[Cassandra’s POV]
Dawn breaks cold over the Black Dragon compound, staining the eastern sky the color of a bruise healing badly.
I stand in the courtyard beside my horse while the delegation assembles—Kael checking saddle straps with mechanical precision, the warriors loading baggage onto the pack mounts, Maren and Torys already mounted. Six people arrived. Six leave. On paper, we accomplished nothing. Paper is for fools.
I adjust my gloves, watching the compound stir. Servants haul water from the well. A patrol changes on the northern wall, riders descending while others ascend, their dragons sleepy in the grey light.
The machinery of a house that believes it survived my visit unscathed. I let them believe it. The most dangerous wounds are the ones the body doesn't register until the blood loss becomes irreversible.
Draven doesn't come to see us off. He sends Theron—smooth, courteous, extending farewells with the warmth of a man performing a duty his lord couldn't stomach.
"Safe travels, Lady Cassandra," Theron says, inclining his head. "May the eastern roads treat you kindly."
"They always do. Please convey my gratitude to Lord Draven for his hospitality. The Black Dragon compound is everything the reputation promised and more." I offer him a polite smile.
The compliment is genuine. It's also a message—I saw everything. Theron smiles cooly and doesn't hear the second meaning—the wrong kind of smart, the kind that sees threats only after they've breached the perimeter.
We ride through the main gate as the sun clears the eastern hills. Behind us, the compound shrinks—dark stone against grey sky, dragon roosts jutting from the cliffs like broken teeth. I look back once. Once is enough to fix every angle in memory.
The exchange with Venna happened two hours before dawn, in the narrow passage between the barracks and the outer wall where the patrol rotation leaves a four-minute gap. I'd mapped the timing my second day and held it like a card I hadn't needed to play.
She was there when I arrived—not because I'd asked, but because a woman running blade drills alone at that hour isn't sleeping, and a woman who isn't sleeping has decided to meet whatever comes in the dark.
I handed her a folded square of parchment—a name, a location, a method. Brennan, the grain trader at the eastern port. Coded correspondence through his shipping manifests, messages buried in trade notation that every merchant house uses and nobody reads carefully. Simple and untraceable.
She read it by the faint light bleeding from the barracks windows. Her face gave nothing away. Her hand, though—the hand that closed around the folded square—tightened with the grip of someone accepting a weapon they've been waiting for without knowing its name.
"I'm not asking for anything today," I told her. "But the day will come when your lord makes a choice that endangers this house, and you'll want someone outside these walls who understands. Someone who listens."
Venna said nothing. She didn't need to. I've read silence since Father taught me that the loudest agreements are the ones people refuse to speak aloud.
A woman that angry, that sidelined, that convinced her lord has been compromised by an outsider—she won't need persuading when the time comes. She'll need only a direction, and I've given her one.
The parchment disappeared into her belt. She turned and walked toward the barracks without a word, stride carrying the tension of someone who has crossed a line and knows it.
Venna doesn't know what she'll provide. Neither do I, yet. But the channel exists—a thread running from the heart of Draven's compound to my hand, invisible, patient, ready to pull.
The road widens past the coastal ridge. Kael rides behind me, and the silence between us has the brittle quality of something that shattered during the night. He warned Evelyn. Went off-script so thoroughly that his usefulness as an instrument has been permanently degraded. I'll deal with that later.
The official dispatch—the one Maren will deliver to the Alliance—says what it should. Productive summit. Trade agreements reinforced. No irregularities. The real report is the one I compose as miles unspool beneath my horse's hooves, and it will say what the official document cannot.
The egg hatched. Evelyn is bonded. The dragon is hidden inside the compound—I couldn't pinpoint its location, but the evidence is conclusive. I watched my sister move through those walls with the grounded certainty of a woman anchored to something immense.
She's stronger than she should be, faster. The tournament victory wasn't luck—it was bonded power channeled through a body absorbing it for months. The dragon is growing. And Draven will fight before he gives her up.
Father will read that and want war. Full mobilization, formal demands backed by force. He'll invoke the Dragon Accords, rally allies. He's a hammer, Father. Every problem looks like something that needs striking harder. I want something more precise.
The prophecy doesn't require an army. It doesn't require politics or tribunals or warships. It requires one thing: the stronger sister must kill the weaker one. Not soldiers. Not proxies. The sister herself, with her own hands. Armies are irrelevant to its fulfillment. I just need the right moment.
I'll convince Father to pursue political channels. Let him rattle his saber, assemble forces. The noise will serve as cover—every eye fixed on troop movements while I position myself for the only action that matters.
A blade, a moment, a sister watching the army at her gates instead of the shadow at her back.
The compound disappears behind the coastal ridge. Salt air gives way to scrubland warmth. My delegation rides in formation, six horses casting long shadows, and from the outside we look like a diplomatic party returning from an unremarkable summit.
But my hands are tight on the reins, and the tightness isn't strategy. It's fear. I catalogue the emotion with clinical detachment because Father taught me that unexamined feelings become vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities become graves.
I'm the trained one, the chosen one, the daughter who received every weapon while Evelyn received silence. I am the stronger sister. The prophecy says so. Father says so.
Except Evelyn was supposed to be the weaker sister. That was the foundation beneath every plan, every cruelty designed to keep her small and afraid.
The Evelyn I grew up with would have crumbled under my corridor ambush. Would have wept at Kael's rehearsed tenderness. Would have broken under the weight of hiding in enemy territory with a stolen dragon and a price on her head.
Nothing about what I witnessed suggests weakness. Not the woman who shut Kael down with the flat indifference of someone who's moved past the wound until the knife itself became irrelevant.
Not the warrior who defeated Venna and earned a commander's mark. Not the sister who stood in the same compound as me for days and never flinched, never ran, never became the frightened girl I needed her to be.
She was supposed to break. She didn't. She was supposed to be small. She isn't. And if the prophecy requires the stronger sister to kill the weaker one, then the question I've avoided since recognizing her walk across that dining hall is the one tightening my hands on leather reins and sitting like iron in my throat—what if I'm the weaker one?
The road stretches east toward Mintia. I ride into the rising sun and compose my father's report, and the fear rides with me—quiet, patient, growing—like a dragon in a cave that nobody knows about yet.