Chapter 68 — Paired Breath

Chapter 68: Chapter 68 — Paired Breath

Chapter 68 — Paired Breath

Thunder followed Christopher into the Knight castle’s training library and stopped dead at the first human-sized doorway. She could have fit through it, but lowering her head for anyone’s convenience struck her as beneath her, so Christopher left the door standing open and moved a reading stand out into the adjoining courtyard instead.

Before anyone touched the records, Christopher brought Mabel, Bennet and Owen in through the courtyard gate. Thunder already knew Walter; she rose at the sight of the others, and her Prestige pressed flat across the stones until Christopher sent one clear meaning down the bond.

These people belonged with him. They were allowed inside. She was not to harm them.

Thunder went down the line and smelled each of them in turn — Mabel’s medicine pouch, the copied plates under Bennet’s arm, the stone dust ground into Owen’s sleeves. Nobody moved until she had finished and turned back to Christopher. Her acceptance, when it came, came reluctant, laced with the firm conviction that all three of them had better remember whose castle this was.

"Warn me before any of you approach her alone," Christopher said.

They agreed.

Only then did Bennet lay the copied plates out on the reading stand. Walter had brought the method Godfrey verified for him and Ivo before he left.

The library divided its records into military, noble and Dragon Knight methods, and Christopher pulled one complete military method aside for Godfrey to review once he was back.

Walter had already begun switching to the noble method Godfrey approved before leaving, practising alone in the locked workroom after dark.

"And Ivo?" Christopher asked.

"Godfrey will supervise him when the road allows it."

The apprentices would wait for Godfrey. Meg kept to basic training with the older children, and Bram was still somewhere on the southern road.

The Dragon Knight breathing method required Christopher and Thunder to practise together through their contract.

Mabel waited near the courtyard wall with water and medicine close to hand. Walter stood at the gate. Bennet took his place behind the reading stand, pen ready, there to record what happened rather than guess at what should.

Christopher sat opposite Thunder and worked through the method recorded on the plate, but Thunder fought him at every turn he tried to set the rhythm.

Impatience entered the bond.

"You are making this harder than it needs to be."

Thunder sent him an image of his own lungs straining like bellows and the clear feeling that he was the problem.

On the ninth attempt, their breathing matched for three cycles running. The contract tightened at once. Christopher’s Essence pulled toward his chest, pale sparks crawling between Thunder’s claws, and under it all he felt the pull to reach past the bond for more power than either of them had agreed to.

He stopped.

Thunder’s wings snapped open in irritation, and a spark cracked against the paving stone between them, leaving a black scorch no bigger than a coin.

Walter’s hand drifted toward his sword, then stilled. Mabel flinched but kept her feet planted. Bennet only stared at the mark a moment before bending to note the number of completed cycles.

Thunder caught all three reactions at once, and pride swelled through the bond loud enough to drown everything else. She had made one spark, and she carried herself like she had split the courtyard in half.

Christopher nearly laughed before he remembered she would feel that too.

Too late. Irritation sparked back through the bond, and Thunder fixed him with a flat, unimpressed stare.

Mabel was across the courtyard before Christopher had even finished standing. She checked his pulse, his eyes, and the scarred channels near his chest with quick, practiced fingers.

"Any pain or a taste of metal?" she asked.

"Only warmth in my chest."

Thunder pressed her nose to his shoulder. Concern came through the bond, mixed with irritation.

Christopher rested one hand against her jaw. Awe still caught him at odd moments like this, up close: the creature breathing under his palm had bent the weather itself at her own birth and brought a Silver Knight to his knees, and now she fretted because his heartbeat had changed its rhythm for a few minutes.

"One successful cycle is enough for today," Christopher said.

Thunder disagreed.

"We will try again tomorrow."

She sent him an image of the sun, barely crawling across the sky.

"Tomorrow is still tomorrow."

Walter turned his face away to hide a smile.

His own breathing came easier afterward, and whatever restlessness lived in her lightning settled faster beneath her scales than it had the day before.

Thunder went on disagreeing until hunger ended the argument for her, and she stalked off into the feeding room, where the remains of a deer waited on the stone table.

Christopher sat with her while she ate. The contract brought her emotions close, but every twitch of her tail and scrape of claw still reminded him what shared his courtyard: a dragon, born with enough power to bend the weather and bring a Silver Knight to his knees.

When Thunder finished, she carried a leg bone out into the courtyard and sprawled beneath the open sky. Wyrms circled beyond the distant ridge, though none came near the castle.

She watched them with open contempt, chewing.

"You cannot fly yet."

Thunder stretched both wings. One membrane had strengthened since hatching; the other still folded unevenly near the tip. She ignored Christopher’s doubt and bolted across the courtyard. Three wingbeats lifted her clear above his head — the fourth caught sideways, and she went down hard into a pile of sand Owen had left by the wall.

Dust powdered her snout white.

Christopher kept his face still.

The bond carried a clear warning anyway.

"I said nothing."

Thunder shook herself out and sent a spray of sand straight across his boots.

Aboveground, Meg drilled with eleven older children, wooden spears knocking against light practice shields in a rhythm that kept breaking and reforming. The younger alarm-group children ran their messages and learned the shelter routes on the side, and Walter’s assistant corrected Meg twice for stepping out of the line to move faster than everyone else.

She obeyed on the third correction.

Christopher came up from the small plane in time to catch the tail end of it, standing at the edge of the yard. Regular meals had put muscle on Meg that had not been there a season ago, but formation discipline was still new, and it showed in every half-beat she rushed.

The older group numbered twelve in all, children and half-grown teenagers together, running through straight lines, turns, spear work and shield drills in whatever hours were left over from their ordinary chores and alarm duties.

Meg learned quickly and hated keeping the line’s slower pace, and on the fourth turn she stepped ahead again. The apprentice supervising them rapped her shield with a stick and sent her back to the start.

She came back tight-lipped and ran the next turn properly.

Joan called her away when the kitchen needed water, and Meg set down the wooden spear and went without argument.

That evening, Christopher ate with the inner household. Martha served fish, bread and stewed vegetables. Joan made certain Elsie finished the vegetables before reaching for more bread, while Meg, famished from training, cleared her plate fast enough to earn another piece of fish without having to ask for it.

Elsie had stopped hiding bread inside her sleeve. Joan caught Christopher noticing and shook her head before he could say a word about it. The child still wrapped up her leftovers when she thought no one was paying attention, but regular meals were slowly teaching her that another bowl would be waiting tomorrow.

Martha set a covered tray beside Christopher’s chair. "The meat you asked for is ready."

Christopher felt Thunder wake through the distant bond. Hunger arrived first, the way it always did.

He finished eating, took the covered tray from Martha and went below. Their shared method needed both of them present, and Thunder expected him to keep to whatever hour they had settled on.

Their second session lasted five cycles. Christopher ended it before Mabel had to step in and end it for him. Warmth spread through his scarred channels without pain this time, and Thunder’s breathing stayed matched to his for several moments after the circulation had already stopped.

Mabel checked him again and found his pulse steady. Walter crouched by the blackened stone from the first session; the scorch was shallow, but it was proof enough that Thunder’s smallest slip could put an ordinary person in the ground.

"The others do not meet her yet," Walter said.

Christopher felt Thunder’s interest sharpen at the mention of others.

"Thunder decides who approaches her. Until she is willing to receive strangers, they remain outside."

Christopher sent her an image of Godfrey kneeling at her birth and the settlers collapsing under her Prestige. Pride warmed the bond, followed by impatience.

She drew her Prestige inward as Christopher crossed the courtyard beside her. The pressure eased. Walter stayed near the gate, his hand close to his sword until the last of it faded.

Their breathing found a steady shared rhythm for the first time.

The following morning, Christopher took Walter along the northern wall. The repaired wall arbalest covered the gate road well enough, but a second attack from the west would force its crew to swing the frame through too wide an angle, so Christopher staked out another platform near the western tower.

"The timber will hold?" he asked.

Walter pressed one boot against a dark beam. "For practice. Not after a month of snow and rain. Owen will want stone beneath it."

"Then he gets stone."

They walked the parapet, checking the spots where archers could gather without crowding the spearmen stationed below. Christopher had stopped trying to decide how every stone should be laid; Owen would build the platform, Walter would decide how men fought from it, and Christopher’s part was simply choosing what had to be standing before winter closed the road.

When the inspection ended, Thunder’s hunger pulled at the bond again, sharper this time.

Christopher went back below, crossed into the valley and swung open the nursery gate. Thunder shoved past him before he had finished lifting the bar, nose raised, already casting along the castle road for the scent of deer.

Walter waited at the gate while Christopher followed her toward the orchard. The trees had gone wild across the old terraces, fallen fruit rotting sweet beneath them. Deer tracks crossed the windfall, and larger prints marked the mud farther on, each one holding a faint trace of essence like a held breath.

Thunder found the herd first. She dropped low and tried to rush the slope, but Christopher caught the start of the movement through the bond and sent back a sharp command to wait.

Thunder stopped two steps in. Her annoyance slammed through the bond hard enough to set his teeth on edge.

"Choose one away from the young," he said.

She understood the direction faster than she would have understood the words alone, and her attention swung toward a limping buck at the edge of the herd.

Christopher set his sword aside in the grass. Thunder already knew how to hunt; what neither of them had was practice hunting together, and he needed to learn how to track a predator who moved far faster than he ever would without stepping into the middle of her attack.

They circled through the trees together.