Dragon Wars (Rise of the Dragon Riders Book 6) by Ava Richardson

Author:Ava Richardson [Richardson, Ava]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

It took them longer than she thought it would to find Lenire. For several long minutes, Cora actually started to wonder if something had happened to him. Maybe he’d passed out in the woods from exhaustion. Or slipped into the stream trying to grab a drink. Even Yrsa didn’t know where he’d gone because he wouldn’t respond to her.

When they finally found him, it was at the bottom of the empty pit they’d once used to store the hound. “Stars!” Faron swore as he climbed down into the hole. “Do you know the fright you just gave everyone?” He reached back to help Cora down.

She took his hand, sparing a moment to reach out to Alaric so he could let Yrsa know they’d found him.

“Hmm?” Lenire said. He sat there, legs pulled tight to his chest. He swayed and tipped his head to look at her.

Cora couldn’t help but notice a glazed sheen to his eyes. It’s like he was far away somewhere, dazed, or perhaps still trapped in the hound’s sight. “Hey,” she said, kneeling and putting a hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

He snapped out of it, shrugging her hand off his shoulder. “Like I told Faron earlier, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” Cora pointed out as she sat beside him on the muddy floor. Faron sat on Lenire’s other side. “Do you realize what almost happened to you?”

“Almost being the key word there,” Lenire said, even as his cheeks darkened with color.

“The Blight tried to possess you. That’s a big deal.”

“And Faron pulled me out before it could.” Lenire let his head thump back against the dirt wall. “That was a nice bit of Itharusian spellwork, by the way.”

Faron almost smiled at the compliment. “Learned from the best.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Cora said. This was a dangerous near-miss with a Blight possession. They’d both been there to see how it affected Alia, and after Lenire’d told her of how his sister had died, her mind taken by the Blight, she knew how badly this could have ended. “You have a lot of people worried. Yrsa included. You really should go see Elaine.”

“I don’t need another healer. I am one,” Lenire said, holding his arms out as if to prove that he was fine. “I had the situation under control.”

“Did you?” Cora said. “You had it under control fighting against Zirael?”

“We got out, didn’t we? We destroyed the weapons. Maybe we didn’t get the disk like you wanted, but our enemies are weakened. This is a victory. We should be celebrating.”

For a moment, he didn’t sound like the Lenire she knew at all. But then she wondered if he was embarrassed. It had been his decision to linger in that tent with the hound, talking about how he could kill Zirael while he slept. Perhaps he thought if he’d just used the hound to grab the disk and run, things might have turned out differently. Maybe guilt was eating at him the same way it was eating at her, and he was trying to absolve himself of it.

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