Chapter 27: The Silverwing Encounter - Part 2
Three more visits. Each one the same routine. Each one building something I couldn't quite name.
Day 118, third visit: I sat in my usual spot, twenty paces from her outcrop. Spoke in broken High Valyrian about nothing important. King's Landing's smells. Helaena's latest insect observations. My training regimen.
Silverwing ignored me for the first hour. Then, slowly, she shifted. Turned her massive head to face me directly.
Listening.
Day 119, fourth visit: No fish this time. Just me. Just words. I told her about the tournament. About Harren and Cheese. About the men I'd killed to protect children who weren't even mine.
She watched the entire two hours. Never looked away.
Day 120, fifth visit: She was waiting when I arrived. Awake. Alert. Head raised, like she'd been expecting me. She'd moved another step closer to trusting me, and I could feel it.
Day 121. Sixth visit.
I reached the outcrop at dawn, same as always. Started to sit in my usual spot.
Silverwing stood.
Not aggressive. Deliberate. She stretched her wings, vast enough to blot out the rising sun, then folded them. Stepped down from her perch.
Toward me.
Every instinct screamed run. She was massive. One bite could sever me in half. One claw could impale me. One tail swipe could shatter bone.
I dropped to ten kilograms. Made myself light, small. Stood my ground.
She approached until her shadow swallowed me completely. Lowered her head. Brought that enormous skull down until I could see every scale, every ridge, every ancient scar.
Her eyes, golden, intelligent, ancient, locked onto mine.
This is it. The test.
She opened her jaws.
I hardened every muscle with Tekkai. Dropped my weight even further, barely five kilograms. Light enough that the force of her breath wouldn't knock me over.
Fire erupted.
Not a small burst. Not a test. A sustained gout of dragonflame, hot enough to melt stone, aimed directly at my face.
The world became heat and light and agony.
My clothes went first. Fabric caught, curled, ashed, gone, and after that there was nothing between me and it. The skin of my hands and face rose into blisters and the blisters burst and what came out of them was gone before it could run. My hair went. The taste in my mouth was my own flesh cooking.
There was no counting inside it. Counting wants a part of you standing outside to keep the tally, and I had no part standing outside. There was only the word I'd given myself before she opened her jaws — hold — and a body built over two years to obey it after the rest of me quit.
Near the end my sight narrowed and greyed and my knees opened negotiations with the stone. I didn't let them finish. Tekkai stayed locked. I stayed standing.
Forty-five seconds. Longer than anything Dreamfyre or Syrax ever asked of me, and I only have the number because some stubborn scrap of me went on counting after the rest of me stopped.
Then she stopped.
I collapsed.
Knees hit the rocky ground. Hands followed. My entire body trembled. Skin red and raw, blistered in places, blackened in others. Breathing came in gasps that hurt.
But I was alive.
Silverwing's head descended again. Slower this time. Her breath, still furnace-hot, washed over me as she sniffed.
Examining the damage.
Then she did something unexpected.
She nudged me.
Gentle. Her snout, larger than my entire torso, pressed against my shoulder with surprising delicacy. Like she was... checking on me? Apologizing?
I laughed. Couldn't help it. The sound came out strangled, pained. But genuine.
"I passed?" My voice was a rasp. Throat burned from the heat.
Silverwing rumbled. Deep in her chest. A sound that vibrated through the ground.
Not aggressive. Almost... pleased?
I reached up with a trembling, burned hand. Touched her scales.
Warm. Textured. Real.
"We good now?"
She rumbled again. Then, slowly, she settled down. Right there beside me. Lowered her massive body to the ground, close enough that I could lean against her foreleg.
I did. Rested my burned back against her warmth.
And despite the pain, despite every blister and burn and blackened patch of skin. I smiled.
Four hours.
That's how long I stayed with Silverwing, leaning against her as my body healed.
The adaptive resistance worked faster now. I could feel it, skin knitting back together, blisters fading, blackened patches flaking away to reveal pink new flesh beneath.
By the third hour, the worst of the damage had healed. Still tender. Still painful. But functional.
Silverwing didn't move the entire time. Just lay there, occasionally shifting to make me more comfortable. Her warmth wasn't uncomfortable anymore. It was... soothing.
"You're gentle," I said quietly. "For something that could eat me in one bite."
She snorted. A puff of smoke from her nostrils.
"Yeah, you're right. 'Gentle' is relative."
I told her about Helaena then. Really told her. Not the surface stuff I'd mentioned before, but the truth.
How she saw futures no one else could. How she was dismissed and mocked for it. How her husband treated her like property. How her children were the only light in her darkness.
"I'm going to protect them," I said. "All of them. When the war comes, and it's coming, I know it is, I'll need your help. Will you let me ride you? Really ride you, into battle?"
Silverwing's eyes were half-closed. Resting. But I knew she was listening.
She rumbled again. Non-committal.
"Right. Not yet. But eventually?"
A small puff of smoke. Which I chose to interpret as "maybe."
Good enough.
When I finally stood, legs shaky, skin pink and new. Silverwing didn't stop me. Just watched with those ancient eyes as I gathered my burned belongings.
My pack had survived. Barely. The leather was scorched but intact.
I bowed. Formal. Respectful.
"Thank you. For not killing me. For... whatever this is."
She lowered her head one more time. Close enough that I could touch her snout.
I did. One last time. Felt the heat radiating from her scales.
Then I backed away. Slow. Respectful. Not turning my back until I'd put fifty paces between us.
She settled back onto her outcrop, watching me go.
When I reached the beach, Tam was there. Eyes wide.
"You look like you walked through a forge."
"Something like that."
"Your skin, it's pink. Fresh. Like new burns healed."
"Adaptive resistance. Don't ask."
He didn't. Just took my silver and rowed me back to King's Landing in shocked silence.
Helaena was waiting in the godswood when I returned. She'd somehow known I'd be there, despite the lack of schedule.
She took one look at me, fresh burns barely hidden under new clothes, and whispered, "You found her."
"More like she found me. And tried to cook me alive."
"But you survived."
"Obviously."
"Did she accept you?"
I thought about those four hours. Leaning against her. Her gentleness. The rumbling approval.
"Not as a rider. Not yet. But as... potential, maybe. It's a start."
Helaena turned my hands over, palms up, the way a septa checks a child for splinters. The new skin was pink and tight in the light through the leaves.
"These will scar."
"Then they'll match the rest of me."
"They won't match anything." She said it the way she says the things she has already seen. "The others were only fire. These have her name on them."
She didn't kiss them. She folded my fingers shut around her own and kept them there, in the open, where two of her grandfather's men were pretending not to watch from the path.
Let them look. Let them write it down.
I'd stood inside dragonfire for the length of a prayer and walked out with Silverwing's tentative acceptance, and there was nothing Otto Hightower could put in a letter that weighed against it.