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The Widow Dragon, Book 1
The Daylight Bond
The strait can only be crossed by dragon, and only in daylight.
The strait can only be crossed by dragon, and only in daylight. Everyone on the Reach knows it. Nobody asks who made it a law of survival, or what it costs the dragons who keep it.
Riley Callahan is a rope-wright's daughter from the fishing village of Netholm, taken by the Levy to the Aerial Station at Daggerpoint, where cadets begin their year by leaping off a cliff for a dragon to catch or refuse. On the morning of her leap, the cliff guns fire on a shape in the sea mist, and the shape comes through the fire: Ondarra, a vast wild sovereign unridden for forty years, who catches the levy girl in front of the whole station.
By sunset, Grand Marshal Silas Thane has claimed the dragon as Crown property and handed her rider to the one captain he most enjoys punishing: Rowan Cade, sole survivor of the ambush that killed his whole flight. What nobody says at the ceremony is that Ondarra's stolen mate is Rowan's own dragon, and that mated dragons bind their riders to each other in the flesh: heartbeat, breath, fever, and wanting, carried body to body, impossible to switch off.
The law Thane wrote forbids a flight leader and his cadet absolutely. The mating season does not care. How long can two riders carry a bond that floods a little higher every night, in a station where the Marshal is watching, and the guns are always loaded?