I woke up shivering so hard my teeth hurt.
For a few seconds I didn't know where I was. The sky above me looked gray-white through a web of branches, the kind of pale daylight that came after too much rain or too little sleep. My whole body felt wrong, too heavy, too cold, too bruised. When I tried to breathe deeply, pain spread through my ribs and side in a dull, ugly wave.
Then I heard the river.
The memory hit all at once.
The cave. The dragon. The roar. The river swallowing me whole.
My hand snapped inward so fast pain flashed through my wrist.
The fruit was still there.
Warm against my palm.
I squeezed it hard enough to hurt just to make sure it was real.
Relief came first. Sharp and immediate.
Then exhaustion crashed over it.
I lay there on the muddy bank breathing hard, staring up through the branches while cold seeped through my clothes and into my skin. Everything I was wearing was still damp. My shirt clung to me in stiff, uncomfortable patches where river water and dried blood had mixed. My shoulder felt half-beaten apart. My hip ached from where I'd hit the rocks. My lungs still burned every time I coughed.
I turned my head toward the river.
The water moved past in a restless gray sheet, faster in the middle, slower where reeds bent near the edge. It looked almost harmless now. Just a river. Just the current and stone and cold water moving on as if it had not nearly drowned me an hour, or ten hours, earlier.
I swallowed and immediately regretted it. My throat felt scraped raw.
"Still alive," I muttered.
"Barely," Finn said.
His voice sounded clearer than it had while I was half-conscious in the river, calmer too. Annoyingly calm, considering I felt like I had been trampled by the entire cave on the way out.
I shut my eyes for a second. "How long was I out?"
"Not long enough to recover. Long enough to stop drowning."
I let out a breath that might have been a laugh if I'd had the energy for one.
My fingers tightened around the fruit again. "The dragon…"
"Is nowhere near us now."
I opened my eyes. "How do you know?"
"Because you survived."
I frowned at the sky.
"That isn't really an answer."
There was a pause.
"You survived because the river carried you far away from the cave," Finn said. "Not because you escaped on your own strength. Do not confuse the two."
That landed exactly where it was meant to.
Of course it did.
I turned my head again and looked downriver, then upriver, trying to make sense of anything around me. Trees on both sides. Thick growth. Mud and roots and stones. No cave. No cliff face. No sign of the mountain or the dragon or even the route I had taken through the forest before any of it happened.
Just a river.
Just a forest.
Just nowhere I recognized.
A cold, different kind of discomfort slid through me.
"Where are we?"
Finn did not answer immediately.
That was answer enough.
I pushed myself up onto one elbow, hissed at the pain in my side, and tried again more sharply. "Where are we?"
"I do not know."
I stared at the river as if it might apologize.
"You don't know."
"No."
"And I don't know."
"Correct."
"Great. We're fucking lost!"
I sat with that for a second.
Astralon burned behind me somewhere maybe days away. The forest and the cave were behind me too. Sylarion was ahead, supposedly, except now I didn't know where ahead even was.
I looked down at myself, mud, torn clothes, blood, bruises, one hand wrapped around a stolen fruit from a dragon's den like an idiot.
"This is going well."
"You are alive," Finn said.
I glared at the river. "You keep saying that like it fixes everything."
"It fixes the most immediate problem."
I wanted to argue with that, but my body chose that moment to shudder violently from the cold.
I needed to move.
Staying half-drowned on a riverbank was not going to help me reach Sylarion, or eat the fruit, or do anything but get colder.
I rolled onto one knee slowly, then the other. The world tilted sideways for a second, but I held it there until it steadied. My soaked clothes dragged at me. My feet squelched unpleasantly in the mud. When I tried to stand all the way, my legs nearly gave out under me.
"Fantastic," I muttered.
"Stand anyway."
"Brilliant advice."
"You are welcome."
I got to my feet on the second attempt.
My balance was terrible. Every injury I had collected over the last several days seemed determined to remind me it existed. My ribs complained. My shoulder throbbed. My ankle still hadn't completely forgiven me for the forest chase. And underneath it all was a deeper ache from the river and the roar and sheer exhaustion that made me feel hollow-boned.
I looked once at the fruit again.
Warm. Smooth. Untouched.
Still impossible.
Then I tucked it carefully inside my coat and started walking.
The first part was miserable.
There was no better word for it.
I kept to the river at first because it was the only landmark I had, moving slowly along the bank where the ground allowed it and cutting around thicker brush when it didn't. The forest near the water was quieter than the deeper woods around the dragon's cave had been, but not by enough to make me trust it. Every snapping twig still made me tense. Every distant birdcall still sounded like it could be something else.
At least there were no roars.
At least no impossible golden eye was fixed on me from a cave mouth.
That counted for something.
The river curved gradually, and after a while the trees began to thin in places. The undergrowth gave way to stretches of flatter ground. I found what looked like a narrow animal trail first, then a more definite footpath, half-muddy and rutted by wagon wheels.
Human sign.
I stopped at once and looked at it.
Relief.
Wariness.
Suspicion.
All three together.
I followed it anyway.
The path drew away from the river and toward higher ground where the trees opened up into patchy clearings. The farther I walked, the more signs appeared—cut stumps, fence posts, a broken bucket half-buried in mud, a strip of cloth caught on a thorn bush. Civilization, or at least the edges of it.
Then I saw the town.
Small.
Not much more than a cluster of low buildings gathered around a road that widened into a central square. A few wagons stood near a well. Smoke drifted from chimneys. Fences boxed in thin vegetable plots. A smithy sat off to one side, shuttered for the moment, and farther up the road I saw what was probably an inn—two stories, sagging sign, windows clouded with grime.
It should have looked ordinary.
Instead it looked unreal.
After Astralon in flames, after the forest, after the cave and the dragon and the river, this place looked almost fragile in its normalcy. Like someone had built a town out of memory and expected it to hold.
I slowed before entering the main road.
A few people were moving around the square, an older man hauling a sack from one wagon to another, a woman sweeping dirt from her front step, a boy carrying a basket under one arm. Nothing dramatic. No alarms. No blood. No screaming.
They all noticed me.
Of course they did.
I must have looked like I'd crawled out of a grave, washed downstream, and reconsidered the whole thing halfway. My clothes were torn and still damp. My face probably had streaks of dirt and dried blood across it. I had a sword at my side and the posture of someone one bad word away from collapsing.
A few people stared longer than was polite.
No one approached.
Fine by me.
I headed straight for an inn.
The sign hanging outside had once been painted with some kind of horse or deer or creature that weather had nearly erased. I pushed through the door and stepped inside into a room that smelled of old wood, stew, stale ale, and smoke baked into beams over the course of too many years.
Warmth hit me first.
Not deep warmth. Just indoor warmth. Enough that my frozen skin stung as it adjusted.
The common room was half full. Three men sat near one wall with tankards between them. A woman in traveling clothes was eating alone by the window. Behind a scarred counter stood a broad man with a gray beard and a face shaped by long practice into mild suspicion.
His eyes moved over me once.
Then again.
"Well," he said, dry as old paper, "you look like shit."
I blinked at him.
There were probably better responses available, but I was too tired to find them.
"Can I get a room?"
He kept looking at me as though deciding whether I was more likely to die in it or burn it down. Then he shrugged.
"If you can pay."
I checked the small pouch I still had strapped inside my coat. Soaked, but it thankfully had not ruined the coins.
"I can."
That improved his opinion of me by a fraction so small it might have been my imagination.
He named a price. I paid it. He slid a key across the counter.
"Up the stairs, end of the hall, left side," he said. Then, after another look at me, "Try not to bleed on more than what you've rented."
I took the key.
"Encouraging."
"That wasn't encouragement," he said.
Fair enough.
I climbed the stairs more slowly than I wanted to, found the room, got the key into the lock on the second try, and stepped inside.
It was small.
A bed against one wall. A narrow washstand. One chair. A window with warped shutters. Nothing more.
It might as well have been a palace.
I shut the door, slid the lock into place, and stood there for a long moment listening to the quiet.
No monsters.
No screaming.
No river.
Just the muffled creak of the building settling and the faint murmur of voices downstairs.
The ordinariness of it felt wrong.
I set the sword against the wall by the bed and sat down too hard on the mattress. It creaked under me. My whole body sagged forward at once.
For a moment I just stayed like that, elbows on knees, breathing.
Then Finn spoke.
"Now."
I looked up. "Now what?"
"The fruit."
Of course.
I reached inside my coat and pulled it out.
In the dim light of the room it still looked impossible, deep amber-red skin, faint inner glow, no bruise from my death grip on it, no sign at all that it had come from a cavern beside a sleeping dragon.
I turned it once in my hand.
"You're sure?"
"No."
I looked up sharply.
His tone didn't change.
"I am sure it will be beneficial. I am not sure how much it will hurt. Those are different things."
"That is a terrible answer."
"It is the truthful one."
I stared at the fruit again.
Power never came freely.
I knew that now.
The pact with Finn had nearly killed me. Spirit power burned through me when I used too much of it. The dragon's fruit had almost gotten me torn apart. There was no reason this part would suddenly become easy.
Still.
I thought of the dragon's eye opening.
Of the roar.
Of Astralon burning.
Of Nate.
Of the three-headed lion's claws in my side and the way it had turned from me because I hadn't even been worth finishing.
I clenched my jaw.
"I'm not staying weak."
"Good," Finn said. "Then eat it."
I took one breath, then bit into the fruit.