A storm passed across the empress’s face.

“How are the dragons the high magistrate sent to you?” I asked again. “Are they well?”

“They’ve taken ill.” Her voice was soft.

I shivered. I could feel them in the distance, faint threads of connection stretching and spinning between us. In them, I sensed the walls of their illness—the same thing that had weighed down the dragons in the ruins above Flamecrest. “I can heal them.”

“That is unnecessary.”

“Are you that proud?” I stood before her throne again, no longer the Hopebearer in this discussion, but the Dragonhearted. So close to the first dragon’s bones, I could feel the ancient power rippling off them—into me. “Or did Paorah send people to heal them?”

“Yes.”

“And have they been successful?”

She said nothing.

“I healed the dragons in the ruins,” I said, stepping up the dais until I stood over her. “I felt their agony, just as I can feel that of the dragons placed in your care. They won’t recover. The people sent to heal them will be unsuccessful. They’re dying, Apolla, and if you turn me away, you’ll be turning away the only benefit of all this business with the Fallen Isles.”

“But you can heal them?” Now, a note of hope entered her voice, and for the first time it wasn’t a carefully planted display of emotion. Now that I heard the difference, I’d never miss it again.

Suddenly, she was just a young woman who’d grown up listening to tales of dragons, who saw the Drakontos titanuses at the mouth of the River Akron every day, and who sat on a throne guarded by the bones of a dead dragon. Now, finally, she’d been given the opportunity to have living dragons—only for them to wither under her care.

In her, I saw a shadowy mirror of myself, raised in a political world though her heart belonged elsewhere. But she’d never seen living dragons as a child, never held a baby Drakontos raptus and fallen deeply in love, and maybe she’d never needed them in the same way. She didn’t have a dragon soul inside her, after all, straining to get out. The sanctuary for dragons had been a sanctuary for me, too, the only place I’d never felt trapped and tangled in anxiety. But Apolla had accepted her role as empress—perhaps too soon—and here she was: a conqueror with dying dragons.

Perhaps she would decorate her throne room with their bones, too.

“Yes.” Part of me hated her; she had everything, and still she couldn’t find it within herself to help someone without some kind of benefit to her reign. “I can heal them.”

“And in exchange, you desire ships to rescue your people.” That cool tone was back, a lifetime of polish placed over the real girl.

I wanted the bones gracing the wide, sigil-lit chamber behind her. I wanted to appease the Fallen Gods and beg them back to sleep. I wanted my world to be made whole. And I wanted to grow old with all my friends and my dragon—but as a human.