“What?” she asked, looking at him as if he might break.
He just shook his head slowly. “Nothing. I just—I think I need a drink.”
“Of water,” Javi said, looking over Fox’s body with more care than she’d managed. “But you look—healed.”
Fox groaned. “Tell that to my body.”
“I was able to fix the worst of it,”Eha said, her voice soft.“But not everything. Not perfectly.”
Sofia reluctantly let go of Fox and walked over to Eha, the crunching of the snow loud beneath her feet. She pressed her forehead against the dragon’s snout, looking her in one eye.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for bringing him back.”
Eha blinked.“I didn’t bring him back. I just healed him.”
“You saved him,” she said again.
“Be careful,” Javi snapped behind her, and she turned to see Fox pushing himself up into a sitting position.
Fox’s mother was there, her hands shaking as she tried to stop herself from grabbing him. He decided for her, pulling her toward him and wrapping her in a hug. Sofia gave Eha a kiss before returning to Fox’s side. She didn’t want to interrupt his reunion with his mother, but he stretched an arm out, intertwining their fingers.
“Sofia, meet my mother. Mother, Sofia.” Sofia smiled awkwardly, but Fox’s mother pulled her in tightly. She gave a small squeak of surprise, but carefully wrapped an arm around her. The woman was covered in blood, but she realized as his mother pulled back, it wasn’t her own.
“It’s lovely to meet you, Sofia,” she said. “You can call me Paoletta.”
Sofia tried not to think too hard about the fact that this woman just watched her kill her son—no, not kill. Almost kill. He was alive. He was always alive. They just missed his pulse, his breathing.
She repeated the words to herself, even as another part of her wasn’t convinced. He hadn’t been breathing. She’d checked. His mother had checked.
“We should get somewhere safe,” Sofia said, brushing away the thoughts, just realizing they were still in the middle of a battle. “We need to talk to the shifters—the other dragons. We need?—”
“Sofia,” Javi said, suddenly in front of her, an icy hand on her cheek. “Breathe. Look up.”
She blinked, following his instructions despite the pounding of her heart. She looked up. The sky was a dark gray—sunset turning into dusk turning into night without her noticing. But even in the darkness, with the stars tucked behind clouds, she noticed the dragons circling, and not in the defensive patterns of before.
A small dragon darted away from the formation, diving out of the sky and directly toward them. Her heart caught in her throat before she heard the soft warble of joy and turned to see Eha looking up at him, eyes shining.
“Mama!”screamed the dragon.
“Zuni!”The small dragon flew directly into Eha. She twisted herbody around him as they met, enveloping him in white wings. Mist and clouds gathered around them, as if she were wrapping him in every layer of protection she could in that moment.
Sofia couldn’t stop her own tears from falling as she watched their reunion.
Aurelia landed softly beside Sofia, scales glowing faintly in the night.
“We freed every dragon,”she said, landing along the edge of the clearing—the only place she fit.“We did not retrieve the eggs, but I’ve sent a few of my best hunters to see if we can find them. The humans are running away. What should we do with them?”
Sofia looked around, truly, for the first time since she’d taken Harlow down. There were no Dereyan soldiers left fighting, only a scattering of dead bodies across the field.
“How many are left?”
“It is hard to say,”the dragon said.“Dozens? Many started fleeing when the battle turned and we started freeing the dragons.”
Sofia scowled. She didn’t blame them for running but was disgusted at their cowardice all the same. Javi was right, after all. They only fought for loyalty—and even that didn’t take them very far.
“You should go after General Luna if you can,”she said, sending the dragon an image of the man as best she could conjure. “You can leave the rest, unless you wish to kill them,”she said, surprising herself. She had gotten her vengeance. She wouldn’t order a massacre.“They likely won’t even make it back to Suvi alive. The wolfshifters and faeries are still out there.”
She was done killing for today.