Emery woke to sunlight.
Not the thin, grey filter that crept through the narrow windows of the palace servants' quarters. Not the sickly orange glow of eternal candles. Real sunlight—golden and warm—poured through a window of clear glass, falling across her face in a way she had not felt in eight years.
She lay still for a moment, disoriented. The bed beneath her was enormous, soft with furs that smelled of smoke and snow and something else. Something that made her heart stutter.
Him.
The night before crashed back in fragments: the dragon descending through the cathedral roof, the heat of his body against her back, the flight through clouds on a beast out of nightmare, the city of white stone rising from the valley. Varnathian. He had called it Varnathian.
