through his thick lips, and Aron woke feeling like every bone in his body had been rendered to liquid, then re-formed at strange angles. This troubled him, but only marginally, as he was grateful to wake at all. For a moment, he imagined he was back at the Ruined Keep, but then he realized there were no walls around him, and he was still outside.
His skin and mind tingled with the warmth of foreign energy, and he realized Blath had been ministering to him with some powerful and deep healing graal. The Sabor woman was bending over him, covered by nothing but the burned tatters of the brown robe she typically wore on their outings from Triune. Moments later, he felt almost whole again, save for some slight swelling and cracking in his bottom lip.
Cool blue light broke the gray clouds above Blath’s head, signaling dawn breaking across the northern reaches of Eyrie. “He’s awake.” She stood and walked away from him, not bothering to clutch the tatters of her robes. She was already shifting, with streaks of yellow-golden fur forming along her limbs as she moved. “We should leave now.”
Aron’s mind turned sluggishly toward the person next to him.
Dari.
With no scales, no fangs, and no gouts of fire spilling from her pale, pressed lips.
She was only Dari again, oddly small in her scorched, smudged gray robes. She was hugging herself and shivering, her skin a sickly ash color, and her dark hair hung in disarray about her face and shoulders.
When she looked at Aron, she seemed both ashamed and angry. “Never take a chance like that again. I cannot understand how you’re still alive.”
“I had to do it.” He straightened himself on the ground and tried to look as certain as he sounded. “You’re the one who told me there would be times when it served the greater good to use my legacy. It was either die in one fashion, or risk death in the other. Besides, you might have regretted roasting me and Blath, too, and making a meal of us both.”
Dari frowned at him. “I wouldn’t have harmed you.”
Aron heard the worry and doubt in her tone, or his graal perceived it, but he didn’t challenge her. “The bandits?”
“Gone.” She closed her eyes and rested her head atop her drawn knees. “No sign of them, according to Blath. It’s as if they vanished into the dirt, rocks, and trees.”
Aron said nothing, but wondered what Blath might have done with the bandits, if she had found them. Perhaps it was better not to ask that question.
“No one will believe a handful of rogues,” Dari said as if she hoped to convince herself. Her lips pursed as a few yards away, Blath finished her transition. “No Fae has ever been able to command a Stregan, Aron.”
“That we know of,” he countered, wondering if his care and concern for Dari gave him some sort of advantage she didn’t expect. “In the old times, such things might have occurred. We did live in peace once, Fae and Fury.”
He remembered what Platt had told him, about how the two races needed each other, about neither being whole without the other, and felt like he understood this even more.
Dari got to her feet, still seeming drained to half of her usual presence. As she walked toward Blath, her gait was stiff. Aron forced himself to get up and follow her, feeling just as awkward and sore as she looked.
When he reached her, he felt compelled to tell her the one lingering truth still troubling him. “I thought I understood, about you and Kate and what you are, especially after meeting with Platt—but I didn’t.”
Dari reached Blath and placed her palm against one furry shoulder. She didn’t look at him. “I know. You didn’t, and Stormbreaker doesn’t. That’s something I should remember.”
The sadness and resignation in her words made Aron want to reach out and take hold of her, but he couldn’t seem to move. He hadn’t meant that her Stregan form put him off, only that he better grasped how important it was to locate Kate, before someone did manage to employ her powers for their own ends.
Dari leaped upward and took her position behind Blath’s neck before Aron could form the right words, and a few moments later, he gave up trying. Dari had almost killed him, but she had no less effect on him now than before.
With now-practiced ease, Aron used Blath’s bent back knee to climb to her broad back.