For a moment, Alaric thought he was dreaming.
Cassius had wiped them all out. Alaric remembered that day all too clearly. Dragonfire reigning from the sky as, one by one, they fell. Cassius had sworn to both Queen and country that none survived. How did Char come to escape? Char, who was the younger brother of Will DeGrey? Cassius would have known if he had not been amongst the dead.
He pushed those thoughts aside: there was time enough for questions later.
“Not yet,” Alaric replied, giving him a defiant grin.
Finding Char alive had given him a new sense of hope. He knew that Naerys did not survive – could not have survived. Aragoth was large and vast, but Alaric did not think that even Char could keep a fully grown dragon a secret for sixteen years. Still, Char had been dead and now he was not. He felt, also, that this meeting was not by chance. He wondered if Char had been seeking them out.
“Come,” Alaric said, “There’s a camp not far from here. It’s safe. We can talk there.”
Charles laughed when Alaric pronounced himself not yet dead. He quirked a brow, a whisper of his more youthful self on his features, and laughed. “I feel just the same.”
He was glad, more glad than words could say, that Alaric had remained true when all the world had turned its back and scorned the fate of those who had given their lives to defend them. Rowena had done well with her ceaseless propaganda, convincing all the youth of the world that she was right where a thousand, thousand dragons and their riders had all been wrong. Yet there were those, too, such as Alaric’s fellow Councilmen, who had known the truth and turned their backs, anyway. Alaric had proved the best of them - but, then, Charles had never had any doubt of that.
When Alaric invited him to come, Charles paused, grinned half-uncertainly. He knew he could trust Alaric, but he hesitated out of habit. He’d guarded his secrets so closely for so many years, something strange awoke in him at the thought of revealing, at last, the most precious of them. Yet, it was not merely this habit that stopped him. Charles’ next news was so immense, so momentous, he found he hardly had a word to couch it, no gesture to prepare his friend for what was to come.
“I will come,” he promised. “But, first, there is something I must tell you...and something I must show you, as well.”
He smiled, then, a bright grin that he couldn’t keep from his lips. Somehow, the sharing of this news seemed to make it real, seemed to conjure some strange optimism he’d not known in decade and a half.
“You recall, I trust, that my brother was wed and had a child from his union.” He shifted. “The rumors are that Roran Degrey died a babe at his mother’s breast but,” he shook his head, paused, turned to trudge back through the woods the way he’d come, and beckoned Alaric to keep pace with him. As he walked, he continued to speak.
“These are fabrications. When my brother lay dying at the hands of his best friend, he exacted one final oath from his betrayer. He made Cassius swear he would spare me, because he loved me and he knew, too, that I would find a way to save his family. Cassius spared me and I saved them, though I could not save his wife from the fever that stole her life away, I saved Roran.
“Since I was a fugitive, I entrusted Roran to his maternal grandmother’s care but, she being an elderly woman, she eventually passed away and, since that time, the boy has been in my charge. Roran has not, however, been my only charge. As Naerys died, I swore an oath to protect her eggs and have carried them with me in secret, all these years. There are three.
“It seems that Roran stumbled upon the eggs, one day, while I was away.” Charles stopped, spotting the glimmer of bright blue dragonscales. He pulled back a branch and stepped aside so that Alaric could see. “The Dragonriders have returned to Aragoth.”
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