Forbidden Honor (Dragon Royals #1)(59)

Talisyn turned to face me but kept walking backward, far more sure-footed than anyone should have the right to be down here. “What is it?”

“Oh. We’re near the cistern, aren’t we? Like we were when we dealt with the Scourge?”

He looked uncomfortable, which was funny, since I wouldn’t think he was embarrassed by any part of his heroic antics during the Scourge attack. I hurried to meet him.

“I guess we are.” He rested a big hand on my shoulder. “Come on. We don’t want to fall too far behind the others.”

He shivered dramatically. “This place gives me the creeps.”

As the two of us caught up, Arren walked through a spider web. Lynx used the pommel of his sword to brush an enormous black spider away while Arren stood there with his hands jammed into his pockets and a tortured look on his face.

“You’ve got some web in your hair,” Jaik observed.

“Why don’t you make yourself useful?” Lynx scolded Jaik, picking web off of Arren’s face. “You know how much he hates spiders.”

“And their webs,” Talisyn added helpfully. “Is that an egg sac by his ear?”

Arren’s broad shoulders hunched up just slightly.

Talisyn brushed it off. “No, I suppose it was just a bit of lint.”

“I am going to beat your ass in the training yard,” Arren said, but Talisyn just grinned.

Lynx picked a last bit of web from Arren’s dark hair and shook it off his fingers. “All better. You don’t have to bother saying I’m your favorite; I know.”

Listening to them banter made me want to be a part of their little group. I turned my shoulder to find Branok staring at me in the same cold, hard way he always was, and a shiver ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the damp chill in the tunnels.

“Come on,” Talisyn told me. “I’d like to put some distance between me and Arren’s misplaced rage. He doesn’t deal well with his fears.”

He slid ahead of me through a narrow passageway, and I followed. I turned back to say something to Arren about how his enormous body might not fit through here, not that I minded the sight of all Arren’s muscles. The others had stopped dead.

My heart rose in my throat, and I moved quickly toward them before I even realized what I was doing. Jaik’s body blocked mine from joining them in the hallway. “What is it?”

Jaik’s gaze met mine. “If you’re going to be one of us, then we’ll see you in the morning.”

He slammed a door shut between us. A heavy metal door, carved with grotesque monsters. My palms hit the cold metal and I shoved my body weight into it, but the door didn’t move; there wasn’t even a handle on my side.

I spun around, only to see a door twenty feet down the other side of the hall swinging shut. Talisyn regarded me regretfully through the crack in the door.

“You’ll be okay,” he told me gruffly just before he slammed it shut, plunging me into darkness.

Gods, this had to be some kind of test. I fumbled through the dark, my hands sliding helplessly across the doors, then lit my flames across my fingers. Shadows danced on the wall, making me jump for a moment, and I breathed in slowly through my nose, exhaling, forcing my heart to calm. I was supposed to be at my stepmother’s in a few hours, and I considered yelling at them, but that would do nothing but shred my last fragments of dignity.

Jaik wasn’t going to relent. He wasn’t the type to be merciful anyway, and he’d probably done this at Branok and Lynx’s urging. They hadn’t seemed very impressed by his grudging compliments.

They didn’t know how terrified I was of being trapped. But even if they had, my fears wouldn’t have mattered to them—no matter how they’d tended Arren and his fear of spiders—because I wasn’t one of them. Being with them had made the tunnels bearable. Now it felt as if the walls were pressing toward me.

Once when I was a little girl playing hide and seek, my competitiveness had overcome my usual resistance to hiding in small spaces; I’d always picked the curtains or crawled under tables. But that time, I’d been brave, determined to win the whole thing—and I’d accidentally gotten locked in a wardrobe.

I’d fought so wildly to escape it that I’d brought the entire thing crashing over. Then my father had been there, pulling me out of the splintered wood and cradling me in his arms. I’d sobbed in part because I was hurt and in part because I was humiliated as my father ordered my playmates and the servants out of the room.

“This is just another scar from your past, sweetheart,” my father had said softly. “But you’re lucky. Your scars are all on the inside. They’re your own secrets.”

I would have preferred if some of my scars were on the outside. Those were the kind of scars other people believed in.

I turned away from the shadows dancing across the walls to face the narrow tunnels. I should be alone down here, as long as there were no Scourge. Lonely was safe, at least.

Would it make a difference in escaping if I were a dragon? Maybe that was part of their test. I moved forward into the narrow tunnels, ducking my head in the places where the ceiling fell low—and trying to ignore the panic that spurted through my blood—until I emerged into a wider tunnel, where maybe there was just enough space for my dragon.

I closed my eyes and raised my hands to either side, trying to call out the dragon.