Page 25 of Dragon’s Ending

Turning off the bedside lamp, I let my head drop onto the rather thin pillow and absolutely did not spend time trying to impose some kind of order on the impressions Dominic Bedwyr left in his turbulent wake. I had no interest in understanding him.

Which would have been a far more convincing argument if I hadn’t, quite clearly, been thinking about him anyway. I turned onto my side and firmly diverted my thoughts back to supper. To the long table, the restrained conversations, and the way Rhodri’s presence had dominated everything.

It was normal for a head of family to command deference and respect, but there was something else at work here. A constant awareness and anxiety, as if everyone was quietly measuring what they said and how they said it. It seemed like an exhausting way to live.

And Dominic… I frowned into the darkness. Dominic had sat within arm’s reach of his father for most of the meal, yet there’d been no interaction between them at all. It hadn’t seemed like deliberate avoidance, because that would have implied awareness of one another. It was more as if they occupied entirely separate spheres.

Instead, Rhodri had directed his attention towards the two older dragons seated to his left, both of whom had the look of long-established authority about them. White-haired, composed, and evidently accustomed to being listened to. The conversation there had been low-voiced but steady, the kind of exchange that suggested seriousness rather than polite dinner-table talk.

An inner circle, perhaps, offering counsel to Rhodri. Or, at least, an audience for whatever he was planning. If that was the case, then Dominic was conspicuously absent from it.

I turned over again, more restlessly this time. It wasn’t my concern. The power structures of another family, particularly one under the authority of someone like Rhodri, were not something I had either the right or the inclination to involve myself in. And yet, Dominic was his heir, and his absence in Rhodri’s inner circle was significant.

There’d been something in his reaction earlier, when I’d told him about the revelations at the Moot. Not just anger, but as if being cut out of things by his father mattered to him.

I rubbed at an itch above my eye. If that were the case, it cast rather a different light on his behaviour. I’d taken his constant provocativeness for a kind of careless arrogance, a tendency to unsettle people simply because he could. But perhaps it wasn’t as simple as that.

And because I was thinking about him, my thoughts chose to take a completely unhelpful turn, revisiting in excruciating detail the moment when he’d stripped his shirt off at the castle. I hadn’t meant to look. Not properly. There’d been more urgent concerns at the time—such as preventing him from breaking every dragon law in existence.

That hadn’t, evidently, prevented me from noticing. The memory was irritatingly clear, showing me over and over the play of muscle under his skin as he moved, his careless lack of self-consciousness about it. He was used to drawing attention, to everyone looking at him.

That didn’t mean I had to be one of them. I wasn’t here to catalogue Dominic Bedwyr’s more… distracting qualities. I had work to do, and a finite amount of time in which to do it.

The fact that I was currently lying in the dark, replaying his shirtlessness over and over, rather undermined that position.

I turned over again, pulling the covers with me as if that might help.

It didn’t.

Chapter Twelve

DOMINIC

I didn’t mean to go back. I had better things to do than sit in a dusty room sifting through centuries of Bedwyr boredom while Berstow ignored me.

My feet took me there anyway.

I paused outside the door, fingers on the handle, and wondered what I was doing. Sure, it’d seemed like fun to poke at Berstow, to see if I could get him to drop that exasperating calm. Right up until it became clear he wasn’t going to get annoyed. To the point where he’d wanted me to go back to the castle with him yesterday. He’d wanted to involve me, even if it was only in old records that meant nothing to anyone.

He’d also told me not to go back and tear down the wall in dragon form last night. “Might damage whatever’s behind it that way,” he said. “And then we’ll never know.”

“So, what? You’re happy to wait a few more centuries for it to crumble away?”

There was something approaching a smile in his eyes. “There’s no room for impatience when studying history. But if Evelyn thinks there’s something important there, she’ll talk to your father about sending a team in with tools, I guess.”

Who would report to Rhodri, completely cutting me out of the loop. Anyway, I didn’t care about some old scratches in ancient stone walls. I’d left Berstow and gone flying in the dark night sky. It’d settled me, the way it always did.

I pushed the door open to find Berstow was already there. Same place as yesterday, though he’d shifted his position slightly, one leg tucked up under him on the chair like he’d forgotten how chairs worked. There were new stacks of papers covering the table in front of him in what looked like chaos except for the little note cards perched neatly on the top of each pile. Even his handwriting was controlled and tidy, damn it.

He didn’t look up, but he did go very still as he registered my presence.

I shut the door behind me a little harder than necessary and crossed the room, not bothering to be quiet about it. If he was going to ignore me, he could do it properly.

He’d made headway since I was last here. The shelves to the left of the window had large gaps in, and those to the right had papers put in defined sections. Almost as if he’d carried on where I’d left off yesterday. Which felt odd, somehow. Maybe it was the dragonish instinct not to share.

I turned away from the shelves and drifted past his table, slower than I needed to, close enough that I could see what he was working on. Something genealogical, by the look of it. Names, dates, lines drawn between them. Riveting.

I moved away again, heading back to the window. The sun was out, causing bright prisms through the raindrops on the glass. Under the ever-present scent of dust and old paper lay another scent. Something warm and alive and unexpectedly pleasing.