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All the women of Fox Way loved to tell Adam that his bond with the forest was bound to lead him into trouble.
Well, not so much Persephone. She only smiled mildly, usually over a cup of tea or a slice of pie, and assured him in her own peculiar sort of way that he would find his way to where he needed to be.
Of course, the two views weren't mutually exclusive; Adam didn't think it was the way of the world to expect to get to where you needed to be without a significant amount of trouble.
Still. In this moment, huddled against the winter wind somewhere deep in the forest, Adam grew more sure with every step he took that he was walking into far more trouble than any of the women of Fox Way with all of their insight could have foreseen.
Adam had woken from an uneasy sleep that morning full of a deep apprehension that something was wrong in the forest. The tarot reading he'd attempted hadn't been very clear to him, and he hadn't been able to shake off the sense of foreboding from his dreams. It'd only seemed to grow stronger as the day went on, so he’d gone directly to the forest itself, despite the icy layer of snow on the ground and the frost in the air.
He didn't have a good sense of how long he'd been walking for, but it'd been long enough that he'd seriously considered turning around and getting back to the warmth of Fox Way. Then he'd noticed smoke in the distance.
He followed the drifting trail of smoke for what become a dishearteningly long time, but then, through a thicket of trees just up ahead, he saw where the smoke was coming from: a narrow cave’s mouth, flickering starkly with firelight. Adam approached as near as he dared, close enough that he could hear the echo of two men’s voices from somewhere inside the cave.
Tucked quietly behind the cover of a birch tree, Adam listened to the two men arguing until he thought he'd gathered some idea of what was happening. The men had something valuable in the cave, something valuable and probably both dangerous and stolen, and they were debating if they should give their haul to Laumonier or to Laumonier’s daughter.
In the kingdom of Henrietta, the Laumoniers were notorious. They had their hands in all sorts of magical trade, not all of it legal, although that hadn't ever been formally proven. They were too careful and too experienced at what they did to end up being charged before the King. That didn't mean the royal family was unsuspecting of the transgressions the Laumoniers committed. Adam knew from conversations with Gansey - more properly, Prince Richard Campbell Gansey III - that the royal family had operatives quietly looking for proof of the magical experimentation the Laumoniers were rumored to be involved in. It just meant that the Laumoniers possessed too much influence, within the kingdom and beyond, to be brought down without substantial evidence.
Adam had heard even worse about the Laumoniers from the women of Fox Way. The women of Fox Way were gifted psychics who used their abilities to help look after the forest. They'd unofficially taken Adam in years ago, and he'd learned to help them guard and maintain the forest. Everyone at Fox Way worked together to make rounds through the forest and use their extended senses to watch for fluctuations in the magical activity of the forest, and they would pass on information to the king as necessary. The forest was special, it had deep roots and its magical energy was strong. The power that the forest could provide for those with magical abilities could be terribly dangerous in the wrong hands. The hands of the Laumoniers, specifically. More than once women of Fox Way had intercepted men with ties to the Laumoniers using the forest in harmful ways. Bringing supplies for dark rituals into the forest. Trading in horrifically cursed objects. Most disturbing of all, the women of Fox Way had heard hints that those men were experimenting with rituals and curses in order to magically transfigure animals, to create creatures that were stronger and more obedient and more lethal than natural born animals, to use for their own purposes and to set on their enemies. The Laumoniers didn't deign to do their own dirty work, of course, but those men who worked for them caused immense damage under their orders.
Here and now, Adam might not know the exact circumstances, but he knew these men were planning on supplying the Laumoniers or their even more unstable daughter Piper with something that they would use to hurt people. The women of Fox Way had prevented such deals from successfully transpiring before, but not alone, not with such little information and no plan. Adam tried to tell himself that he wouldn't be helping anyone by being stupid and reckless and getting himself caught. But still. The forest had wanted him to come. And what it came down to was that Adam wouldn’t feel right, just turning away.
Carefully, warily, he approached the entrance of the cave, keeping to the shadows as much as he could. By the light of the dwindling fire, he could see the figures of the two men, and between them, a roughhewn wooden crate. Whatever was in the crate, some part of Adam could sense power coming from it, the way he could sense power coming from certain rivers or trees that were strong sources of magical energy. This was the reason he was here.
Without giving himself time to change his mind, Adam closed his eyes and concentrated on using his magic to start vines growing from the cave walls. He urged the vines forward and sent them circling the men’s ankles, swift and silent, snaking around and around until the vines had bound the men’s legs and arms and covered their mouths, stifling their shouts of alarm. Once Adam was sure both men were constrained, he started new vines growing that wrapped around the crate and drew the crate to him where he stayed out of sight by the opening of the cave.
Adam had no clear plan once he had the crate, beyond getting away. He put distance between himself and the cave as hastily as he could through the snow, and finally when he came along a secluded cluster of winterberry shrubs, he stopped to see what was inside of the crate he’d so recklessly made off with.
He pried the top open, and inside the crate were lain three oil-black dragon eggs.
He nearly reached out to brush his fingers over the thin smoke wisp patterns of red and orange and blue that ran subtly along each of the eggs’ dark surface, but he held himself back.
Dragon eggs.
What was he supposed to do with them?
Adam carefully put the top back on the crate and tried to think, but he was at a loss. Looking about for some sort of inspiration, he spotted a puddle nearby that had frozen over, decently sized and its icy surface perfectly smooth. It would do for scrying, so he knelt before it.
He had no idea what the forest expected of him, and the discovery of actual dragon eggs made it difficult for him to clear his mind to allow himself to scry. Senselessly he found his thoughts drifting to one of the few conversations he’d had with Ronan Lynch.
Ronan Lynch didn’t like Adam, and didn’t feel bad about making it apparent, not that Adam had the time to spare for Ronan’s pisspoor attitude anyway. Adam would never engage with someone like Ronan if it weren't for Gansey. Adam didn’t have the faintest idea what Gansey saw in Ronan, but Adam refused to let Ronan get in the way of whatever friendship he was building with Gansey. The longest conversation Adam and Ronan had ever had was during one late night when Gansey had been telling a story about Glendower and Glendower’s magician from the days when they’d allegedly ridden dragons together. Gansey had made a very Gansey-like remark about it -imagine being there to witness that, the great dragons and the men who took to the skies with them - and Adam had responded with something to the effect of how as flashy as that sounded, he still thought there had to be greater benefits to more mundane forms of transportation. Greater odds of survival, specifically. This had been enough to move Ronan beyond his typical hostile glares and sharp-edged sneers, and actually fuel Ronan to speak. Of course Ronan Lynch would want it known that he was in favor of anything to do with dragons. Of course Ronan Lynch would say that the riders from the days of old who’d bonded with dragons had had nothing to fear - that it was everyone else who ought to have been afraid of the dragonriders. Of course Ronan wouldn’t care that breeding dragons or attempting to tame dragon hatchlings was outlawed under Gansey’s own father. Of course Ronan would think that the reserves of land that had been sectioned off to house the few remaining dragons that still lived, in order to keep dragons away from towns and villages, were - in Ronan's own words - fucking bullshit. Of course. None of it had been the slightest bit surprising, least of all when Gansey had quietly and somewhat ruefully told Adam that Ronan and his brothers had grown up on stories of dragons from their father.
It was his own fault for allowing his mind to wander, Adam thought to himself with aggravation, when he realized what he was seeing in the glassy surface of the ice. His scrying had revealed to him a path through the forest that would lead him to the Barns.
Adam didn’t want to go to Ronan Lynch for help. But then, who else could Adam go to that knew anything about dragons? Who else could Adam go to that he wouldn’t have to worry about feeling bad for bringing this kind of trouble to their doorstep? More than any of that, though, this was where the forest was leading him, and Adam had come to trust the forest.
So he went.
Adam trusted the forest to lead him where he ought to go, but there were things in the forest that were more sinister and more perilous than the forces Adam had become connected with.
It started with the creeping feeling that something was after him. He didn’t hear anything, or catch a glimpse of something unsettling from the corner of his eye. He knew it to be true anyway. He didn't know what was there just out of sight following him, but he knew better than to ignore his suspicion. From past experience he could tell that this wasn't just his own sense of trepidation he was feeling; the part of him that was connected to the forest was honed to warning signs that his conscious mind wouldn’t know to look for. Whatever it was his instincts were telling him to guard against, it left Adam with the insidious feeling of being closed in on.
Doing his best not to slacken his pace, Adam focused on the mental shielding he’d learned with Persephone. He pictured himself walking through the ice that he’d scried into before, to somewhere distant and impenetrable where nothing could touch him.
It wasn’t enough.
Adam could tell the thing was getting closer because cracks began to split their way down the trunks of the trees around him with sounds like a rifle being fired. Adam grabbed up a narrow branch that had fallen to the forest floor and focused his magic on making it something he could use, until it’d grown sharp as a blade. The thing was very near, Adam was sure, but it knew that Adam was aware of it, and so it’d stilled itself, like a spider ceasing its scuttering when it sensed human eyes on it. Waiting for it to move, not knowing where it would choose to hurl itself, was agonizing.
It struck from above, too quickly for Adam to be able to make the creature out properly, with a low whir of wings that made Adam think of an overlarge insect. Acting all on reflex, no time for conscious thought, Adam struck out with his glorified stick to deflect what looked horribly like an unnaturally large stinger plunging toward him. His hit managed to connect, he felt and heard the distinct crack of it, but the stinger must have managed to connect too; an explosive level of pain seared through him all at once like someone had skewered his shoulder with a white-hot poker.
The pain was peculiarly hard to focus on, though. Everything seemed...murky. In a creeping rush like being swept out to sea, his vision grew darker and darker and everything felt further and further away. He had to focus, he had to...there was a light. He thought there was a light. There was fire. Something aflame, something in the distance, or maybe not, maybe not so far away, a flaming sword. A flaming sword, and the sharp features of Ronan Lynch’s face looking even sharper and fiercer in the light of the blade. Ronan Lynch had a flaming sword. Adam expended a lot of effort into trying to get himself to blink the image away, he had to stop letting his mind wander like this, he had to focus. A flaming sword was a good idea, why had he used a stick, why hadn’t he used a flaming sword? Adam clung to consciousness like a drowning man gripping at driftwood bobbing by, but inevitably he slipped under.
Adam woke up feeling warm. Groggily he recognized the soft crackling sounds of a fire going, and when he slowly opened his eyes, there were huge dark eyes looking back at him.
“You woke up,” the small blond girl whispered in a furtive sort of voice from where she was tucked into the corner of an aged wooden rocking chair. Probably Adam would have found the girl’s tone of surprise more notable if it weren’t for the fact that the legs that she had pulled up to her chest were fur-covered goat’s legs.
“I should go get Kerah,” the girl said, distracting Adam again. “He wants to know when you’re up, but if I leave, I might miss the babies…” The girl cast a weighty look toward the fireplace, and when Adam followed her gaze, he realized that nestled in the heart of the fire lay the three dragon eggs.
Before Adam could prioritize which questions to ask - where was he, who was Kerah, who was she, what did she expect to happen once three newborn dragons crawled out of the fire - he heard a low call he thought might have been the cry of a raven, and then Ronan Lynch appeared in the doorway with his raven perched on his shoulder.
“Parrish,” Ronan said, faux-casual, like this was any other time the two of them had happened to cross paths while trying to find Gansey. “All in one piece then?”
“Lynch? Am I at the Barns? How did I get here?” Adam asked, attempting to get up off of the sofa he was lying on, but Ronan took several harsh steps forward and snapped, “Quit moving, for fuck’s sake, I’m surprised you came to as quick as you did, don’t fuck it up.”
Adam stilled where he was sitting, considering this. His shoulder hurt something awful, and his head was beginning to pound, and now that he thought about it, he really wanted something to drink. “How long was I out?”
“Almost 24 hours.”
Adam stared. “That’s quick?”
“For the damage you took? Yeah, Parrish.”
Adam found it infuriating, the way Ronan would rage against courtly etiquette or his older brother telling him off for horse racing or anyone who dared to look at his raven the wrong way with all the force of a fully-armed battalion, but now was when he chose to act indifferent. “What happened?”
“Let me clean your shoulder first,” Ronan responded, shaking his head a little. “Then we can get to your questions.”
Adam realized then, when he went to look at his shoulder, that he wasn’t wearing a shirt under all the mismatched blankets that’d been piled on him, and that his shoulder had been wrapped. When he looked up from observing the clean white bandaging, Ronan was grabbing more bandages and an unmarked white jar from the side table.
“What is that?” Adam asked, frowning at the jar, because it seemed like the easiest place to start trying to understand the current situation.
“Try the reason you’re awake right now,” Ronan shot back, cocking an unimpressed eyebrow at him. “Or do you think there’s a lot of good alternatives for how to deal with the aftermath of being attacked by a magical demonic creature in the middle of the frozen woods that we could sit around debating?”
Well. When he put it that way. “If it needs to be reapplied, I can do it myself,” Adam said, because there was only so much he was willing to concede on.
Ronan gave him a contentious roll of his eyes. “It’s a little late to be starting with your issues, I already changed your bandages twice.” Ronan breathed in sharply through his nose and let the breath out of his mouth. “Look, you’re not gonna get anywhere trying to pull some contortionist shit anyway, I’ll do the back of your shoulder, you can do the rest.”
Adam didn't have a good argument against that. Possibly he would have in less hapless circumstances, but as things stood, he ended up unwinding the old bandaging and leaning forward a little so Ronan could apply the salve to the back of his shoulder. It was a little weird, but if Ronan was going to aggressively pretend otherwise, Adam could too.
Ronan, despite his personality being largely made up of vicious posturing, was surprisingly careful spreading salve over Adam’s shoulder blade where it was sorest. Adam focused on looking down at what he could see of the front his shoulder where he supposed he’d been stung clean through. There wasn’t a puncture wound, or anything so commonplace. The skin had gone an unsettling ashen gray, tight and drawn and waxen looking. The physical traces weren’t the worst of it, though. His shoulder ached with every heartbeat, and he felt oddly feverish, though he didn’t think he was any warmer than usual. It was more that the part of him that was connected to magic felt somehow frail and off-balance. When Ronan was done he handed Adam the jar and said, “Don’t take too long, the hatchlings should be breaking out of the eggs soon,” and he left, taking the faun girl and his raven with him.
And imminent dragon hatchlings, at the very least, gave Adam something to focus on other than the aching pain as he applied more salve and rebandaged his shoulder. Something that wasn’t being irritated with himself for thinking that Ronan actually probably would have done a better job with the rest of his shoulder than he could by himself. The dragons would emerge snapping and snarling soon, and what then? Adam took a few moments to clean himself up and put on a shirt that was lying out, which wasn’t the shirt he’d been wearing earlier, but it did fit him well enough. Then he went to crouch by the fire.
There were already fine cracks running along the shells of the eggs. He didn’t want to be here by himself when the dragons emerged, so he went to the door. He wasn’t entirely sure what he ought to do next, but he’d barely stuck his head out when the faun girl came scampering up to him with a tray that bore three different glasses of juice and various kinds of fruit. She told him that she didn’t know what he thought was good for eating, but that he had to like something on the tray. She said this last bit with a very dubious sort of expression, though. Adam drank a glass of juice, which turned out to be cranberry; then he drank another, which turned out to be pomegranate, when the faun girl looked so delightedly gratified.
Adam might have even gone on to drink the third glass, just because it seemed to please the girl so much, if Ronan hadn’t reappeared with his raven flapping her wings in agitation. “It’s not gonna be much longer, pretty sure that’s what she’s so worked up about,” Ronan said, going to crouch by the fire and pushing lightly at his raven, who was trying to press her face into the cover of Ronan’s neck. She fluttered and hopped over to the mantle above the fireplace, peering down with bright mistrustful eyes and adjusting her wings fitfully, ready to take off at a moment’s notice.
The faun girl went to Ronan’s side, looking both exceedingly eager and as if she too were poised for flight.
Adam, after a moment of deliberation, went to Ronan’s other side. How many times in his life would he get to see dragons hatch?
“Hear that?” Ronan asked in a quiet voice, his eyes lit by the firelight, gaze never leaving the eggs.
As if in response to Ronan’s voice, the rustling and scritching sort sounds coming from inside the eggs grew louder. In a matter of heartbeats, the egg in the middle began to break apart, and the other two followed suit quickly after.
From the remains of the shells crawled and stumbled three baby dragons, each of them the simmering red color of lit coals, all enormous wings much too big for their bodies and bright lamp-like eyes. The first one out of its egg managed to clamber determinedly out of the fire, and Ronan picked it up, a smile slowly curving his mouth that Adam never would have thought possible of him if Adam hadn’t witnessed it firsthand. The tiny dragon scrabbled forward and Ronan let it climb up him to curl itself around his neck and shoulders, snuffling its long snout under Ronan’s shirt.
The next one that made its way out of the fire Ronan picked up and held out to Adam. Adam wasn’t all that sure he wanted to hold a newborn dragon, to be perfectly honest, it seemed like something could go wrong too easily, for him or for the dragon or for them both. But Ronan was looking at him, and so was the baby dragon, and Adam couldn’t just refuse. Cautiously he took the baby dragon from Ronan. As Adam drew it closer the baby dragon sneezed, setting off a few bright sparks, and it looked so visibly startled by the act of sneezing, blinking its enormous eyes at the thin wisps of smoke drifting ever so faintly from its snout, that Adam burst out in unrestrained laughter. He cradled the baby dragon softly to his chest and watched with an unexpected rush of warmth as the faun girl made insistent grabby hands, and Ronan placed the third baby dragon gently on her lap. The faun girl grinned down at it impishly as if she were already picturing going on dragonback to conquer kingdoms.
The baby dragons were, as it turned out, so unspeakably charming that at one point Adam theorized aloud about potential evolutionary advantages to explain it, which made Ronan laugh at him and call him a headcase. And, granted, Adam didn’t think Ronan was entirely wrong, but all the same, he didn’t think he himself was entirely wrong either.
Adam would challenge anyone not to be whole-heartedly won over by the baby dragons, whose red scales flickered when they caught the light like they were made out of flame, who liked to wriggle their way under Ronan’s or Adam’s shirt where they would curl up and make quiet rumbling sounds of contentment that Adam would go so far as to call purring, who slept in the crackling fire all piled up on top of each other so closely that there was no telling where one ended and the other began and then woke up so pleased with themselves to be entirely covered in soot.
Even for someone like Adam Parrish, self-made and self-reliant, they made it so easy to want to stay.
He was in over his head before he’d ever realized the waters were creeping up on him.
That first night, he should have asked more significant questions about the particulars of what had led up to his being at the Barns in the first place. But he’d been caught up in the wonder of the newborn dragons, and he’d only asked Ronan what Ronan thought appropriate dragon names might be when Ronan had said that they should name them. Ronan had come up with a memorable list of ridiculous options, ranging wildly from Ballista to Flightmare. They’d bickered and laughed for what had to be hours. In the end, though, Ronan ended up naming them Muirdris, Caoránach, and Suileach, after stories he’d been told by his father.
The next day, after Ronan helped Adam reapply salve to his shoulder, Adam remembered to ask some of those questions at last. Ronan told him that when Adam had been in the forest Ronan had been dreaming and in his dreams he’d seen that something dark was coming after Adam. Ronan knew enough about Piper to know that it was exactly her style to get wind of trafficked dragon eggs and make plans to steal them out from under her father. She must have been keeping tabs on the eggs, and when Adam took them, she put one of the demonic creatures that must have been a result of all those alleged magical experiments to use in order to try to put a stop to him. In a way it was like the creatures were venomous. Only it wasn’t just that they killed their mark; their sting had a way of wrecking a person from the inside. If it’d strung Adam any closer to his heart, there wouldn’t have been anything Ronan could have come up with that could’ve helped Adam.
This inspired many more conversations about what Ronan was capable of. Conversations that defied belief, almost, except that Adam was here at the Barns with the evidence of Ronan’s manifested dreams all around them. Conversations that went easier for the both of them somehow when they had three high-spirited baby dragons to distract them when they needed it, to make them laugh, to provide common ground.
At first, the damage Adam had taken from being stung provided a good reason for him to stay at the Barns. But even after a few days had passed and he’d regathered his strength and there was really no need for the salve anymore, Adam wanted...he didn’t want to leave. In only a short time, Adam had become attached to this place, to Ronan and Opal and the baby dragons, he wanted to watch them grow, he didn’t want to miss anything.
He was glad for every day that he got to spend here, he didn’t want to give any of it up.
Three days in - Ronan had told Adam enough of his dreaming that he felt free to be open with it, and Adam was feeling well enough that he wanted to try scrying into Ronan’s dreams to see what those dreams were like. Together they thought of dream things they could create that would please the baby dragons.
The first things that Ronan took out of a dream he and Adam had shared were three miniature dragon figurines. They were made up of some sort of red dream-crystal that looked like he’d managed to freeze flames, and they had wings that could move. The baby dragons loved them, often proudly carrying them in the grip of their small sharp teeth or in the coil of their spindly tails.
From there Ronan made what amounted to a menagerie of miniature animal figurines, made of a shiny sort of metal-like material that was bright as brass, which the dragons fervently hoarded to sleep on top of.
And on Ronan and Adam went, night after night, thinking up all sorts of things. Wizard-like staffs studded with all different colored gems that the dragons liked to chew on and use for fetch, which was truly hilarious to behold, with the staffs being so much longer than the dragons themselves. Shield bosses and helmets shiny enough to double as mirrors and wide enough for the dragons to curl up inside of.
Adam’s favorite dreams that they pulled things out of were the ones where Ronan dreamed of light. Ronan was so good at that. In their dreams Ronan didn’t even have to think to make sprawling streets for them to walk along. Streets that were lined with streetlamp after streetlamp all merrily guttering. With cottage windows glowing golden with candles. With trees whose bare branches seemed to grow tiny orbs of light like berries. They plucked some of those orbs, and later Ronan woke up with them, and they grinned at one another as the dragons scampered around exuberantly trying to catch the light between their small sharp claws.
When the dragons had tired themselves out, and Ronan was petting Muirdris with such quiet fondness in the act that it almost made it hard for Adam to look at the two of them, Adam asked Ronan why he hadn’t tried to dream himself dragon eggs a long time ago.
Ronan ran his fingers back and forth along the ridges of Muirdris’ spine before saying in a voice that was a little unlike himself, “I would never have been able to make them so well. Not like this.”
And something about Ronan’s words made Adam ache in a way that he didn’t fully understand.
Six days in - Ronan was trying to teach the dragons to sear their own meat with the small bursts of flames they were starting to get a handle on breathing, and even though Ronan and Adam had set the dragons up in a brick outbuilding set far apart from anything else, somehow the dragons still managed to set fire to a hay barn over a hundred yards away.
At first this had seemed like something of a crisis, but the snow on the ground helped in stopping the fire from spreading to any other buildings before Ronan and Adam could get the hoses around. And then once they knew that they had the means to put the fire out and they’d given up the hay barn itself as a lost cause, they both sort of threw up their hands and let the fire burn.
The dragons relished having such a large fire to play in, rolling all about and chasing one another between and under burning planks of wood, screeching gleefully. Opal was a little jealous that she wasn’t able to go into the fire. Ronan and Adam made it up to her as best they could by bringing her fun things to throw into the fire; whatever they could find, from some iron filings that’d been sitting leftover on a workbench, to cubes of sugar, to pine cones they collected from the ground.
They ended up dragging chairs over and watching the fire burn for hours. Ronan told Adam what he knew about dragonkind. Some of what he told Adam were facts that Adam hadn’t known before, like that almost all hatchlings were born a reddish-orange color, and developed different coloring as they grew older. Some of what he told Adam sounded more like it had to be imaginative supposition, like when Ronan told him that the connection between human and dragon, the connection which formed the bond of dragonriders, started forming before the dragons were out of the egg and often inspired the dragon to hatch. Adam wasn’t sure he believed this; but, then again, he supposed it was a rather big coincidence that the dragons had hatched so quickly in Ronan and Adam’s presence. More surprising than any of that, Ronan made spiced tea for them to sip by the fire. When Adam told Ronan it was good, because it was, he told Adam he'd learned to make it from his mother, and he said it in a way that made it sound so aggressively like it didn’t really matter to him that Adam knew the opposite was true.
Adam wouldn’t have expected it at the start, but the whole thing had ended up being a surprisingly good afternoon.
Nine days in - the dragons had grown nearly three times in size and had been stoutheartedly attempting to work out the mechanics of flight. By now they’d managed to get past merely running and flapping and crashing, to a more sustained sort of advanced-level hopping, where they could stay aloft for maybe ten or twelve yards or so and then push off the ground and soar another ten or twelve yards. They could cover an astounding amount of ground in this way, and they were astoundingly quick.
Pleased with their progress, Ronan, in all of his wisdom, had gone so far as to produce a sleigh with three leather harnesses to pull it.
When Adam had only stared between Ronan and the sleigh, Ronan had stared defiantly back at him and said, “What? You know how bad Opal wants to get to ride the dragons, but they’re not big enough. This is as close as she’s gonna get for a while.”
“Sure. How bad Opal wants to get to ride the dragons.”
Ronan’s defiant look only grew that much stronger. “Are you trying to say Opal doesn’t really really want to ride the dragons?”
Adam only cocked an eyebrow dryly back at him.
“Or are you trying to say the sleigh isn’t a good idea?” Ronan continued, unwavering. “Cuz it’s a fucking awesome idea, Parrish, just try it and see.”
And it was a losing battle, trying to resist Ronan in this, so despite himself, Adam did end up on the sleigh.
They let Opal go first, naturally, and she cackled, overjoyed, as she whooped for the dragons to go faster and faster. She ended up overturning the sleigh, time after time, hurtling into snow banks again and again. Luckily the snow was fresh and still soft.
The dragons seemed to think it was as much fun as Opal did, raring to go each time Opal got back on the sleigh. After a few dozen rounds of this, though, Opal was getting distinctly unsteady on her hooves, though her smile was still just as enormous, and Adam managed to convince her to sit and rest for a bit. By the time he’d gotten her settled with a thermos and blanket he’d had the forethought to bring along, Ronan was calling, “Come on, Parrish, get over here.”
So Adam climbed into the sleigh where Ronan was waiting, and he’d barely gotten himself seated when Ronan urged the dragons into motion and they shot off as spiritedly as ever.
“Lynch! You’re worse than Opal!” Adam hollered as they just continued to pick up speed, because Ronan’s whoops were even more effective than Opal’s at getting the dragons to want to go faster, and obviously Ronan had no intentions of stopping before they overturned the sleigh. No, Adam knew all too well that Ronan’s intentions lay at the exact opposite end of the spectrum, he intended to see just how uproarious a crash they could achieve.
Adrenaline spiked through him as Adam felt the sleigh tipping, skidding up on to one side, and then for a moment he was airborne, and then all in a rush he was hitting the ground, cold but not quite so hard as he’d anticipated, and momentum was sending him skidding into Ronan, or sending Ronan skidding into him, he wasn’t entirely sure, but the snow was cold and Ronan was warm.
Warm, and quaking a little with laughter, and something about that made Adam feel like this was all worth it, which was senseless.
Adam hadn’t quite gotten his breath back and accounted for all of his limbs yet when Ronan, who’d gotten to his feet despite the way he was still laughing, reached out a hand to help haul Adam up. Adam found himself oddly unprepared for the way his pulse quickened when he took Ronan’s hand, when he found himself standing maybe a little too close to Ronan and saw how easily and profoundly happy Ronan looked.
He might have been looking a little too long at Ronan, at the sharp line of his jaw and the faintest traces of snow caught in his eyelashes, because he wasn’t entirely sure when Ronan had stopped laughing. Then Ronan turned and went to right the sleigh, and Adam couldn’t help feeling like there was some potential there that’d slipped away. He shook himself a little, and dusted snow off himself, and went to the sleigh where Ronan was already climbing back in.
“Bet we can go faster this time,” Ronan said, grin still curving the corner of his mouth, and Adam already knew it was a losing battle, trying to resist.
He didn’t want to give up his days here, but what was he going to do?
Adam was confronted with this directly when Blue Sargent and Prince Richard Campbell Gansey III arrived at the Barns the next day.
Opal had been outside climbing trees and had seen Blue and Gansey coming, so she’d come capering in to let Ronan and Adam know they were on their way.
Adam looked over at Ronan to find Ronan already looking at him, but he couldn’t read the shuttered expression on Ronan’s face. Muirdris slunk around Ronan’s feet and nudged at Ronan’s leg, and Caoránach and Suileach padded over too, curiosity piqued.
Side by side, with their dragons following behind them, Ronan and Adam went out to meet Blue and Gansey.
Even from a distance, Adam could see the way Gansey’s eyes went wide and Blue’s eyebrows arched high enough they were almost completely obscured by her fringe.
“...are those dragon hatchlings?” Gansey asked when they were close enough that there could be no mistaking it, his still-wide hazel eyes racing with all the thoughts he was trying to process.
“No,” Ronan drawled, “We’re pretty sure a cougar had babies with a bat.”
When his sarcasm did nothing to diminish the genuine awe Gansey was watching the dragons with, Ronan let out a breath and said, “Come inside where it’s warm, you can get a closer look.”
Blue hung back, though, looking meaningfully at Adam, and once Ronan and Gansey had gotten inside with the dragons, Blue demanded in a low voice, “What the hell, Adam? You disappeared more than a week ago without a single word, and now I find you here, with dragons? What the hell?”
“It’s not like I planned this,” Adam began lamely, not knowing how to explain everything that had transpired, but Blue’s sharp eyes were telling him that he’d better start trying, so he did the best he could. As he recounted finding the eggs and being attacked and the days that had come after, he could see Blue trying to fit the pieces together, and he wasn’t sure he liked the way she was looking at him as she did so.
Blue ran a hand through her hair and sighed faintly. “First of all, you should have let us know you were okay. We had no idea where you’d gone, anything could have happened to you. Persephone said you were all right, but still, that’s not the same. You could have saved us a lot of worry.”
Adam wasn’t used to feeling guilty for worrying people, and his first impulse was to feel a certain amount of indignance at Blue’s words, but he knew the feeling was unfair. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you all in the dark, I just… a lot’s happened.”
“Dragons,” Blue said, some undetermined place between impressed and exasperated.
“Dragons,” Adam agreed.
“That’s the next thing. What are you planning on doing with them? Have you talked about arranging something with the Reserve?”
Blue must have seen something in his face, because her brow furrowed and she said, “Well we’ve got to come up with something, it’s not like they can just stay here.”
“You can’t take the dragons away from Ronan,” Adam said, and he didn’t know how completely he meant those words until he’d said them.
Blue only blinked, too taken aback to offer much of a reaction. “I - they’re dragons, Adam - they’re small now but what happens when they get bigger?”
Adam only shrugged. He wished he had a better answer, but he only knew that what he’d said was true. “Ronan’s got a lot of property here.”
“You’re saying you think he should just keep them?” Blue asked skeptically, brow creasing even more. “You really think he should keep three fire-breathing dragons, with dragon claws and dragon teeth? How - how do you think that would work?”
“He loves them, Blue,” Adam said quietly. “They love him.” That’s what it came down to.
Blue was silent for a long moment. Her eyes were searching his face. Adam felt uncomfortably sure of the sort of conclusions she was drawing as she looked at him. Keeping the dragons was trouble beyond any concept of belief. It was foolish, it was outlawed, but above all, it was dangerous in too many vast and varied ways to count. And Adam Parrish, who’d always operated on logic before anything else, didn’t care about any of that as much as he cared about Ronan and the dragons getting to be happy.
Finally, Blue said, “He’s gonna need a lot of help. You - you’re planning on helping him?”
Adam nodded. It was an easy answer, even if the larger implications of it would be exceptionally complicated.
Blue looked at him for a few moments more, and then nodded too. “We’ll do what we can to help you too, then, me and Gansey and everyone at Fox Way. What could go wrong.” She shook her head. “I wanna meet these guys.”
Adam and Blue went inside to find Ronan watching with a very dry sort of amusement as Gansey very carefully and very gently examined one of Suileach’s wings, Suileach allowing Gansey’s administrations with an air of dry amusement that seemed uncannily similar to Ronan’s.
When Blue went to Gansey’s side, Ronan silently exited the room.
Adam followed Ronan outside, but Ronan didn’t turn around to face him. “What’d Sargent want?” Ronan asked, voice flat in a way that didn’t suit him at all.
“She was concerned about the dragons,” Adam answered, coming to stand by Ronan’s shoulder. “She said that she and Gansey and the women of Fox Way would help us.”
“Us?”
“I wouldn’t just leave you to care for the dragons by yourself,” Adam told him, frowning at the little he could see of Ronan’s face. When Ronan didn’t respond, he added a little more quietly, “So long as you want my help.”
Slowly Ronan finally turned toward Adam, but his gaze was cut low. “I didn’t know if… I mean it’s not like I thought you were just gonna stay forever, but I wasn’t sure how long -”
“I mean obviously we’ll have some things to work out. I still have my work with Persephone. But I -” Adam let out a quiet but uneven sort of breath. “I wouldn’t have spent ten days here without ever really letting myself think about leaving if I was just gonna walk out altogether. God. I never even really thought about trying to get in touch with anyone while I was here, Blue was pissed at me for that.”
Adam could see the way the set of Ronan’s shoulders had gone so much looser, and he could hear the undercurrent of relief in the sharp sort of laugh Ronan let out. “I haven’t really thought about talking to my brothers, either, but I should probably get on that. Matthew’s gonna lose his mind, knowing that kid he’s gonna be acting like he’s just become an uncle. And Declan’s gonna lose his mind too, only not like in a stoked way, in like a he’s gonna have an actual stroke kinda way. Which. I should really get on that.”
Adam couldn’t help but laugh, and Ronan grinned back at him. Then he told Adam, “You should be there, when I tell them.”
There were a lot of things Adam thought of saying, but the best he could manage aloud was, “Okay.”
Something about his tone maybe made Ronan’s grin do something complicated. “Yeah?”
Adam nodded. Fought back an unhelpful impulse to swallow. “I wanna be there. I wanna be part of it.” In an objective sort of way, Adam didn’t think this was such an unreasonable thing, but saying the words felt enormous.
And it was sort of like the moment after he’d taken Ronan’s hand when they were sleighing; Adam looking at the sharp lines of Ronan’s cheeks and jaw, at how soft the bow of his mouth and the long sweep of his eyelashes looked in comparison, looking maybe a little too long. Only this time Ronan didn’t turn away.
Ronan reached out and pulled him closer, warm hands on his waist, warm mouth on his mouth. Adam let his hands slide up the long line of Ronan’s back to cup the back of Ronan’s neck, and Ronan brought a hand up to fit along the curve Adam’s jaw, thumb swiping slowly over Adam’s cheek, and it felt like everything, everything, slotted into place.
When they finally pulled back, Ronan was smiling, faint but true, and Adam’s mouth still felt warm. And he felt a little bit like he’d been lit up with sunlight.
And yes, staying would certainly mean trouble. Adam didn’t think he could have possibly managed to find more trouble if he’d gone looking.
And yes, here was exactly where Adam wanted to be.