House of Shadows (Royal Houses 2)

Just as she was about to say screw it and dive in anyway, Fordham closed his eyes for a second and then pulled back. He took his hand with him, and suddenly, she felt bereft.

Kerrigan crossed her arms over her chest and turned away from him. Her eyes struggled to focus, except what had almost happened. She was so stupid. Why did she keep putting herself in this position with him? He’d made himself clear.

“Kerrigan …”

“What’s this?” she asked, focusing on the book finally. Anything to keep him from saying whatever was next going to come out of his mouth.

“What?” He saw what she was looking at and then said, “Oh. It’s records from the Great War.”

“You’ve been researching the Great War?”

“Well, I was working with Gelryn to see if I could get information about your vision, but he had no interest in talking about the war.”

“Unsurprising,” she said, paging through the book. “Considering what he went through there.”

“Yeah. So, I thought to see if there were records for all of the Society members at that time, but there were just long lists of names. They were almost indecipherable.” He shook his head. “I decided to try to search through the Great War rosters and see if I could find anyone by the name of Trulian or Mei.”

“Any luck?” she asked.

He shook his head. “About what I expected. Trulian is a pretty common name. I found five of them so far. Four Fae commoners and a Society general. The general seems pretty important.”

Kerrigan wracked her brain. Trulian had looked like someone important in her vision, but with five options already, she didn’t know if that was right.

“And Mei?”

“No. Plenty of Mae spelled M-A-E but none M-E-I.”

“Huh,” she said. “Thank you for doing this. I never would have thought there would be records.”

“We keep them in the House of Shadows, and sometimes, as a child, I had to copy them word for word as punishment.”

Kerrigan frowned. “That sounds torturous.”

“It was,” he admitted. “Who knew it would be useful?”

Kerrigan pulled the book closer to her and paged absently through it. She didn’t know what she was looking for. If there were that many Trulians, she wouldn’t find them, but a Mei might be the key. She had been the one to put up the wall around the House of Shadows after all.

But there was nothing here. She spent an hour thumbing through the records and found nothing.

“What we need,” Fordham said, “is someone who was alive during the Great War, who would remember and talk to us about it. I don’t know anyone old enough though.”

Kerrigan shook her head with a sigh. “I don’t either, but I’m going to find someone.”

28

The Bond

“Congratulations, trainees. You have completed the introductory bond training. Your mount and dismounts have greatly improved. Though we will continue to focus on them as we go into the next section, they will not be the primary concern of the second set of training.”

Kerrigan grinned, knowing what this meant. They were finally going to be able to fly. Flying was her true passion. The first time she’d ever ridden on a dragon, she’d known that she had been made for it. Nothing in all of her life had ever prepared her for finding joy on the back of a dragon high above the city. She’d wanted nothing but her own set of wings from that day forward. That way she could go up into the skies anytime she wanted. But as she’d gotten older, she’d realized two things: she’d never get her own wings and no one was going to give a half-Fae a dragon. She’d been right on both counts even if she’d made her own destiny with the second. It had been luck or fate that gave her Tieran. She couldn’t wait to do more than hover around the arena with him.

“Before we move on,” Alura said, “I have a series of bond tests to determine the strength of your bond.”

Kerrigan’s stomach dropped. That wasn’t going to be good.

“Afternoon classes have been canceled for us to perform these tests. There will be two tests—one for you and one for your dragon. Each test will be scored based on how well you perform together.”

Kerrigan looked to Tieran with a frown.

His face revealed nothing of his own anxiety, but she swore that she could feel it radiating off of him. They’d fumbled through most of bond training so far with him speaking into her mind or her gentle nodding. She’d actually come up with a few signs and magic signatures for him to follow. There was no bonding, but they were beginning to understand each other in ways that they’d never managed in their earlier training sessions. It hadn’t been dire enough. Now, it was do or die.

“Dragons and riders, to opposite ends of the arena,” Alura declared.