“Four,” the dragon’s voice spoke in his mind. “But I am the only one who has shown care for you. The others would make you a spectacle.”

  “To cause you discomfort.” Gulvane spoke out loud.

  “To weaken me,” the dragon corrected.

  “How?”

  “It would be an embarrassment.”

  “But you have weathered those before.”

  The dragon sighed. “You are too impudent by far.

  Gulvane leant back, raised an eyebrow in amusement. It was dangerous to bait the beast, when he was so contested, but he wanted to know at least something of the creature’s plans.

  “I don’t see what a little embarrassment is to one such as you,” he persisted.

  The dragon blinked. “It would weaken me.”

  That simple admission shook Gulvane to the core.

  “You have invested that much?”

  “Look within, and you will see the first bond threads have already formed.”

  “I should have seen them long ago.”

  “I kept them hidden.”

  Gulvane was aghast. “You had no right.”

  “I saved your life.”

  That made Gulvane pause. The beast was right. Even the small interference of bringing his adopted father to his rescue was enough to create a debt. When he looked within, Gulvane found the bond threads, shining bright and strong. There was just one problem.

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  “I am not yet what you want,” he said.

  The dragon smiled a terrible smile.

  “Don’t—” Gulvane’s protest was too late.

  The dragon stepped sideways in his mind, kicking the bronze-wood door wide, even as his fist hammered down on the ebony surface of the door beside it. The mist-night bow slipped free of the magic keeping it in place as the portal shattered, and memories, dark as night, flooded out engulfing the corridors of his mind in bloody wreaths of sorrow and secret victory.

  This time the pain was like a physical blow. So many memories, so much coldness, so much—too much—emotion dammed up and masked behind the professional solitude his mistress had made him learn. The poison had required strength of heart to endure and then defeat, but the trade had encased that heart in an icy shield denying emotion.

  The sun shivered at the horizon’s edge, lending the world a gray light until it could shine in full. Gulvane felt its promise in the coolness of the pre-dawn breeze, heard it in the growing chorus of bird and animal cries, saw it in the silvered edges of his chamber’s soft, gray curtains.

  The dragon still stood, propped against the wall, its brow furrowed with concern. Relief softened its features when it saw Gulvane open his eyes.

  “My rival comes,” the dragon said. “I trust you are whole, now—all your lifetimes blended as one?”

  In his mind, Gulvane took note of the shattered assassin’s door, the way the fighter’s door hung half off its hinges, the fact the forester’s door was wedged by the softly mounded earth of memory. A fourth doorway stood, forever open, a square framework of granite and stone. The rooms beyond each were empty, yet he could see relics of his past in every one.

  He would use them, later, he knew, to recall exactly what he needed, until he had explored his mind enough to know where his secrets were kept. In the meantime, he reached down and picked up the crossbow, feeling it become a weight in his hands even as it disappeared from inside his head.

  Undoing its concealment had been remarkably easy, given how hard he’d studied to work out how to hide it there.

  The dragon watched, and, when Gulvane looked up from the weapon, it spoke.

  “Will you treat with me?” it asked. “Call me master for another lifetime?”

  Gulvane knew a fifth door was already forming, a great archway leading to an even larger cavern. He was ready for a change, curious to see what events would give him the memories to fill a space the size of that which lay beyond the arch.

  There was only one thing more, he had to ask. One last debt he had to pay.

  “My mistress.” Gulvane made it a statement, a demand, and to his surprise the dragon acquiesced.

  “I will show mercy.”

  He glanced toward the window, and the sound of heavy wingbeats, now receding. After a moment, he looked around the room.

  “How long do you need to pack?”