woke at dawn, fed Leyra and took her outside to blow off steam, oversaw the Sky recruits’ training, wrote reports, then spent the rest of the day with Leyra.
Taking care of Leyra alone was no easy task. Once, Tauran aired the idea that Kalai might come and spend some time with her, but the dragon specialists insisted Leyra would be less confused by a uniform training method. The Sharoani treated their dragons much differently, after all, and the last thing they wanted was to encourage her wild nature. Falka, too, insisted that Kalai should spend as much time working on the translations as possible, and no matter how much Tauran tried, he couldn’t come up with a sound counter-argument.
So Tauran’s nights were spent alone in the room he shared with Leyra, keeping her entertained, fed and warm.
Already, Leyra had transitioned to eating once every three days. An adult titan could go a month on a decently sized meal. Tauran knew babies grew quickly, but he hadn’t been prepared for the speed at which her spikes grew pointy and her claws sharp. The dragon physicians mused that she would be the size of a small pony within another five weeks, which meant she would soon outgrow Tauran’s room. Her mouthing, too, became a problem, and the main focus of her training. Once, in play, she clamped down on Tauran’s forearm and drew serious blood. He hadn’t been mad at her, it had been an accident after all, but the smell of blood and Tauran’s pain had been enough to render her curled up tight at the foot of his bed, cooing softly. Tauran wrapped his arm around her and drew her into his lap, and she fell asleep sprawled on his chest. After that, she was a little more cautious with her teeth.
After Kalai’s massage, Tauran’s leg, too, had been remarkably well behaved.
The pain wasn’t gone. It never truly left him. But in the afternoons it decreased to such a degree that he forgot about it for several hours at a time. The first time it happened, he had been unexpectedly emotional, and had wanted nothing more than to head for the archive and pull Kalai into his arms.
As time went on, Tauran thought less of Albinus, too. In the days after his arrest, Tauran had inquired again and again about Albinus’s fate. In the end, Falka had pulled him aside, placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “Look, son. I know you were fond of him. But sometimes people aren’t who we think they are. And when people choose to align themselves with traitors and murderers, there’s little we can do to change their destiny.”
After that, Tauran stopped asking, if only because thoughts of Albinus would leave him gloomy for hours, and Leyra, as sensitive as she was to his state of mind, deserved him at his best. So when he heard the Sky Guard was putting out a request for a new saddle maker, Tauran ignored the recruits’ hushed discussions and retreated to his room to work on Leyra’s wing strength.
On the fourteenth day of Tauran’s routine, Catria knocked on his door.
“Do I need to be worried about you?” she asked, leaning against the door frame with her arms and ankles crossed.
“What do you mean?” Tauran wrapped Leyra’s blankets around her curled up body and gently closed her crate to avoid disturbing her.
“I don’t know. I think I can count on one hand the amount of evenings you spent in your room alone in the old days. You were always in the dining hall or the nests or at a bar somewhere. You hated solitude.”
“Well.” Tauran stood, washing chicken off his hands in the basin on the table. “I’ve been busy with work. I’m not twenty-two anymore, Cat. I’ve... matured.”
Catria hummed, not sounding entirely convinced. “’Mature’ isn’t a synonym for ‘lonely’. That’s something else.”
“I’m not...” Tauran paused with his hands on the basin. She was partly right. He had been lonely. For four years, he had been alone with loss, with guilt, with pain. With fear. For four years he’d had nobody to confide in, because the weight of it had crushed him, and there was no way he could pass that kind of weight onto another person. And with time, he’d encased that misery in cement, in iron and steel, layers upon layers until he couldn’t tell himself apart from the defensive shell he had wrapped himself in. And by then, it was too late. If he