Deven and the Dragon - Eliot Grayson Page 0,52
Would it be different, reading Deven’s? Would the echoes of Deven’s childhood excitement waft off the pages and wrap Fiora in wonder? Fiora drifted, and he smiled, and his chest ached with a pain he couldn’t bear to name.
Chapter Fourteen
Two weeks slipped by, more quickly than any in Fiora’s memory, a string of sunny afternoons and quiet evenings.
There was no more drunkenness, but Fiora returned to his own dinner table and made sure to send for the best his cellars could offer in the way of wine, just for the pleasure of seeing Deven’s face light up as he tasted it. By day Fiora let Deven drag him all over the countryside, rambling through hedgerows and climbing hills to see the view. They stayed away from other people, Deven helping Fiora hide behind trees or, once, in a blackberry bramble, both of them laughing like schoolboys. Fiora complained for days about the tiny rents in his coat left by the thorns, but he ate the berries Deven picked for him and kept it to himself that he thought they were the nicest thing he’d ever tasted, dusty and half-withered as they were.
And after dinner they retired to the library, where Fred knew, after the first day, to set extra candles. Fiora reclaimed his favorite chair; Deven occupied the matching one to its right. Sometimes they talked idly, and at other times they both buried their noses in something and didn’t surface for hours.
Fiora wished he could ask Deven to let him read Deven’s own books, rather than the library’s admittedly generous offerings, but that would have meant possibly betraying his own secret through his eagerness. The night after the picnic, Deven had come up to the study and taken his trunk away to his own room — first opening it, with uncharacteristic shyness, to allow Fiora a glimpse of the contents. Fiora bit his tongue lest he admit he’d already looked without permission. His guilt over that transgression weighed on him, but confession was beyond his courage after the golden afternoon they’d spent by the stream. Would a human look on his moment of weakness the same way a dragon would, as the worst possible invasion of privacy? Possibly not, but he couldn’t bring himself to risk ruining such a perfect day.
On the third night, as they were retiring from the library, Deven followed Fiora to the foot of his tower. “Are you flying tonight?” he asked, leaning in so closely that Fiora could feel the gust of his breath over his own face. It was scented with the sweet wine they’d had with dessert — a chocolate custard concoction Fiora loved, proving that Mrs. Pittel had forgiven him. He suspected Deven had talked her round.
“I thought I might,” Fiora managed. Deven was so close, looming over him in the semi-darkness in the best possible way. “Do you have some other plan?”
Deven hesitated and then smiled, the kind of smile Fiora would have hoarded along with his books, if it were possible to preserve and store away. “I was hoping you might let me stay on the top of the turret while you fly,” he said softly. “And watch you up there. It’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Fiora couldn’t possibly say no to that; he spent two hours that night wheeling through the sky, making sure to be at his most regally draconic-looking when he passed across the moon. It was a waning quarter, and so not as dramatic a backdrop as a full moon — but Fiora made the most of it, spreading his wings and lifting his head at an appealing angle. The wind cooperated that night, blowing steadily and without too much force, so that gusts didn’t push him off course.
Deven was smiling, his eyes wide with delight, when Fiora landed. It was difficult to go to bed alone.
But he did, that night and all the others. Andrei’s sour reminders of Deven’s likely ulterior motives, issued every day like clockwork, had faded into the back of Fiora’s mind. It was possible, after all, that Deven had agreed to the town council’s nonsensical plan out of a desire for variety and adventure — or simply to make himself agreeable. Fiora hadn’t seen any evidence to the contrary, and Andrei’s pessimism began to sound like the croaking of an old raven: constant, rasping, and ultimately possible to simply ignore.
But Fiora couldn’t forget the curse: that bloody blight on his life that he couldn’t escape, and that weighed