my spine like unwelcome heat. “Your student looks tired,” he murmurs. The possessive tilt isn’t subtle.

“I’m fine,” I answer before she can, keeping my eyes on the page. The letters won’t focus. It’s not fine. It’s that the small, careful space where her knee finds mine feels like a line he keeps erasing with his body.

Violet’s hand tightens over the corner of the folio, knuckles pale. Her braid shifts with the movement of his fingers. She draws breath like she’ll argue, then swallows it.

I close the book. The clap is too loud in the hush of the library, and a few heads turn. I force a smile I don’t feel, polite and practiced. “I should let you two strategize,” I say, sliding the text gently toward her. “You can quiz me later on the petitions.” My voice is level. My chest is not.

Her eyes are quick to mine, silver and sharp. “Rhi—”

“I’ve got weapons drill,” I lie without blushing, because there’s always a drill, always a reason to be somewhere else. “I won’t be long. Keep the Seventy-Ninth. I’ll grab it from you tonight.” I tap the margin where my last note sits, a neat wedge of ink under her tidy annotations.

He doesn’t look at me when I speak; he watches Violet instead, reading the places she tenses. His arm stays right where it is, the curve of his hand branded against her through her shirt. It’s not harsh. It doesn’t need to be. It’s a claim for anyone who knows how to read it.

The ugly flare of heat in my gut is fast and mean. I call it protectiveness. I tell myself it’s about strategy, about the way he pulls her close when she thinks better with space. I don’t call it what it is.

“Rhiannon,” she says, softer, that warning/lament way she says my name when she’s trying to keep me from doing something stupid. “You don’t have to—”

“I do,” I cut in on a gentle exhale, packing my charcoal and straightedge and the stub of the yellow chalk she always forgets is in my kit. “Or Sorrengail will write me up for skipping drills in favor of romantic histories.” I make the joke land light and easy, and it works because her mouth tries to curve and fails, her eyes flicking to his cheek, to my hands, to the space between us where there used to be knee and heat.

He finally acknowledges me with a look as cool as a wet blade. “Don’t let her make you late,” he says to Violet, not to me. The message isn’t for me. It hits anyway.

“I won’t,” Violet answers, her voice smoothing into that careful tone she uses when managing fires. This one is human shaped and right there, arm heavy over her.

My bag’s strap catches on the chair leg, and I yank it free too hard, correcting before the motion becomes a scene. I slide my notes into order and tuck them beneath the book so she’ll find them when he’s gone. My thumb brushes the margin where she wrote remember the food lines weren’t numbers, they were people, and something inside me pulls too tight.

“I’ll bring you more salve,” I say, softer, because I can’t leave without giving her something useful. “We’re almost out.”

Her throat works. Something painful moves behind her eyes. “Thanks.” Her fingers twitch like they want to reach and don’t.

I nod to the table. “Don’t let him bully the scale into replacing the raven,” I add, trying for lightness again, and the smallest real smile breaks over her mouth, flashes and is gone. It’s enough that the librarian’s glare lessens when I lift my bag.

I stand. His shadow shifts with me. The urge to tell him to take his arm off her is bright and stupid and would get me killed or worse, make her pay for my mouth. So I don’t. I tip my head to both of them, respectful, a cadet to her wing leader and his captain. I hate how crisp it feels in my bones.

“See you at dinner,” I say, like it’s normal. Like I’m not going to spend the next two hours trying to shove the memory of his thumb moving over her shoulder into a dark corner of myself that won’t spill when poked.

I make it three steps and remember the spare stick of graphite on the far side of the table. It sits by her elbow. I could leave it. I don’t. I turn, reach. The back of my hand brushes her sleeve. The contact is nothing. It’s a jolt. Her breath stutters. His fingers tighten again, just enough to be felt.

“Sorry,” I murmur, failing at nonchalance for a second, the word scraping. My eyes meet hers and I can’t help it. I hold them a beat too long. There’s a question there I don’t ask and she doesn’t answer. We both hear it anyway.

I tuck the graphite into my bag and paste that polite look back on, the one that’s gotten me through inspections and grief and nights where the noise in the barracks didn’t drown out the noise in my head. “Wing leader,” I add, giving him the acknowledgment he never needs. He inclines his head a fraction, the courtesy of a man who knows he doesn’t have to be courteous to get what he wants.

When I turn for the last time, my chest hurts worse than it did the day Feirge burned me accidentally during first bonding. Different tissue. Same scar.

The corridor outside is cooler, the air a cleaner cut without his presence thickening it. My boots are steady on the stone even though my knees want to shake. I don’t go to weapons drill. I go to the nearest stairwell and take the steps too fast until my legs burn and my lungs catch. I stop on a landing no one uses and press my back to the cold wall. The ache slides under my ribs, sharp and real. I let it sit. I name it anything but the truth—frustration, protectiveness, fear for her, fury at him. Not jealousy. Not desire. Never that.

By the time I reach the courtyard, the sky has split its threat and rain needles down. It hisses off stone, darkening everything it touches. I stand under the overhang and breathe until the place where his hand lay on her shoulder is out of my head and the place where her knee met mine is just a ghost. I wipe my face with my sleeve even though it’s only rain, hitch my bag higher, and walk toward the training grounds like I never detoured.

Tonight, I’ll bring her the salve. I’ll sit on her bed and rub it into the bruises on her wrists and the ache in her ankle while she talks about how the scale was always a lie. I’ll keep my hands steady. I’ll pretend I didn’t feel that small, savage pang when he pulled her away like she belonged to him alone. And when she thanks me, when her eyes soften in that way that undoes me, I’ll swallow the word that keeps trying to climb my throat. I won’t say it. I can’t. Not when his shadow is still fresh on her skin.

The room is dim, only the ember glow of the brazier licking at shadowed corners. The rain has finally spent itself against the stone, leaving everything quiet enough that I can hear the soft drag of her breath and the faint glass scrape of the salve jar’s lid.

Violet sits on her bed with her knee pulled up, her braid undone and a curtain of silver hair falling over one shoulder. She’s got one boot off and one still on, stubborn as always. Her shirt is folded to the elbows, exposing pale forearms mapped with fresh purples and old yellowed bruises. She dips two fingers into the jar and flinches when she tries to reach a tender spot on her inner elbow.

“Give me,” I say, voice low, already moving. I don’t wait for permission because she gives it anyway, every time, and the asking feels like we both lie.

Her eyes flick up, and I watch her mouth press into a line before she nods. I take the jar from her, setting it on the blanket between us, and hold out my hand for her wrist. She hesitates for a breath, then lays her arm across my knee. Her skin is cool and soft, and the heat under the swelling is a tight, angry thing.

I warm a dab of the ointment between my fingers before I touch her. Practical habit. I learned exactly how much pressure she can take and where the joints slip toward danger. I start at the heel of her hand and work up her forearm, finding the places that cry out first. The scent of wintergreen and crushed comfrey fills the air.

She tries to hide the first wince, teeth setting, eyes closing for a second. “You don’t have to—” she begins.

“I do,” I answer, because it’s true. Because I said I would, earlier, before I ran from that library. Because doing this makes something inside me settle that nothing else does.

I knead the ointment into the muscle that runs along her forearm, slow and steady, pressing with my thumb in small circles until I feel the knot give. The skin under my hands goes slick, and I slide further up, over the ridge of her elbow, careful of the joint. She trembles, just a shiver, and then breathes out like she’s been holding her breath since midday.

“How bad?” I ask, as neutral as I can make it.

She watches my fingers like they’re something that could save her. “Just tight. The gauntlet drills were a mess today.” Her mouth tips in a dry almost-smile. “You’d have been proud. I didn’t fall off the balance bar once.”

“I’m always proud.” It slips out, soft and honest, and she looks away. I move to her bicep, thumb stuttering over a small split in the skin where someone’s grip found her. The anger rises in me, quick and hot, but I keep my touch calm. I smooth salve over it and feel the tremor in her breath again.

“Rhi—” Her voice is a soft crack, something inside it fragile. “About earlier. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t.” I shake my head. The apology is for leaving, for letting his hand stay. I don’t want to pick at that wound right now. “Lift,” I murmur, tapping her elbow.

She obeys, and I slide my hand under her arm to support the joint as I work the tender inside. The intimacy of it isn’t loud; it’s in the simple trust of the way she lets me handle her like she’s breakable and believes I won’t let her break. The salve gleams on her skin in the low light, and my fingers glide over the hollow where blood gathers easily on her.

“Other arm,” I say when I finish, and she shifts, the mattress dipping, her thigh brushing mine. The contact is a shock I pretend not to feel. I cradle her wrist, turn it, and repeat the ritual. My hands know the path now, each scar a familiar landmark. Her breath evens, the lines at the corner of her eyes easing.

I set her arm down gently on the blanket and tap her knee. “Boot.”

She grumbles something about stubborn leathers but pulls it off with a hiss. The ankle beneath is already swelling, skin stretched tight and shiny. She bites her lip hard when I touch it.

“Breathe,” I tell her, and she does. I scoop a generous amount of salve and work it into the tendons on either side of the bone, careful not to push the joint where it shouldn’t go. She grips the sheet with one hand and my thigh with the other, fingers digging in when I find the sorest spot. Heat flares where she touches me, even through my trousers. I don’t move away.

“Too much?” I ask.

“No,” she says immediately, voice rough. “It’s good. Don’t stop.”

I don’t. I massage slow, circling the joint, coaxing the muscle to loosen around the pain. My hands are slick, and her skin is satin under oil. Each stroke draws a different sound from her—hitches, quiet sighs, the small, unguarded noises she makes only when it’s me and the door is shut. I work lower to her arch, dragging my thumbs along the tendon there, and she melts into the mattress with a soft curse.

“Language,” I murmur, a smile ghosting my mouth.

She huffs a laugh that breaks into a low groan when I press the pads of my thumbs into the meat of her foot. “Shut up,” she whispers, but there’s no bite to it, only relief.

I finish with one last glide up her calf, then rest her ankle on a folded blanket to keep it elevated. “Other one?” I ask, already reaching.

She shakes her head. “It’s fine.” She watches me as I wipe my hands on a scrap of linen. Her pupils are blown wide in the dim, her lips parted like she’s been running. “Thank you.”

I shrug one shoulder, the motion tight because her hand is still on my thigh and she isn’t moving it. “It’s what we do,” I say. The words lay between us, bigger than they should be.

She nods, slow. The kettle clicks once on the brazier as it cools. She shifts closer, knee bumping mine, her breath grazing my cheek. The fresh salve on her skin makes her smell like mint and earth, and it’s got me dizzy in a way that has nothing to do with fumes.

“Back?” I ask, because she’s still got the shirt pulled up and there’s a set of darkening bruises shaping over her ribs where the harness dug. I don’t wait. I lean in and slide my fingers under the hem, touching the warm, damp heat of her waist, and she arches to help me. The shirt lifts, and the light catches on skin that is too thin over bones that are too sharp.

My hands bracket her sides, palms slick and smooth, and I rub the ointment into the bruises near her ribs, thumb sweeping the edges where pain lives. She makes a sound I feel in my gut more than I hear. I keep my touch clinical, methodical, but there’s no way to ignore the way her body leans into my hands like a plant toward light.

I work up to her shoulder blades, find the place where muscle knots around bone, and knead until it loosens. My thumbs carve slow paths down either side of her spine. She drops her forehead to my shoulder without warning, hair sliding over my arm. The weight of her there is small and everything.

“Rhiannon,” she says into my shirt, the sound a breath, a warning, a plea.

“I’ve got you,” I answer, because I do, because I will, even when I shouldn’t. I smooth the last of the salve over her shoulder, the same shoulder his hand held earlier, and a quiet, ugly satisfaction rises in me at erasing that ghost with something that heals.

I set the jar on the bedside table and lower her shirt, careful and slow. Her face is still tucked near my neck, breath warm. When she pulls back, our mouths are too close for sense. Her eyes flick to my lips, then to my eyes, and she swallows.

“Thank you,” she says again, softer.

“Anytime,” I reply, equally soft. I make myself lean back, put an inch of air into the space that wants to be none. I adjust the blanket under her ankle, check the elevation, pretend I’m thinking about nothing but swelling and circulation.

Her fingers slip from my thigh, curling into the blanket instead. The loss slices a clean line through me. I stand, take two steps to set the used linen in the basin, and let the cool air wash over my face. When I turn back, she’s watching me like I’m something she wants to memorize.

“Sleep,” I tell her, because if I say anything else, the wrong words will come out. “I’ll wake you for patrol at dawn if the rain holds.”

She nods, tucks herself down carefully, wincing when she shifts her ankle, then relaxing into the pillow. I blow out the brazier half, leave just enough flame to keep the chill off. When I crawl into my own bed, the space between us feels at once too narrow and too wide. I stare at the ceiling and listen to her breathing even out, the scent of mint still on my hands, her warmth a line of heat across the dark.

The night settles heavy, the kind that sinks into bones and refuses to let go. The dormitory quiets in fits, a door down the hall closing, a low laugh from some cadet too wired to sleep, the hum of dragons beyond the stone walls like the ocean under everything. Our room is a small island of low flame and breath, the brazier whispering against the cold, the blankets rustling as Violet shifts and then stills.

Her breathing steadies into that rhythm I’ve learned without trying, a four-count inhale, a longer release. It’s the only metronome I trust when the world claws at the edges. I stare at the ceiling until my eyes blur, until the shadows of the rafters soften and double.

My hands still smell faintly like wintergreen. When I curl them into the blanket, the heat trapped against my palm is a ghost of her heat. I should scrub the scent away, force my mind to turn toward tomorrow’s drills, the route for patrol, the way Feirge gets restless at cloudbreak. I should think about strategy and the core I have to strengthen and how to keep her safe without making her feel like a fragile thing.

Instead I think about the way her fingers held me, tight when the pain lanced through her ankle, like holding on was instinct. I think about the feel of her skin under my hands—slick with salve, hot at the bruises, delicate over bone. I think about how she leaned into me, how her forehead rested against my shoulder like it belonged there. The thought that follows is the disloyal one, the one that opens like a mouth I don’t want to feed: that my hands know her better than they know steel. That they fit her in ways a blade never could.

I press my knuckles into my sternum until the ache sharpens. The ceiling doesn’t answer, the slow-low light doesn’t judge. Her breath is a tide I let myself ride for just one minute more.

“Sleep,” I tell myself, and close my eyes.

When sleep takes me, it takes me hard, like falling into warm, green dark.

I dream in color I can feel on my skin. Green, at first—deep, living, the exact shade of Feirge’s flames when the wind snatches them sideways midflight. The fire curls and spirals, but it doesn’t burn. It wraps around me from the waist down, a tether and a promise, heat sliding up my legs like hands. The air smells like rain just before it breaks, like wet stone and crushed leaves, like the ointment still trapped under my nails.

Through the flame, she comes. Silver hair catching light that doesn’t have a source, too bright to be just reflected. It moves across her shoulders, a fall that I want to bury my face in, that I know will slip like water through my fingers when I try to hold it. Her eyes are the gray of storm sky over the Vale, and they’re on me, steady, the way they are when I say I’ve got you and mean it.

Her mouth parts and I feel breath ghost my lower lip even before any word comes. I don’t hear my name so much as feel it unspool inside my chest. The fire leaps, and the voice in me that remembers duty says run, but I don’t. I step into her.

Her hands find my waist, small and firm, the pads of her fingers gliding over my shirt and then slipping under it like it’s not even there. The heat from the flames moves up and through us both. There are no bruises on her here. No harness marks, no thinness like hunger. She’s solid, soft where I want her soft, strong in the places I’ve cataloged. My body knows how to hold her without thinking, like it’s something we’ve practiced until it’s muscle memory.

We don’t kiss, not at first. We breathe, mouths close, the edges of our lips touching, the flare of warmth that simple touch sends through me more dangerous than any weapon. Her hair brushes my cheek and falls over my throat. It tickles. I tilt my head and she laughs, that low sound like a secret offered, and my knees go weak.

The green curls around our ankles, then our calves, up, up, and I think of all the times I’ve led her through a spar, chest to chest, one of my hands guiding her elbow, the other at her back. Here, I guide nothing. I let her slide her palms over my ribs, let her tug me forward until I’m pressed full-length to her. There is no room for air or sense. There is only heat and the way her breath changes when I touch the small of her back, when I splay my palm over the base of her spine and pull.

We kiss then. It isn’t gentle. It’s deep and unguarded, a press that says all the things we don’t say when the lights are on. Her mouth opens and I taste rain and mint and salt and something that feels like home. The fire climbs and climbs; it doesn’t scorch, it licks. It paints lines up the inside of my thighs, around my hips, across my stomach, over the underside of my breasts. It marks me without leaving a single wound.

When her thigh slides between mine, heat meets heat. The flame flares white at the center, and I gasp into her mouth, her fingers digging into my back, holding me there, anchoring me. My hips move like they’re answering a command I never knew I’d given, a slow grind that turns my bones to liquid. I feel her answer me, a tremble at the edge of her strength, a sound that punches low in my belly and makes my head fall back.

“Rhiannon,” she says, and my name is another kind of flame in her mouth.

I say hers back, and the sound twists through the green like a ribbon, binding us. We move together, a rhythm born of all the times we’ve moved together on sweaty mats and narrow parapets, except there’s no enemy here, no audience, nothing to prove. There’s only the slick heat building, the tight pull gathering at the base of my spine, in the back of my knees, in the place between my legs where the fire pools and begs.

Her hair tangles in my fingers and I fist it, not to hurt, just to keep myself from coming apart. She arches into me, the points of her nipples catching on my shirt, and the friction is a knife I lean into without bleeding. Her hand slides between us, over my stomach, lower. She finds me like she was made to, like she’s known the map of me forever, and when she presses there, firm and sure, the world goes quiet except for the sound I make. It doesn’t echo. It fills.

The green turns gold at the edges, bright threads weaving through, and I realize, even in the dream, that it’s not just her and me. It’s the dragons humming something low and primal through the bond, it’s Tairn’s warning thunder and Feirge’s satisfied rumble. It’s power, the kind that has nothing to do with rank or signet.

I’m right there, on the edge, and she’s right there with me, our foreheads together, breath harsh, noses brushing. We don’t look away. We never do. When it breaks, it breaks like summer rain after a drought—heavy, relentless, everything in me soaked through and cleaned out in a rush. I shudder against her, the green flaring, the gold threading tighter, and she follows me, nails biting into my shoulder, mouth open on a sound that feels like a prayer.

We stand in it until the flames calm and the room of the dream returns, stone and shadow and the soft throb of blood in my ears. She lays her head on my chest. I hold her there and feel the beat of her heart under my palm, quick and alive.

“I’ve got you,” I tell her, and this time it’s less a promise and more a truth that doesn’t need proving.

The fire dims to embers and the silver of her hair glows like starlight scattered over coals. The last thing I feel before waking is the slide of that hair across my mouth, soft and impossible, and the bitter-sweet ache of wanting what I’m not allowed to want.

I wake with my palm pressed hard over my sternum, the room cold again, the brazier hissing low, the taste of mint still a ghost on my tongue. Violet’s breath is steady in the next bed over, her body a small rise under the blanket. I stare into the dark and force my lungs to match her rhythm, slow, even, controllable. The disloyal thought nips again, persistent as a wound that refuses to close.

I push it back where it belongs, into the quiet place I keep locked, and I listen to her breathing until the edges of the dream fray and drift away like smoke. Outside, a dragon calls, low and distant. Inside, I pretend my hands are still steel, and not the memory of her skin. Only then do my eyes close again, and the dark takes me without light or flame.