“What just happened?” Marin murmured to Thom.
“If I didn’t know better,” he muttered back, “I’d say a family reunion.” His eyes didn’t waver from Leinth, who stood before them in the driving, stinging snow, her gaze suddenly soft and sad as she peered back into the dim of the tent, the gloom into which Cameron had vanished.
“Such fire,” she said softly before her gaze flicked toward Marin and Thom, intensifying for a moment. The storm grew momentarily stronger, then abated as her expression softened slightly from its harsh severity into something almost sad. “He reminds me so much of those who are long lost to us.”
“Like Seamus,” Thom said.
“Yes,” she said, her voice almost lost in the wind. “Like Seamus.” Her gaze drifted toward the shadows beyond them again and she shook her head. “This did not go as I anticipated.”
“These things seldom do,” Marin observed.
Whatever the hell this was. Thom’s brow furrowed and he shivered in the wind and snow.
“Go inside,” he said to Marin. “Make sure that they’re okay. I’ll handle…whatever there is left to handle.” His gaze drifted toward Leinth again. “What, precisely, brought you here?”
Marin hesitated when he asked the question, making him regret asking it before she was out of earshot. Leinth stared at him for a long, aching moment.
“I came to see the young dragon,” she said. “I came to warn him.”
“Warn him?” Marin drifted back to Thom’s side. “About what?”
Leinth’s eyes slid shut, the lids fluttering for a moment. “You will carry this warning to him, I trust?”
“Is it meant for him, or all of us?” Marin asked softly.
Leinth’s lips quirked toward a smile. “A fair question. I am no fool, he would share this warning, so I mean it for all.
“This storm…it is not my doing, though it was once within my power. I am not the only one who has ever possessed such power. Others will come who mean you ill.”
“Same story,” Thom said. “Different day.”
She laughed. “I suspected. Tell him that sometimes, not even family can be trusted. I pray he’ll understand my meaning before it’s too late.” Her smile faded and she drew the hood of her cloak up to shield her face. “I have loved them all, in my way,” she said, her words carried on the harsh wind. “Tell him that, too. Would that I could protect them. That task, I fear, will fall to him—to you.” Her head dipped. “Safeguard them, Seers. Have a care. I have loved and lost. I would not have that be his fate.”
“Should we tell him that, too?” Thom asked quietly, imagining that he was still meeting her gaze, though her eyes were hidden in the shadows of her cowl.
She nodded. “Yes,” she said in a bare whisper. “Tell him that, too.”
