Chapter 86: The Specific Gravity Of Oh Fuck
Most people didn’t know about the bonus arrow. The only way to get it was in freefall with immaculate timing.
Guinevere had discovered it on her last flight before merging with Maddox’s flame.
Without breaking stride, she launched off a green dragon’s back. Wind hammered upward. One hundred feet. One fifty. Two hundred. The arrow streaked in from the left and she snatched it out of the air.
Ryker dove alongside her, matching her freefall speed, and closed his paws around her waist gently. Then he surged upward, and tossed her onto his back where her bow was.
She loaded. Fired. Bullseye on the bonus target.
"Three minutes."
Every tent on the eastern ridge was open.
Lord Raventhorn appeared at the edge of the field. "I want one."
The lord beside him blinked. "One what?"
Guinevere ate through lap five and six. The dragons moved in a pattern so fluid it looked rehearsed by a unit that had been flying together for years, and they hadn’t. They had been flying with her for two weeks. She had rewritten their formation by accident and refined it on purpose, and the result was a six-dragon, one-wolf machine that moved through the sky like a rumor with teeth.
Every target, every orb, every transfer. The field below had gone from stunned to silent to something else entirely, and the time callouts were just numbers chasing a woman who had stopped listening to them.
Last orb. Sprint. Collected. She launched off the dragon’s back and snatched the bonus arrow on the descent.
The green dragon surged parallel to her, catching her in his claw and tossed her to Ryker where her bow was.
She fired the bonus arrow. Bullseye. It split through six arrows already stacked in the target. Seven bullseyes. Six splits. Even for her, that was impressive.
Ryker dove.
She rode his descent standing, then launched off of him before he landed so he could shift mid-air. Her boots hit the grass the same second his did. It was so in sync, it looked choreographed.
Ryker was breathing hard. So was she.
Their eyes met.
She placed her hand over her chest and pressed once. Over her heart. The salute the soldiers had given her, given back to him.
Ryker ruined the moment entirely by mouthing, Don’t you dare make me emotional right now.
She gave a sad smile, then turned away and walked to the opposite side of where she’d usually go, because Maddox was there and she’d been instructed not to approach him by Ryker and Sterling.
All of her instincts screamed to run to him. But to him, she was a stranger. Nothing more. And even if she did approach him, she wasn’t sure what she’d even say.
The targets lowered from the clouds. She didn’t turn to look at them as she walked. She knew the score. Bullseyes and split arrows.
Silence.
Blair grabbed Damon’s arm again. He didn’t even look down this time.
The time hadn’t been called yet. Neither had the orbs. Nobody cared. The targets said enough.
Then buzz erupted.
Somewhere on the field, a Drakencrest soldier collected a hundred gold from a man who was still staring at the sky.
She kept her expression neutral, pretending to not be entirely too pleased with herself.
The orbs floated down next. All green.
Bonus arrows. Seven for seven.
The field was in stunned silence.
She didn’t wait for the time to be called or any kind of head nod. She didn’t look at Sterling. But if she had, she would have had her bitch face on.
Nicholas Shadowfell watched her with nothing short of pride on his face. Also the look of a king who had just had multiple heart attacks in a row and had shifted into his wolf once during the simulation.
Next to him, Blair and Damon looked like proud parents.
Guinevere wanted to laugh at it, but then noticed they were holding hands.
"Six minutes, twelve seconds. One hundred percent accuracy," Sparrow called.
A lord turned to his son. "A white wolf. You won’t see that ever again."
"I saw, Father."
"She’s young. Is she the wolf king’s mate?" a captain asked Sterling.
An honest question that froze every Drakencrest soldier within earshot.
Maddox didn’t react or look like he cared in the slightest. His arms were crossed. The Drakencrest soldiers noticed but all wisely chose to stay silent. Smart men.
"Not her mate," Sterling answered. "Just knows her father."
Lord Solandris had been listening. Old money. One of the oldest houses outside of Drakencrest. Highly respected. The type who rarely ever spoke, but if he asked you a question, you answered.
So when he walked over to Sterling and dropped his voice to ask, "Renwick’s daughter?"
Sterling had to answer.
"Yes, Lord Solandris. Do you know the Lunaris King?"
Lord Solandris exchanged a look with his second. "Yes."
He moved away from the exchange, before any follow up questions could be asked.
"How long has she been flying?" another lord asked, just as Ryker walked up.
"Two weeks, Lord Thornvale," Ryker answered.
"Bullshit," Thornvale barked, entertained. "She’s yours, High General?"
"My what?"
"Your wife."
The silence that followed was the silence of every Drakencrest soldier on the field simultaneously holding their breath.
"Not my wife, my lord. Just the best and only rider I’ve ever trained and I will be taking credit for her until the day I die."
"You two flew like you share a bed, High General. I’ve seen enough bonded pairs to know what it looks like."
Ryker laughed. Flipped his coin. "Lord Thornvale. I’m not that lucky or that brave."
"I will not press, High General. I’ll say this, if you’re not sharing a bed, you should be. That kind of chemistry is rare. I’ve buried two wives, so I know what I’m looking at."
✦ ✦ ✦
Maddox watched her walk away from the field.
The white hair caught the last of the sun and turned gold at the ends, and something in his chest shifted a fraction of an inch in a direction he did not authorize.
She was heading toward the eastern tents. Away from him. Away from the command line, the officers, the place where every warrior on this field salutes and debriefs after a run.
His jaw tightened.
He did not know this woman. She hadn’t so much as glanced in his direction. But she had saluted Ryker.
His dragon rumbled. Low. Irritated. The kind of irritated that precedes fire.
He shook his head once. Hard. The way a man shakes off a thought that has no business existing.
"Does she know who I am?"
Sterling glanced up at him. "She does."
"Then she’s either brave or stupid. I haven’t decided," Maddox said. "What did you say her time was again?"
"Six minutes, twelve seconds. One hundred percent accuracy."
Maddox’s expression did not change. His posture did not shift. His arms stayed crossed and his breathing stayed even, and if you were standing ten feet away, you would have said the Dragon King looked bored.
You would have been catastrophically wrong.
MADDOX’S RECORD: 6:45.
MARGIN: 33 seconds.
FUCKS DISPLAYED: 0.
FUCKS FELT: Several.
"Run that number again."
"Yes, Commander," Sterling said. "Though, I’ve run it three times already. Fair warning."
Six forty-five had stood for four years. He had set it during a wartime exercise with a full dragon squad, combat-seasoned, drilled to perfection over months. It was untouchable.
He said nothing. The silence around him had weight, the specific gravity of men who knew the record and were making the math-based decision to keep their mouths shut.
Smart men. Breathing men. Two categories that were currently overlapping.
His eyes tracked her across the field. She moved like she belonged in a space that was never built for her, which was either admirable or infuriating, and Maddox had not yet decided which.
Nicholas Shadowfell appeared at her side. The wolf king’s hand found her arm, gentle, and he leaned in to say something close to her ear. She nodded. Then she fell into step beside him, the two of them walking towards the Keep.
Something twisted behind Maddox’s sternum. He dismissed it, and then felt it twist again.
"Did she come with Shadowfell?" he asked, eyes still on her retreating back.
Sterling’s answer was immediate and measured. "She arrived a week before him."
"Did she ask to fly? I’m having a difficult time understanding why a wolf princess would want to do that."
"The High General took her shooting. When he saw she could, he decided to put her on a dragon," Sparrow answered. "She ran two lethal simulations that day."
Maddox digested that. A wolf female in a dragon keep with enough confidence to train with his High General.
And she had walked past him like he was furniture.
Women came to Maddox Drakencrest. That was how the world worked. That was how it had always worked. He did not chase. He did not wonder. He did not watch white-haired girls disappear.
"Hell of a shot," he said, turning to the targets where the split arrows were still embedded so deep the wood had splintered around the shaft. "I was unaware wolves trained their females."
No one commented.
✦ ✦ ✦
The command tent was quieter than the field. Maps spread across the table. Candlelight replacing sunlight. The noise of the crowd was a distant hum, and Maddox’s posture had shifted from king-on-display to king-in-private, which meant the questions he was about to ask were the ones he had been saving.
"Was she in the throne room?"
The question was casual. The delivery was a trap laid by a man who had been building traps since he could talk.
"During the hostage situation," Maddox clarified, picking up a dispatch and scanning it like the answer was decorative. "The girl with the white hair."
Ryker looked at him dead in the face.
"What if I were to tell you she walked into the throne room with a Lieutenant’s head in a box."
Maddox looked up from the dispatch.
"When I was ten seconds from getting my throat slit," Ryker continued, his voice carrying the specific energy of a man who had been waiting hours to say this. "Then caught three blades mid-air, threw all three back, killed the mercenary holding one to your throat, got the entire room to laugh at the man running the operation, and broke dragon iron."
He flipped his coin. Caught it.
Maddox looked at him the way he looked at bad intelligence. "I would say horseshit."
