The Bond (Book 2) (6 page)

“No, she
 . . .” Aeron’s cheeks warmed. “She said you were a really good kisser.”

Willem’s cheeks turned crimson and he burst out laughing. “I forgot about the link!” After a moment, he raised an eyebrow and told Aeron, “You’re very good yourself, you know.”

There was a knock at the door, and annoyed by the distraction, Aeron opened it.

“Morning!” “Hey guys.” It was Sharrah and Cheddar.

She looked at the two of them and said, “Why are both your faces so red?”

The laughing grunts from Anaya’s den made Aeron’s face even warmer. “N–No reason,” he said.

Sharrah raised an eyebrow.

Cheddar said, “You two want to get breakfast with us before Aeron has to head off?”

+ + + +

After breaking his fast with fluffy eggs, crispy bacon and a thick slice of warm toast, Aeron took Millinith to the site via portal. Anaya might remember how to fly there, but he didn’t.

Last night, he hadn’t paid much attention to where they were going; he just followed the nahual-sense. Master Doronal told him to familiarized himself with the site, however. No doubt already planning for him to portal back with Millinith.

He watched the gateway close as Anaya angled down for a landing.

“Going through those always seems to unsettle my stomach,” Millinith said as they landed.

“Really? They don’t bother me.”

As he brought down one of Millinith’s tool bags, he asked Anaya,
How about you?
Does going through a portal upset your stomach?

Not at all.

“It fades soon after,” the magic adept continued as she removed her other tote from the saddlebags, “and it’s not of such intensity that I worry I might empty my stomach. It’s mostly an annoyance.”

She looked around the semi-wooded area. It was near a rise, and they stood in a small clearing amongst the trees. “Where did you—ah, I see it.”

At the low mound of turned soil, Anaya carefully dug up the creature she’d helped bury the previous night.

Having done this nearly a dozen times now, Aeron found the examination almost routine, though some parts of it were still kind of awful to him. Anaya, oddly enough, had taken to watching the process closely. Maybe not so odd, though. She hated nahual as much as he did, and knowing more about them might make fighting them easier.

Aeron wrote down Millinith’s dictation as she went about measuring, examining, and probing the beast. She then cut it open to examine its insides, and made sample slides from some of those internals.

“Every one of these we’ve been able to examine,” Aeron noted as he finished up the notes, “has been female, hasn’t it?”

Millinith frowned as she replied, “Yes. And it makes me wonder. Have we just not run across males, or is it that they truly do not exist?”

“How would they, ah, reproduce without males?”

“Self-fertilization is possible,” she said as she removed the gloves and tossed them onto the carcass. “But I’ve never come across any information about higher animals doing so. I read a study about some worms which do, but they seemed to become weaker over the generations, less able to deal with stress or changes in their environments. Some plants can self-pollinate, too.” She shook her head as she stared at the nahual. “But I haven’t kept up with Animal Craft studies since I switched to sorcery. I’ll talk with Sharrah. Maybe she’s come across something more recently.”

Aeron closed the notebook and helped Millinith gather her things and pack them away. He then had Anaya bury the nahual again. He didn’t want anything to find it and eat it. Not that he felt sorry for it. Oh, no. He just didn’t want a big cat or whatever to feed on it and have that evil thing inside.

He showed Millinith where the nahual had been digging last night, the beginnings of its den, and she examined it for a time. They then spent nearly an hour searching for signs of tracks nearby. Millinith wanted to see if there had been another nahual in the area, perhaps a male. The search ended up being fruitless, as Aeron knew it would be. First, neither he nor Anaya sensed a nahual, and second, the things had some knack for not leaving much of a trail at all, except in snow. There hadn’t been snow in a while.

When they returned to the Caer, Millinith retired to the investigation office to go over the notes and start on her report while everything was fresh in her mind. After unsaddling Anaya, Aeron plopped on his bed and thought about going over this week’s spells again, but he wasn’t in the mood. Lately, nahual examinations always left him feeling a little depressed.

Why couldn’t they find out more about those damned things?

We do not need to know any more about them,
Anaya said, tone confident.

Aeron looked through the doorway to the den. She lay on the ground, chin on her forepaws, clear inner eyelids closed, and her beautiful gold eyes staring at him.

What do you mean?
he asked.

We can kill them now, even with what we know.

Aeron smiled. He loved her uncomplicated way of looking at things.
That’s true, dear-heart.

Lunch was big bowls of beef soup with crusty bread and cheese on the side, though Aeron paid it little attention. His mind was occupied with nahual and what to do about them. More dragonlinked would help. And him getting better at spells, performing better under pressure as a sorcerer, would definitely help. But Anaya’s point not withstanding, he would still like to find out more about the horrible creatures.

He was still thinking about them when he and Willem returned to the Dragon Stable afterward.

“What’s on your mind?” Willem asked as he closed the door behind them.

“On my mind?” Aeron looked in on Anaya, she was sleeping soundly, then sat down on the couch.

“Well, at lunch you were pretty quiet, and you didn’t seem, I dunno, yourself.” Willem sat next to Aeron and lay back into the couch, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Something’s troubling you. You hardly even spared a look at your food during lunch.”

Aeron twisted his mouth. “I’m just thinking about nahual. It seems like we’ve again reached the limit of what we can learn about them, even with the ability to get to attack sites faster.”

“I see.”

“So much about them remains a mystery, you know? Why is it we’ve yet to come across a male? And if there are no males, how do they reproduce? Is not having males why they need animus to reproduce? And do they really need animus for reproduction? I mean, yeah, I came up with that theory, but it’s just based on the slim evidence we have. What if they use animus for some other reason? What if they don’t use it at all and they kill people for something else? And where are they even coming from? Are they like spores or something, all being emitted from one place, or are they more like a plague of evil rats breeding and spreading across the lands?”

He let out a frustrated breath and said, “There’s so much we don’t know about them, and it bothers me.”

Willem raised his brows. “You really have been thinking about this.”

Aeron nodded.

“Listen,” Willem said, taking Aeron’s hand, “you shouldn’t worry too much. We’ve got a plan to deal with them. We’re going to get more dragonlinked and fight those things when they try to get near people. We’ll keep as many as we can from hurting anyone else.”

Aeron looked at Willem’s hand clasped in his own. It was warm and strong. He squeezed it briefly in thanks and said, “You’re right.” Then he chuckled.

“What?” Willem smiled at him.

“Anaya. She said we don’t need to know anything more about nahual.”

“Oh?”

“She said we know plenty enough about them now to kill them.”

Willem laughed quietly. “She’s so adorable in how straightforward she is.”

“Yeah.” Aeron smiled. Then he looked at Willem, all humor gone. “Were you serious about wanting to be a dragonlinked?”

“Of course.”

Aeron bit his lip. After a moment, he said, “Don’t tell anyone, but I think you’re going to be the next one.”

“How do you know?” Willem’s full attention was focused on Aeron.

“Last night, just before we landed, I told Master Doronal that we needed more dragonlinked if we wanted to keep everyone in our region safe. He agreed. And asked if I thought you would mind taking care of a dragon.”

“Really? That would be so amazing! What did you tell him?”

“I told him I thought you would love taking care of one.”

“Golden! Though, I’m going to try not to get my hopes up, just in case.”

The distant sound of a door opening and closing on the other side of the building signaled the first arrival for the meeting. It didn’t take long for everyone else to arrive and find seats around the table.

Cheddar, who had taken to making notes of their meetings, was writing in his neat script as Millinith began with a quick recap of the nahual examination.

Master Canneth, the Caer’s Master Zoologist, head of its Animal Craft Hall, and the other leader of the investigative team, asked a few questions.

Not much new was revealed, though the fact that this beast, too, was female, was noteworthy. When there were no more questions, they moved on to the real purpose of the meeting.

“Flying back last night,” Master Doronal said as he looked around the table, “Aeron brought up an important point. He and Anaya can only sense nahual in a ten mile radius. If we want to keep the region around Caer Baronel safe from the evil things, we will need more dragonlinked, more dragons.” He then looked at the Animal Craft master and smiled. “Something which Lord Baronel, Master Canneth and myself have been aware of for some time.”

Aeron raised his brows and looked at Willem, then Sharrah and Cheddar. All his friends looked similarly surprised.

“While we do have great plans for the future, we must start small. We simply do not know quite enough about dragons as of yet. But we will continue to remedy that.”

He rested his elbows on the table and clasped his hands together near his mouth, tapping his two forefingers against his lips. “One of the first things we learned, and one of the most remarkable, is that bond-mates are linked extremely tightly, down to their very spirits. Due to this, Master Canneth and I suspect that a bonded dragon’s mate selection will be heavily influenced, even if unintentionally, by his or her bond-mate.”

Everyone glanced at Aeron, and cheeks warming, he cleared his throat. Sharrah was nodding a little to herself as she stared at him.

“As such,” Master Doronal continued, “we think that Willem will be the best choice for the next dragonlinked. Because as much as others would like to be bonded with a dragon, we must think of the future of dragonlinked and our need to increase the number of dragons we have for bonding.” He spread his hands. “To put it bluntly, we need dragon breeding pairs.”

Cheddar sighed loudly. “You’re right, of course, Master Doronal, much as I hate to admit it.” He turned to Willem, a wry smile on his face, and said, “Congratulations.”

Willem, looking nervous, nodded.

“One of the things we are not sure of,” Master Canneth said, “is exactly how to procure dragon young for bonding. From what we learned from Anaya, dragons have rarely, if ever, traveled as far as her mother to clutch. It was sheer luck that Aeron came across Anaya.”

We could always ask at House Yaot.

That’s a great idea. Do you think you could fly us there?

“Does anyone have any ideas about this?” Master Doronal looked around the table.

I do. I remember my mother’s flight here, well. I can even try to show you my memory of it, so we might be able to use a portal.

Aeron raised his brows. Would that work? “Anaya thinks we could ask the dragons at House Yaot,” he said. “She remembers how to get there, and she says she can try to show the location to me, through the link, from her memories. It might then be possible to open a portal for it.”

“Can you do that?” Willem asked. “Portal to somewhere you’ve only seen from one of her memories?”

“I don’t know,” Aeron replied. “But we can try, assuming the idea is approved.”

“If it were possible to learn a location from a dragon memory,” Master Doronal said, “that could have any number of uses. But putting that aside for now, House Yaot may actually be our best plan. Since her mother is from there, Anaya can meet with them as one of their own, perhaps even convince her mother to help recruit.”

“And,” Sharrah said, “with her maternal memories, she knows everything about the place.”

Master Canneth nodded. “House politics and history, the standing of the various members and families
 . . . yes. This could work out rather well.”

“An excellent idea,” Master Doronal said. “We’ll devise plans in that regard soon. And should those efforts succeed, we will need housing for the increased number of bond-mates. Any ideas in that regard?”

“I have an idea for what we can do while we continue to look,” Aeron said as he unrolled the map of the Caer, “and while a new location is being prepared.” He slid two map weights to Willem, and those, along with the two Aeron used, held the map open on the table.