[Evelyn’s POV]
I find Draven in the war room after midday, alone—Riven caught my expression when I entered and left without being asked. The door closes, and Draven turns to face me, sleeves rolled to his forearms, ink staining his right hand.
"Your sister requested a private meeting this morning," he says before I can speak. "She named you. Named the egg. Demanded your return for tribunal."
"What did you tell her?"
"That bond law predates her accusations by two centuries, and that she's welcome to petition the Alliance formally if she'd like to waste her time more publicly." Something cold and satisfied ghosts across his mouth. "She didn't enjoy the experience."
I know what Cassandra will do next because I grew up watching her do it.
The pattern is etched into my bones the way old scars are etched into skin—familiar, unavoidable. She tried the legal strike and Draven didn't flinch. She invoked Lyanna's name and he dismissed her like a petitioner who'd wasted his morning.
My sister is brilliant and adaptable, but predictable in her cruelty. When the blade doesn't cut, she reaches for poison. And the poison she'll reach for now has a name.
"She wouldn't." I press my palms flat against the desk's edge because my hands want to shake and I won't allow them to. "Draven, listen. She's not done. I know her—the way she thinks. She tried law and you shut her down. She tried Lyanna and you held. She's going to go sideways now, somewhere you're not braced for."
His dark eyes narrow. "Go on."
"She's going to use Kael." I say his name the way you say the name of a disease you survived—flat, clinical. "She'll engineer something. A scene, an encounter, something that looks intimate between him and me.”
I watch his face carefully, to notice his doubts, if he has any. “Something designed to land where you can see it. She doesn't need it to be real. She just needs it to plant a question you can't stop asking."
Draven goes very still—not performative stillness but the deep, involuntary kind. His jaw shifts, a movement I've learned to read in the dark between breaths.
"You know her tactics well," he says quietly.
"I survived eighteen years of them. I know the playbook because I was on the practice field." I hold his gaze without flinching. "She used Kael against me in Mintia—dangled him, withdrew him, turned him into proof I wasn't worthy. She'll use him against you the same way. Different target, same blade."
"And Kael." His voice drops lower, the syllables tightening around the name like a fist closing. "What does he want from this?"
"What he always wants—to follow whatever script puts him on the winning side. He's not the threat, Draven. He's the instrument. Cassandra is the hand."
He studies me across the war table, and I watch the question build before he asks it. Watch his jaw tighten another fraction, the tendons in his forearms shifting beneath rolled sleeves.
When it comes, the words are quiet and controlled in a way that tells me exactly how much they cost. "Do you still have feelings for him?"
The room contracts. Maps and patrol routes fall away until it's just his dark gaze and my answer and the fragile, ferocious thing we've built between cave walls and tangled sheets.
"I have feelings about him," I say, steady, because this I know with absolute certainty. "None of them are affection."
He holds my gaze for four heartbeats. His jaw releases by a fraction—easing from stone to iron. He nods once, reaches across the desk, catches my hand, and pulls me around to stand in front of him.
His fingers lace through mine, thumb tracing my knuckle with a possessiveness that borders on bruising. He kisses me—hard, brief, a man branding something he's afraid of losing—and when he pulls back, his forehead rests against mine. "I'll handle Cassandra," he says, rough against my mouth.
"We'll handle her," I correct. But I see the seed land. It's there in the way his eyes don't quite warm all the way back, in the tension still coiled through his shoulders.
Cassandra's poison doesn't need to be believed. It just needs to exist—settling between trust and scar like water into a crack that winter will freeze and widen.
The sea caves are darker than usual when I descend that evening, the air charged and metallic like sky before lightning. Through the bond, Aspis pulses with a restless energy that presses against the inside of my skull. I round the final bend and stop, because Aspis fills the cavern.
She's the size of a warhorse—shoulders level with my head, neck arched beneath stalactites that her horns nearly scrape. Wings half-furled, their tips brush the cave walls on either side, dragging pale lines through dark stone.
White scales ripple across doubled muscle and bone, and her amber eyes burn with an intelligence deeper than anything I can track. She shifts her weight and a stalactite snaps against her wing membrane with a crack that echoes like thunder.
"You're enormous," I breathe, pressing my palm to her snout. The scales are hot, thrumming with a pulse that doesn't match my own.
"I am what I was always going to become." Her voice through the bond carries gravity I've never heard—something older than either of us. "And this cave cannot hold what I am becoming."
"I know. The summit is ending, and once Cassandra leaves—"
"No." The word reverberates through me like a struck bell. Aspis lowers her head until her eye—enormous, amber, ringed with fire—is level with mine. "You speak in plans and timelines. But I am not a political problem to be managed, Evelyn. I was not born only for you."
The words hit somewhere deep and unprotected, and I stand with my hand on her scales while she continues through the bond.
Her certainty is absolute—not arrogance but the calm, terrible conviction of something that knows its purpose the way rivers know the sea. "Something is approaching that has nothing to do with your sister's cruelty or your father's politics. Something that will require every wing in the sky and every rider who can hold a bond."
A chill slides through me, settling at the base of my spine. "What's coming? Aspis, what do you feel?"
"I feel it the way I feel you—constant, approaching, inevitable." Her wing shifts, another stalactite cracks, stone fragments raining into dark water. "I cannot fulfill that purpose from inside a cave. No dragon born for fire was meant to hide underground while the world decides whether it's ready for her."
I press my forehead against her snout, and the heat sears through my skin into bone. Through the bond, I feel the edges of what she's describing—not a vision but a pressure building at the horizon like a storm that hasn't crested.
Vast, darkening and patient. I don't fully understand it, don't know what shape it will take when it arrives. But Aspis's certainty is a living thing inside my chest, and it doesn't feel like fear. It feels like a warning.
I hold my dragon in the dark, feeling her breathe against my palms, and for the first time since I fled Mintia, the danger ahead feels larger than the danger behind. Something beyond house rivalries, beyond Cassandra's poison—something that makes all of it look small.
The cave groans as Aspis shifts again, wings scraping stone, body outgrowing its shelter the way truth outgrows every lie built to contain it. Whatever is approaching doesn't care whether we're ready.