“The Prince.”
She nodded. “But then he found you again, one day. In a field. And even though he knew he should be scared, he… wasn’t. He said you were loud and annoying and you threw up on him.”
“All of that is pretty much true,” I agreed.
I thought I saw the ghost of a smile on her face. “I thought it might be. He doesn’t know how it happened. Did you know that? He doesn’t know the moment he began to see you as his home.”
I hung my head.
“He thinks it might have been the moment you two bonded atop the keep under a field of stars, but he cannot be sure. He remembers that night quite vividly. He said it was the first time he’d ever seen a human heart break up close. He knew then that he wanted to keep you safe. He may not have understood why, but he did. And when you spoke of your castle to him, when you told him he could go with you, he said that he believed that you would keep your promises. That even though you were young and would sometimes make mistakes, you would always try and do the right thing.”
“He has a lot of faith in me,” I said. “I don’t know that I deserve it.”
“Those who do rarely think they should,” Pat said, not unkindly.
“Why was your heart breaking?” Leslie asked. “He said that was your story to tell.”
I laughed wetly. “I was in love. A choice was made to follow an oath rather than a heart. I thought Ryan was choosing the Prince over me.”
“Your cornerstone?” Pat asked, sounding surprised. “He loved another?”
I shook my head. “Not loved. It was duty. But I was so hurt that I couldn’t see the difference.”
“But now?”
“My heart was struck by lightning and made whole again. He keeps it safe.” Even if he was angry with me at the moment, I truly believed that.
They were silent, and I looked back up to find the feathered dragons staring at each other, as if they were speaking without words. They must have come to some kind of agreement, because Leslie nudged Pat, who sighed before she turned back to me.
“Dragons have magic,” she told me. “You understand this, yes?”
I nodded slowly. “You are dreamwalkers. Zero can grow an entire forest.”
“Truly?” Leslie asked. “And you have seen it with your own eyes?”
“He grew a tree right in front of me. It was beautiful.”
Leslie sighed. “How lovely.”
“And Kevin… well. We don’t know exactly what Kevin can do.”
“He’s young yet,” Leslie said. “It’ll come.”
“I don’t know that it matters,” I said honestly. “He’s… enough as it is. More than enough.”
“It’ll come,” Leslie repeated, and there was something in the tone of her voice that suggested she knew more than I did, but before I could ask, Pat spoke again.
“Dreams can be terrible things,” she said. “Nightmares from which there can seem to be no escape. It is where your darkest thoughts come into hazy focus, your greatest fears. We pulled you into a dream, wizard, to see what you were made of. But with you came something we did not expect.”
“Your knight,” Leslie said. “He was not meant to be there. We did not call for him.”
I frowned. “Then how…?”
“Kevin spoke of your broken heart,” Pat said. “That he had never seen anything like it before. And you have said it was mended, piece by piece. Do you trust it? Do you trust the man who holds it in his hands?”
“Always,” I said without hesitation.
“It is why he was there,” Leslie said. “Because in the end, you wished for him so desperately that your magic superseded ours. A wizard and his cornerstone is one of the most powerful bonds in the world. He came because you wished it so, whether you knew it or not.”