Me and My Shadow - Katie MacAlister [59]
“Well, great. Here I am trying to get rid of this shard, and it’ll probably go tell the rest of them what a horrible person I am, and they’ll all refuse to re-form.”
She laughed and patted my hand as she stood up, much to Jim’s unhappiness. “It is not that you have to worry about.”
“Oh really?” I caught something in her tone that made me uneasy. “Is there something else I should be worrying about?”
She hesitated a second before saying no.
“Kaawa,” I said, rising as she reached for the door.
She stopped, her shoulders slumping for a moment before she turned back to face me with a perfectly innocent expression. “Yes, wintiki?”
“I appreciate you trying to protect me, but I assure you I can take care of myself. Gabriel knows that. That’s why he’s not fussing around while I take care of this. So if there’s a danger involved—other than the obvious one of being vulnerable while the decanting and re-forming processes are going on—I’d really appreciate you telling me what it is, so I can be ready for it.”
Her hesitation and concern were almost palpable, making me worry anew.
“I would not for the world insult you, May, and I would never hide something that you could use to protect yourself.”
“But?” I asked, waiting for her to finish.
“But you possess many qualities of humans, and not so many of dragons.” She looked away, obviously not wanting to meet my gaze.
I went over everything she had told me about the shards, everything that Ysolde de Bouchier had done . . . and enlightenment dawned.
“Kaawa?”
She held on to the door as if she wanted to escape. “Yes, child?”
“Did Ysolde disappear immediately after she re-formed the dragon heart, or did she vanish when Baltic died?”
Her dark eyes, rich as mahogany, and filled now with sadness, studied mine. “We don’t know. It’s . . . it was a confusing time, you must understand. Three things apparently happened at the same time: the black dragon heir killed his wyvern, Ysolde re-formed the heart and sharded it into their phylacteries, and the silver dragon wyvern disappeared.”
A few seconds of digging around in my memory pulled up a name. “Constantine Norka? Wasn’t he also supposed to be mated to Ysolde?”
She was silent a few moments, her fingers absently rubbing on the edge of the door. “No one knows for certain what happened. Until now, it was thought all were dead, but with Baltic having returned, perhaps he could clear it up and tell us what exactly did transpire.”
I almost snorted at the thought of Baltic doing anything but spouting mysterious, ambiguous comments. “I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to explain. So basically, the theory is that she was either Baltic’s mate or Constantine’s, and when they died, she died, too? Or was it the dragon heart that did her in?”
“We don’t know,” she said, looking even sadder. “Her diaries don’t say.”
I swallowed back my fear. “You’re a shaman, Kaawa. You see things that most people can’t even imagine exist. You can look into the shadows, look past time and space. What do you think happened?”
Her fingers tightened on the door. “That is not a wise question to ask, wintiki.”
“Unwise because you don’t wish to answer it, or because I won’t like what you have to say?”
“Perhaps both.”
I looked at my hands for a moment, absorbing what she hadn’t said. “You think the dragon heart killed Ysolde.”
“No.”
I glanced up.
“I think it used her up,” she said. “I think—I have no proof, mind you; this is all simply speculation—but I think that Constantine Norka tried to save her, and was destroyed along with her.”
“Would the dragon heart do that to dragons?” I asked, sick at the thought of risking Gabriel. I knew without the slightest doubt in my soul that he would sacrifice himself to save me.
“It has the power to destroy the entire weyr,” she said wearily. “Perhaps even the mortal world.”
“Agathos daimon,” I swore under my breath. I had always assumed that the dragon heart was a benign thing, a relic of the first dragon that