When I’d first met her in the marketplace in Dothik, she’d had a book then. Had been aghast when I’d dared to touch it with my filthy hands, coated in Zaridan’s scale dust.

“Knowledge is not always about books,” she replied, her eyes shining in the darkness. She was a beautiful woman, the surprising want curling in my belly. “You have far more knowledge than I—I’m sure of it.”

I frowned. “Knowledge is what you pride yourself on, and you give that achievement to me so readily? Why?”

“Because knowledge is like…love,” she answered, a soft smile curling her mouth as she settled on that particular word. “It should be freely given. It shouldn’t be a selfish thing.”

Her words struck me and held on. Like she’d plunged her fist into my chest, wrapping her little fingers around my shriveled heart, squeezing tight.

Discomfort swam in me. Karag didn’t speak of such things so freely. Though perhaps the Dakkari did.

“You said Zaridan holds sway in this territory? What did you mean?” she asked, stepping toward me.

The Elthika in question was perched to the far left, curled up and resting along the cliff edge. But the spikes of her ears, which usually flattened against her skull in flight, were perked and twitching at the slightest sound.

Klara leaned against a rocky boulder, crossing her ankles in front of her as she regarded me. The pose lengthened her legs, encased in her tight trews. I couldn’t help but look. Did her cheeks pinken because of it?

“Zaridan is one of the remaining descendants of Muron,” I said softly when I swallowed, feeling familiar pride swell up in my chest as I looked over at her. “One of the ancients.”

“Muron?” she asked quietly, her eyes shifting back and forth between mine. I saw it then…her passion for knowledge. The need for it. The most surprising thing of all was that it lit a fire in my belly. It was an attractive trait in a mate, one I’d never given much thought to before.

“The ancient,” I answered, holding her gaze. “The Elthika revered him like a god once. His bones make up the stretch of a northern peninsula—a sacred place for the Elthika.”

“Does Zaridan look like him?” came the unexpected question.

I nearly laughed. “It’s difficult to say,” I said. Then I tilted my chin back and said, “That scar on your face…that is the mark of Muron. Zaridan’s line.”

Klara’s hand touched the scar on her cheek. “How can you tell?”

“Muron led a battle once against an enemy faction of Elthika, to bring order to their race. An impossible feat. His dragon horde was severely outnumbered, the odds against them. So the stories go, he was struck by lightning during battle and the scar it made was permanently imprinted onto his body, right over his heart. The strange thing is that the lightning didn’t hurt him—it made him stronger. A heartstone gift. It was the first recorded moment of ethrall being used in our history.”

Klara’s lips parted, but otherwise she was frozen in place along the boulder.

“You call it the red fog. We call it ethrall. But they both are rooted into the power of the heartstones, and that power grows like the boughs of a tree. Wild and untamed. It manifests in different ways, like your gift,” I said, nodding at her. “That day, that heartstone power flowed through Muron. He alone, when many of his brothers and sisters had already fallen, defeated the enemy faction with ethrall. Suddenly a new order of Elthikan rule came to be. But Muron’s scar never faded. It passed to his descendants. You can see it on Zaridan, even from here. On her back flank.”

Klara’s breath hitched, and her eyes sought it out eagerly. They widened on the familiar mark. “But…then why did Zaridan pass it to me?”

The question of the millennium, I thought. Why would Zaridan cross into dreams to find a Dakkari princess and mark her as mine? As ours?

“Only she knows,” I said instead.

“And you listen to her without hesitation?”

“Yes,” I answered. “And she listens to me. That is the nature of a bond with an Elthika.”

“Even if you cannot communicate?”

“Oh, but we do,” I told her, brow furrowing. “Your hordes rode on the backs of pyrokis for centuries, yes? To this day, they still rely on them, yes?”

She nodded.

“And would you not argue that the bond between a pyroki and their Dakkari rider is strong? Perhaps they cannot communicate with words, but you communicate with everything else within your power. With the Elthika, it is the same. You learn to hear every unspoken thing in the beat of a heart. The gust of a wing. Elthika can make a seemingly infinite number of sounds, strung together in different ways. Just like language, like words. You learn to listen closely. They are far more intelligent than us, and so they listen closely too.”

Klara stared at me. “Like the sy’asha?”

My chin tilted back. “Yes. That is one way they will communicate. Effectively, at that.”

“And what does it mean?”

I wasn’t certain I wanted to tell her yet. But I didn’t see the point in deceit when we would soon mark our marriage in the Arsadia, deep within the temple of Lishara.

“It is the song of an accepted bond,” I said. “Zaridan accepted you, on the wildlands beyond Dothik. She gave you her song. I am her rider, and that bond can never be replaced. But she has taken you under her protection, given you her oath, which all Elthika must do with their rider’s chosen mate.”

“Oh,” Klara whispered. “And…has an Elthika ever rejected a rider’s mate?”

My lips slid up in a rueful smirk. “All the time. Elthika are possessive creatures, even more so over their riders. They do not accept outsiders easily. And if a rider does not have his Elthika’s sy’asha for their intended mate…it is not a circumstance that ever ends happily.”

I swallowed, my eyes running up Klara’s form carefully. “Zaridan gave you her song upon meeting you,” I said quietly.

“Is that…rare?”

“Rare?” I repeated. I shook my head, standing to stretch. Klara’s neck craned back to meet my eyes. “It has never happened before in our history.”

She said nothing at first.

“I suppose that means you are well and truly stuck with me,” she finally said.

Silence dropped between us. When I glanced over at Zaridan, I saw that her head was raised, peering at the both of us from her place on the cliff, no longer hiding that she was listening to our conversation.

Stepping forward into Klara, I brushed the tendril of hair away from her scar, remembering the jolt I’d felt in the marketplace in Dothik when I’d first seen it. How it had felt like all the air had been sucked from my body, a strange sense of familiarity and knowing making the city sway. As if I’d been there before. As if I’d been remembering her.

Heartstone magic was an unpredictable, dangerous, and powerful thing. Klara of Rath Serok and Rath Drokka was at the root of it all.

She cleared her throat when the silence stretched too long between us, lowering her cheek so that my touch slid away.

“You, um, said that Zaridan has sway here because of Muron. What of the other Elthika? Levanth’s, was it?”

“Levanth is one of my riders,” I corrected. “The navigator wing, I’m sure you remember.”

She stilled. “Ah. The female you went into the forest with tonight. Alone.”

That made me straighten, hearing an odd note in her tone, one I recognized from earlier. “What?” I asked quietly, irritation beginning to burn in my belly. I couldn’t stand cowardice. “Would you like to ask me something?”

Her lips pressed together. Then her mouth opened. “Everyone saw.”

“Nothing happened,” I rasped, stepping closer, lowering my head until our eyes were parallel. “I am not only a Karath of the Sarrothian people, Klara, but also the lead commander of a rider horde. You think I would do something like that when I have given you my vow?”