“We’ll stop it somehow, princess,” said Slate.

  “Yes,” she said, even though she knew it was a lie.

  She went into the hallway and she sent out the order to be dispersed through the ranks. Then she went downstairs to find Dove.

  She remembered how she’d once promised Dove to take her riding on the back of her dragon. This wouldn’t be the way they’d hoped, of course, but she would keep her word.

  But she was cut off on her way to the rooms in the healing wing by the rush of hordes of ice monsters.

  These were like Deke had been once—full-on rage, no thought, no words, nothing but instinct. They rushed through the hallways, letting out animal whines.

  She watched as riders cut them down, swords slicking into cheekbones, under chins, through temples.

  She watched as ice monsters leaped and tackled and seized. She watched the ice monsters’ teeth sink into skin here and there.

  She was unable to move or speak. Simply watching. Stunned. Sick.

  Slate yelled, tugging on her, and she stood still for long moments.

  Long enough that one of the monsters ran for her.

  Slate slammed a knife into its temple and pulled it free.

  The monster slithered lifeless before her feet.

  “Banyan!” screamed Slate.

  Then she let him pull her and they went up the stairs. It was madness. There were bodies everywhere—bitten bodies, headless bodies. And fire. So many things were on fire.

  It was smoke and blood and the smell of sweat, and the sounds of cries and growls.

  They got to the landing tower, and others were there, taking off into the air, and she found Erach and he found her. Yilia was there.

  She and Slate climbed onto the dragons.

  She hesitated. She yelled across at him, over the din of the fray around him. “I should stay! I should do something!”

  “Dead leadership is worse than alive leadership,” he yelled back. “Someone told me that.”

  She remembered making this argument, but she wasn’t much of a leader, was she?

  Erach sent messages through the bond to her, messages about getting Yilia free and safe, messages about securing his mate. Then he would come back with her, then they’d have the revenge they’d planned.

  Banyan was so tired of revenge.

  So tired of death.

  She let the dragon take her away and she peered down at the school below as they rose higher and higher into the air.

  They rose into the layer of smoke and ash, and she couldn’t breathe, and her eyes stung, and then—

  They broke through it, and here, above all that, the sky was blue and the sun was shining and there were birds calling to each other on the breeze.

  Banyan slumped into Erach’s scales.

  The world was ending.

  But up here, the birds were still singing.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IT TOOK WEEKS for Odion to get everything settled at South Ridge.

  At first, he wasted too much time looking for them.

  He didn’t think they would have left. He thought Banyan would have stayed to the bitter end, to defend the school, to make her final stand against him.

  He certainly wouldn’t have left.

  Maybe she was a coward.

  Or maybe… maybe she’d just decided she was done with him. And this hurt, hurt in that way that things weren’t supposed to hurt, not now that he was part of the Family. He didn’t understand why these emotions kept breaking through, and they disturbed him.

  He also wasn’t certain why he’d been so careful to protect Dove. However, it was the first place he’d gone, the minute he’d infiltrated the school. He’d come in with probably the fifth wave of his army, and he’d expected to find Banyan still there at that point. But he hadn’t seen her at all.

  He had to admit, the victory hadn’t been as satisfying as he’d hoped.

  He’d sort of thought she’d have something up her sleeve, something surprising.

  He’d hoped, of course, that she hadn’t realized he was actively recruiting all through the past month or so. He was reminded of a strategy he’d seen her use back in the glider skirmishes, wherein she’d load up several of her players with nearly all of the arrows and then leave the rest with only one or two. The riders with an abundance of arrows would be at an advantage. He’d just done that—loaded up the arrows—made his army larger.

  He didn’t want her to have guessed that.

  Well.

  Maybe he wished he would have left her clues if she wasn’t going to figure it out, however.

  Of course she hadn’t.

  He’d seen it in that last meeting they’d had, wherein she and Slate had tried to kill him, wherein she’d stabbed him. She was breaking somewhere.

  He remembered the breaking.

  After his bask had fallen to the Frost, after everyone had died, he’d felt terrified and there had been so much pressure on his shoulders. People could die, and it would be his fault.

  That was what had broken Banyan.

  He, however, was here, warm and safe in the arms of the Family, where no one died and nothing was so dire. He wasn’t breaking. He was having fun.

  It had been supposed to be fun.

  But she hadn’t wanted to play, and now she was gone, and now he had the school, but it was dissatisfying in some way, because it shouldn’t have been that easy. Banyan had folded. She hadn’t lived up to her full potential. Or… maybe it was his fault. Maybe…

  Anyway, he hadn’t gone directly for her when he’d arrived, not that it probably would have mattered, he didn’t suppose. Maybe he could have bitten her. Bitten Slate. Bitten either or both would have eased things for him.

  He was lonely.

  He shouldn’t be.

  There was no loneliness in the Family.

  He hadn’t gone directly for her that day, though, the day of the fight, when he’d come into the school with his army. No, instead, he’d gone elsewhere, to find Dove.

  Dove tried to block the door, but he pushed through and stepped into the room. There were people—his people—Family members—strapped to cots, chained down, missing their arms and legs. He knew she’d done this, of course—that Banyan had stolen away the members of the Family and mutilated them. They’d found the missing limbs.

  He couldn’t read the thoughts of the rest of the members of the Family, but they felt things from each other. They felt pain when the purpose was in danger, and when the purpose was not, they were alleviated of that pain in pursuit of the good of the Family.

  Dove sprinted across the room and took up a scalpel from the far counter, where a number of vials were sitting out. Uttering a cry, she threw herself at Odion.

  He caught her by the arm and twisted it behind her back. “Drop it.”

  “No,” she said, gritting her teeth.

  He wrenched the scalpel out of her hand and tossed it across the room.

  “You don’t understand,” Dove said. “You don’t know what you’re going to do here, the work you’re going to destroy.”

  “I do understand,” he said. “And I’m not destroying anything. You’re working on what you call a cure. I want you to keep working on it.”

  She went stiff in confusion and disbelief.

  He let go of her. “Yes. I want to see if you can do it.”

  “Why?” she said.

  He rolled his head on his shoulders. “Because if you do, it will be here, with me and the Family. If that knowledge exists, we should have it.”

  Dove blinked at him. “What would you want with that knowledge?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, glaring at her. He couldn’t make this make sense either.

  Later, when Colonel Rabi found out that he had sentries on the doors to the healer’s wing and that everyone had been told never to bite Dove and to do whatever she requested, the colonel didn’t seem pleased.

  They were back in the colonel’s old office, though the furniture in there was too burnt to be used. Much of the school was damaged due to fires, though they’d all been put out by this point. There would need to be significant repairs before anything could be properly accomplished.

  The colonel didn’t sit down, then, and neither did Odion. But they stood in the same positions as they had time and time again when Odion was a student and the colonel ran the school. “What’s this about your letting Dove ‘cure’ the gift?”

  “If there’s a significant way to defeat us, sir, we need to understand it,” said Odion. He often called the colonel sir, even though Odion was the one in charge of, well, everything. But the colonel, he was… it was habit. He supposed the colonel was his advisor, and he did take the advice of the colonel to heart more often than not. He was used to having the colonel around.

  “I see,” said colonel. “Not simply eradicate it?”

  “We can’t,” said Odion. “You can’t crush knowledge. I guarantee Banyan knows the theory behind it all, and if she knows that, she can recreate it. If I’m going to fight it, I need to be ahead of her.” He had moved Dove out of the dungeons, in fact, given her a wing in the school, someplace with one door that could be barred and protected. He didn’t want anyone to do anything that would impede Dove’s progress.

  “Banyan,” murmured the colonel. “You haven’t bitten her yet.”

  “I’m going to.”

  “And?” The colonel raised his eyebrows. “How about the rest of it?”

  “Of what?”

  “Did you fuck her?”

  “Oh, elemental forces, we’re talking about this again?” Odion hadn’t brought up the conversation they’d had before, the one about erections, and he’d tried to put the entire thing from his mind.

  “I take that to mean no,” said the colonel. He nodded. “Good.”

  “What about you?” said Odion.

  “Me?” The colonel touched his chest. “Does that matter?”

  Odion blinked. “You did. Did it work?”

  The colonel looked away, chuckling in a way that Odion took to mean that it did work, just fine, that sex was entirely and utterly achievable.

  “Is there… fluid?” said Odion.

  The colonel coughed.

  “We can’t…” Odion gestured. “We’re all rendered sterile by the bonding process. It doesn’t undo that?”

  “That’s not how the Frost reproduces,” said the colonel. “So, no, I’m sure that wouldn’t happen.”

  Odion nodded.

  “Listen, you’re still interested, undoubtedly,” said the colonel. “I know how a bond works. I was obsessed with Marigold for no reason I can even fathom, but it does us no good now. We have the school. We have the power. If you see her, there’s no reason not to bite her.”

  “I will bite her.”

  “Good,” said the colonel, nodding. “Now, about Dove.”

  “Don’t worry about Dove,” said Odion. “I’ll deal with that. Let’s talk about our next moves. Do we have to worry about reprisals, or can we send out word that things have changed here in Hazai? We are the new Quorum, we rule the country, and we must commence the spread. Then, once that is complete, we can commence classes here.”

  “Yes,” said the colonel, smiling. “It will be good for school to be back in session, especially now that we are spreading the Family far and wide.”

  “Everyone in the Trinal Kingdoms in the Family, everyone strong. Everyone nearly indestructible. All of us happy and safe and together. It’s a good goal, colonel. We must keep our eyes on the future.”

  “I’ve been doing a bit of thinking, and I wanted to share it with you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think we must go and bite the ruling families first, in both Noch and Aleen,” said the colonel. “Once we have the kings and queens in the Family, everyone will follow suit. It should be easy enough.”

  “And any ‘cure’ will be safe here, locked away, and I’ll have found a way to counter it,” said Odion.

  “All right,” said the colonel, shrugging.

  There was a brief silence, then. Nothing else to discuss.

  “I’m going,” said Odion, who still felt as if he needed to wait for the colonel to dismiss him.

  “One more thing,” said Colonel Rabi.

  “What?”

  “We turned enough students to know where they were all heading,” said the colonel. “Where Banyan is.”

  “You said we don’t need them anymore,” said Odion. “You said there’s no reason to do anything but bite her.”

  “Well, don’t you wish to do that? To have her back?”

  “Oh, fine, where are they?”

  “Aleenan shores, all the way to the south. Port city of Canciunne,” said the colonel. “We can send soldiers there.”

  “How? We’d have to create ice clouds to travel that far. It’s very warm there. It seems to tax our resources for no good reason. She retreated, ceding this place to us. We won. It’s over.”

  The colonel nodded. “Can’t argue with that.”

  Odion nodded back. He waited, realizing again that he was waiting to be dismissed. “Sir,” he said finally, and then stalked out of the room.

  But that had been weeks ago. Several times, Odion had thought about sending out someone after Banyan, but that wasn’t what he wanted.

  He wanted to go himself.

  Of course, he couldn’t. He couldn’t simply leave. People would notice if he was gone. He was far too conspicuous now, head of the Family, the war hero who had won the battle against the humans and given them the South Ridge Academy. He couldn’t go to her.

  Didn’t want to, anyway.

  He only…

  Mornings, staring out into the distance under the still-cloudy sky crowded with ash, he had a strange feeling deep in his chest.

  This wasn’t the way things were supposed to have gone.

  Everything was wrong.

  THE FIRST DAYS at the ocean were like some kind of healing magic.

  Banyan had forgotten beauty, had forgotten relaxation, had forgotten splashing.

  There weren’t many of them who’d gotten away from the Academy, all told. The army of dragon riders now numbered less than fifty, and they all slept in groves of palms along the beach. In the mornings, they went out into the surf to splash and play and the dragons flew out over the water and brought back wriggling, gleaming fish, which they skinned and cooked in fire pits they made in the sand, lit by dragon fire. In the afternoons, they hid in the shade or swam deep in the water, because it was too hot else.

  And the nights, she spent in Slate’s arms.

  At first, they were sort of dull and blank, too shocked to know what to feel at all.

  But then, they began to break against each other, crying as they clung to each other. They whispered things to each other about Odion, about that last battle, about the future.

  They didn’t know what that held, but one thing they both felt deeply was gratitude.

  They had each other.

  Before, in the wake of Odion’s turning and the constant battle, they’d hardly touched each other with the exception of heats. Now, their lovemaking was frequent and it was different, too. There was some playful element to it, often, one of them topping the other, but it always seemed to settle somewhere else. It became about the two of them joining together, the two of them merging, the two of them finding their pleasure in each other’s arms, and feeling their love for each other.

  She loved Slate.

  It was different than the way she’d loved Odion.

  Sometimes they talked about that.

  “He… I don’t know, I was fascinated by him,” Slate whispered, smoothing his hands over her bare back. “His fame preceded him, of course. I couldn’t help but be intrigued by him. I wanted him, but maybe because of his reputation, first and foremost.”

  “Maybe, me too,” she admitted, shamefully. Hadn’t she liked being admired by an important man? Hadn’t he made her feel as though her ego was being stroked? Hadn’t it been about that, at least a little, in the beginning? “But it wasn’t just that.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Nothing so shallow explains the attraction to him.”

  “Can you explain it?” She didn’t understand it herself, but then, she didn’t think things like attraction were supposed to make sense exactly. You either felt attraction or you didn’t, and who knew why these things were the way they were.

  “I think because he was this collision of opposites. He was so ruthless and powerful and sure of himself and yet… inside… this part of him was just crying out to be loved, I think. I wanted to soothe that. I wanted to hold onto him so tight he never felt alone again.”

  “We all felt alone,” she whispered.

  “Yes, here we were, practically children, frightened, alone, told we were going to save the Trinal Kingdoms.”

  “The last hope,” she said. “We failed.”

  “We did,” he said. “But first we failed him. Nothing mattered after that, not really. It was the end.”

  She wanted to cry. She rubbed her face into Slate’s chest.

  He crushed her against him.

  Then they made love again, slowly, her straddling him, moving her hips in slow, tortuous circles while they both gasped.

  They slept.

  The next morning, it was fish in the morning light, swimming in the glittering water, playing silly games with the dragons until the day grew too hot and they all retreated.

  The days faded in and out of each other.

  One day, Banyan was sitting up on a rock outcropping, watching the waves splash against it. It was late in the day, and the sun hung heavy behind the trees and the water was deep purple in the distance, and everything seemed unreal.

  Slate was lying next to her, on his back, eyes closed, a smile playing on his lips.

  “I’ve been a fool,” said Banyan.

  “No,” said Slate. “Don’t be any harder on yourself than you already have, princess.”

  “I got it all wrong, I think.” She sighed. “I felt different my whole life, and I thought, I supposed, if I was going to be so wretchedly different, at least there should be some compensation. At least I should be able to do something useful for other people.”