so she instead embraced him, thanked him sincerely for all his aid, then watched him walk back inside the keep with the ease of a man who wasn’t currently contemplating a trip off the ground where no sensible soul would wish to be. She was appalled to realize there was a part of her—an alarmingly large part—that wished she were walking back inside with him.
She took hold of her terror, shouldered her pack with her horse inside, then turned to Ruith. “What now?”
“We’ll be off.”
She’d been afraid he would say that. She couldn’t think of any reasonable-sounding reason to dawdle, so when Ruith walked over to their mount, she dragged her feet behind him. He looked over his shoulder, then stopped and put his arm around her shoulders.
“I won’t let you fall.”
“I wasn’t worried about what you would do,” she managed. “I was planning on holding on very tightly and concentrating on not screaming.”
“Already my plan yields benefits,” he said with a small smile. He nodded toward the dragon, who seemed to sense that he was about to be carrying at least one rider who wasn’t precisely thrilled about his shape. “The view will be spectacular, I promise.”
“How would you know?” she asked faintly.
“How do you think I know?”
“What I think is that you are not at all who I thought you were,” she said with a shiver. “But since that seems to be the usual fare where you’re concerned, I likely shouldn’t think anything of it.”
“Consider me your very dear friend with a tumultuous past,” he said, turning her toward him. “And since we are such dear friends, perhaps you’ll indulge me in a friendly embrace to settle my nerves.”
“Your nerves,” she huffed, then found she couldn’t say anything else. It was a miserable start to what she was now convinced would be a miserable journey. If she couldn’t even set foot to the path, how was she to continue on it when things became truly dangerous?
She didn’t want to hold on to Ruith so tightly, but she did not like heights of any sort and the thought of clambering onto that dragon’s back and not screaming when he leapt up—
“I could clunk you over the head with my sword and spare you any undue anxiety,” Ruith offered.
She was more tempted by that offer than she wanted to admit. “I don’t think Soilléir’s sword would care for that treatment—oh,” she said in dismay. “I left without the bow you made me. And you forgot yours.”
“Both are stowed in my pack,” he said. “Slightly altered in form for the moment.”
She shivered again. “You have become appallingly accustomed to magic in a very short time.”
“The truth is hard to deny,” he agreed ruefully, “but I’ll admit that if my magic serves us, I’ll use it without hesitation.” He pulled her hood up over her hair. “Shall we go?”
She couldn’t spew out anything that sounded like an assent, but she managed a nod, because the way was clear there before her feet and she had no choice but to walk it. She supposed she might have been forgiven legs that felt like noodles straight from the pot under her. Ruith pretended not to notice, and he did her the enormous favor of hooking her pack onto what was apparently going to serve them as a saddle. Then he helped her up and onto that saddle as if she’d been a feeble old woman.
She realized, as he settled himself in front of her, that she couldn’t breathe. She suspected that if the choice had been between facing his brothers, his father back from the dead, and Droch himself, or facing the thought of that dragon leaping into the air, she would have chosen any of the former three—or all of them together—without hesitation.
Ruith hesitated, then swung suddenly off the dragon. She looked at him in surprise.
“What is it?”
“You steer. I’ll clutch.”
She forced herself to make a noise of humor—it couldn’t have been even charitably termed a laugh—instead of sobbing like the terrified woman she was. “You are a lecherous knave,” she managed.
“But a friendly one,” he said, motioning for her to move forward. “Hurry up, gel. I’m envisioning all sorts of groping whilst you’re busy being terrified.”
She shifted to sit on the forward part of the saddle, which she wasn’t sure was an improvement as it left her looking over the dragon’s neck and ... down. At least the pommel was rather high, which might prevent her from tumbling off the front. Ruith’s