Dragonfire, p.39
Dragonfire, page 39
The light shattered, spraying across the battlefield in a blast as warm as summer heat, yanking the last few sobs from Cistine’s chest and blinding her eyes; when she blinked the glittering green dapples away, there was only daylight and the faces of the cabal around her, every cheek tearstained, every eye wild with wonder.
Then Quill cursed in relief. “His heart’s beating!”
Gasping, Cistine flipped over and crawled to the edge of the dead grass to see for herself how her valenar’s chest rose in a thready, shallow breath…then another, and another. With a sob of joy, Ariadne gathered Thorne into her lap, propping him up so he could breathe.
Cistine fell back on her heels, her elation and relief guttering, a kernel of darkness nudging in.
Ariadne held him. Maleck and Quill and Tatiana circled them, arms around each other, brows pressed together.
All while she gripped the green grass and watched the blades turn black as char, wilting at the touch of her hand.
The
AFTERMATH
CHAPTER SEVENTY
THORNE DRIFTED IN and out of a dream of starlight wreathed with the smell of orange and cinnamon. A familiar kiss on his brow, gnarled hands that reminded him of dancing and dreaming and screaming obscenities in an abandoned cabin until his lungs gave way—then a whisper that carried over from dreaming to awake.
For my boy. Who has not even begun to chase his stars yet.
He wanted to beg her not to go, but it was only a dream.
Slowly, he came aware. His chest ached as if he’d challenged Quill to a two-hundred-push-up match. Every limb felt like a metal cast clamped in a blacksmith’s vise. Even when he was fully conscious of sounds and smells trickling past him, for a time he couldn’t open his eyes or move his tongue to wet his lips. But he did know a crisp, clean, cold scent, and the artificial burble of a fountain; the voices of the cabal, murmuring nearby; and the sounds of city life, always coming and going, until he parsed out exactly where he was.
“House of healing.”
These were the first words he managed after stars-knew how long. That dull rasp stopped the conversation around him with impressive finality.
Then Aden’s voice, equally dry: “Yes, we’re in Stornhaz.”
Thorne grimaced. He still couldn’t open his heavy eyes. “Cistine?”
This beat of silence was longer, deeper, as if they were all waiting for something. At last, Tatiana said, “She’s not here. Not inside the city, either.”
Frowning, he fought again, and this time finally won the battle to open his eyes. There was no mistaking the house of healing where his aunt Natalya once served, the familiar ivory walls with their fine gilding, the reek of death hidden by cloying herbs and potted vases.
Thorne was lying on the room’s only bed, overstarched sheets sticking to his bare chest. Someone had removed his armor and redressed him in linen pants; he hoped for his own sake it was Cistine. The cabal gathered at the walls, their faces in varying states of sleepless worry; Aden nearest to the door, Quill and Tatiana in bedside chairs, Ariadne cross-legged at his feet.
No sign of Cistine or Maleck. Of Ashe, Kristoff, or Sander.
Thorne looked at Quill. “Report.”
He cleared his throat, flipping his hair across his head. “Not enough healing augments to go around. The army was in poor shape, so the Chancellors brought everyone back. They…” he trailed off, eyes flicking toward the corner.
“They requested Cistine not show her face here,” Ariadne growled. “At least not until they quiet rumors about what happened on the Deathmarch.”
Thorne tucked away his anger and made a silent vow to speak with his fellow Chancellors at length in private. “Who did we lose?”
Tatiana stared down at her hands. “Sander.”
“And as for Ashe and my father,” Aden’s voice shook, “we don’t know yet. Maleck is with him, Pippet with her. They’ll come for us if…”
“If anything changes,” Ariadne supplied firmly.
Fear spiked in Thorne’s chest, his stomach clenching with nausea, but there was nothing to give. “Who else?”
“Halfgrim and Vaclav,” Ariadne said. “Half the Legion. Bresnyar nearly lost a wing; the medicos are keeping him unconscious while they try to save it.”
“Benedikt is dead,” Aden added. “Kyost will take power soon. For now, the Courts are leaning on one another. They’ve left some people behind to build pyres and burn the mirothadt. That will take several weeks, but they’ll manage.”
“And us?” Thorne asked.
“We’re…alive,” Tatiana said. “Not whole, but alive.”
“We had to carry your ass all the way here from the wall.” Quill’s tone was mock-stern, but a tremble of emotion belied his annoyance. “You’re really heavy, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told.” Thorne pushed himself up against the pillow. “What happened on that battlefield?”
“Cistine was carrying the killing augment when she touched you,” Ariadne said softly. “She still carries it.”
Thorne grimaced. “How many days has it been?”
“Half a week,” Tatiana said. “I’ve been with her every second I’m not here. The augment isn’t going away.”
A hum of disbelief filled his ears. “That’s not possible. All augments run their course.”
“Not this one.”
Deafening silence gripped the room, and Thorne pushed himself all the way up, gritting his teeth against the throb in his head, his back, and his chest. “I have to see her.”
“Allet, wait.” Quill hopped to his feet, raising both hands in warning. “You died out there. You just woke up, you can’t—”
“Watch me.”
Ariadne rose when he did, putting a hand to his chest, halting him in place. Something in that touch, in her look, jolted him; a faint thread of memory that went deeper than his flesh and bone, straight to his heart, teasing loose that dream again.
A whispered voice. A prayer. An anchor for his spirit, grounding him when he was halfway to the Sable Gates.
Ariadne took his hand, turned it over, and pressed a wind augment into it. “Ten minutes. Then we come after you.”
Thorne kissed her temple and limped from the room, out into the mercifully-empty hall, where he broke into a tilted, staggering run.
The wind augment could carry him no farther than the edge of the wall, and from there he followed his sense of Cistine up the broken stairs to the top, where she sat alone, cross-legged, staring at the plains beyond. The dragons healed there, stretching scorched wings and injured limbs, their Wingmaidens tending their wounds. Sunset painted the world in fuchsia and gold light, streaking his valenar’s tearstained face and silver hair.
She was wearing a simple, sheer dress, and his old, armored leather coat over it—the one he’d sent her off with to Talheim. It nearly engulfed her whole frame, her knees drawn inside the bottom hem, the last two inches of the sleeves flopping limply against her ankles.
His body weak again from the climb and the augment, Thorne padded down the wall toward her. “Wildheart.”
She flinched, head snapping toward him. “Thorne?”
A smile yanked at his mouth just to see her. But when he approached, she cast up a hand and scrambled backward on her knees.
“Don’t!” she shouted. “Don’t come any closer.”
He halted. “Cistine—”
“I killed you once. I might do it again.”
“I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.”
“But I did.” Fresh tears traced down her cheeks, and everything in him longed to wipe them away, to press his lips to her brow.
But he couldn’t, and that was just now beginning to sink in, erasing the flicker of joy at seeing her. It brought him so low he buckled to the top of the wall, folding his legs beneath him. “Tell me what you need.”
Her stomach lifted with a long, trembling breath. “I don’t know. I can’t think, I can’t plan…it’s like that augment took my mind and shredded it, then stuffed it back in the wrong way.”
“That was more power than any of us has wielded…than perhaps anyone ever has. You’re stronger than any augur, but you aren’t immune. Give yourself time to heal.”
“But I can’t just sit here, all I can think about is what happened on that hilltop, what I did to you…” She trailed off, pressing a hand to her mouth and shutting her eyes. Thorne’s fingers flexed uselessly at his sides, aching to hold her.
“I think the only reason you were able to come back was because of your armor and inkings,” Cistine added between her fingers, eyes still shut.
“You think they conducted the augment?”
She nodded. “But not enough that you could touch me again.”
“Would you let me try?”
She slowly shook her head.
Thorne didn’t know what else to say, his heart fracturing at the pain in her face. He stared across the fields for a moment, the dragons roosting and basking below, tending to their wounds. It seemed a lifetime ago when the creatures had littered the forest around Lake Erani, the night after he’d married Cistine, and now here they sat, at arm’s length from one another, the promise of death hanging between them.
So much had changed in such a short time.
A thought struck him then, sizzling with another memory of that night. “The visnprestas.”
Cistine’s eyes swiveled to him. “What about them?”
“What if they know something about the Stor Sedam? How to end their effects?”
She blinked, hope darting like a flicker of lightning through her gaze. “Do you really think they might?”
“It’s possible.” Thorne knocked his fist on the stone, squinting down over the wall. “And if any visnpresta does, I know which one.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
ASHE HAD NEARLY slipped through Maleck’s fingers. He would’ve known it even if he hadn’t seen the medicos’ faces when he’d brought her to them on the battlefield’s edge. The same way death had called him to his cabal on that hill, away from her side, it hung over her, too. It lingered still in her room in the house of healing where he and Aden had come as boys to pester Natalya, a place of buttermilk walls and cream drapes and quiet, soft misery. This gentle corner of Nimmus where Asheila Kovar lay wrapped in linens, face so pale her hair lit like fire around her sallow, jutting cheekbones.
At least she no longer thrashed and moaned. Those long hours where her agony was so visible he felt like a villain himself for clinging to her while the medicos measured the waves of her pain, seeking herbs and augments to cure it, had been among the worst of his life. Of Aden’s, too, his voice cracking with every growl of You do not break, you do not break, while Maleck could not speak at all—could only weep at the agonized whimpers and pants and sobs she made, like nothing he’d ever heard from her before. They’d both gripped her hands and held fast through those rollicking seas, but now…
Now he was alone, and she was so still, he wasn’t certain if that was better or worse. Better for her sake, perhaps; but in his mind, the screams went on and on.
Death lurked down every corridor here. Dead warriors, dead smiles on vacant faces robbed of joy. The weight rubbed against his back, bowing him low over Ashe’s bedside, his folded arms hiding a face that ached from weeping.
It hurt to be with the cabal. It hurt to be alone. Ariadne had sat with him and prayed over Ashe for so many hours they both lost their voices. Tatiana and Quill had brought food and comfort with their arms around him and their heads pressed against his, passing the time in silence. Pippet had crawled into his lap and braided birch bracelets that hung limp from Ashe’s wrists now, and Rozalie had stood watch at the door, shedding her own tears in silence for her friend.
Aden came most often. He divided his time constantly between his father’s room and Ashe’s, always with the same shadows stamped under his eyes and his fingertips digging into the new scar on his palm.
Not a battle-wound, he’d told Maleck over Ashe’s bed one day. An oath he had yet to fulfill—Sander’s dying wish.
Maleck could hardly keep his hands on all the pain everyone was feeling, all the different hurts within himself. His mind was a constant storm whether he woke or slept or tried to sleep.
Funeral or pyre, Talheimic or Valgardan sendoff, what do I give her, what does she need? Not to be returned to the Wardens, Talheim is her home, her life, but she’s one of us now. Stars, how do I tell Bresnyar his Wingmaiden is—
My valenar is—
A dry heave rasped from his chest, and he tightened the cross of his arms. He’d been too slow, gotten her to the medicos too late, had taken too long to reach the house of healing, and now it was just a matter of time, they said. Time would give her strength, or take the last of it.
His Mereszar, his fearless one. She would either step back into his reach or walk away from him for the last time.
He couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t think beyond her passing. Stars, he couldn’t breathe.
“I wish you wouldn’t leave me.” The words escaped him in the gentle quiet of the room, on a night as dark as all the others before it. “But if the pain is too great, then let go, Asheila. I’ll…”
He couldn’t force the lie to his lips. He would not be all right. But he would not force her into this shell, locked in agony, if her spirit stretched out for Cenowyn and eternal rest.
“On that battlefield,” he said instead, “when the world seemed to be at its end…in that moment, my whole life passed before me. And you were the best part of it all.” He gripped her limp hand in both of his and kissed her callused knuckles. “Nothing will change that. I will carry you with me always, even if you choose to go.”
A quiet knock on the doorpost roused him. He swiveled his gaze to find Tatiana leaning against the frame, one arm crossing her middle. She tossed an orange to herself, then held it up for him. “Hungry?”
“I can’t remember when I last was.”
“That makes eight of us.” She limped to the bedside and slumped in the chair next to him, peeling the fruit in two. “Thorne’s awake.”
“I know.” Whispers had reached him already of his Chancellor tearing from the house of healing, no doubt on his way to find Cistine. “I should have been there.”
“But you were afraid to leave her, I know.” Tatiana gave a chin nod to Ashe. “Any change?”
“None. Whether or not that’s good…”
“Time will tell.” Her breath blew out in a rush. “I know what that’s like. Stars, the times I’ve sat like this with Quill…”
Guilt snarled his insides like thorny vines, and he dropped his gaze to the bedclothes.
Half an orange appeared under his nose.
“I’ve decided I forgive you,” Tatiana added. “Addiction can make you feel like you’re an entirely different person who wants different things and takes different risks. And what happened in Hvallatar wasn’t just you, either. You didn’t pick that fight.”
“I tried to stop it.”
“I know you did, which is why I didn’t beat your face in once you came back.” She waved the orange, wafting sweet citrus notes into his nostrils, his stomach seizing with hunger. He took the fruit and tore into it while she tore into hers, and together they sat back and watched Ashe’s inert face.
“If the worst happens,” Tatiana said at length, “you know you won’t be alone, don’t you?”
Dry mouth stinging with sweetness, Maleck wiped his lips on his wrist and forced a nod. “I’ve never been.”
She offered her fist to him. “You never will be.”
Maleck bumped knuckles with her, and they went back to eating. But it was good not to be alone.
The door burst open again, and this time it was Rozalie, scowling. “Trouble at the wall, Mal. Ashe’s dragon is awake and he’s trying to climb it. They can’t talk him down, but he can’t fly. He’s going to hurt someone or himself if he doesn’t stop.”
Maleck shot to his feet. “I’m on my way.”
Without the wind augments most took to cross the city, it seemed an eternity before he reached the wall; but Bresnyar was not difficult to find on its edge, his bellows a beacon more animal than intelligent for once. Vassoran guards lined the top of the wall when Maleck ascended, polearms aimed fearfully at the dragon’s golden snout jutting over the cracked stone.
Cursing, Maleck shoved between them, forcing down their weapons. “This is a Wingmaiden’s mount who helped win the war, and you repay him with threats?”
“He’ll crush the wall if he keeps flailing like that!” one man shouted. “Call him off!”
Maleck faced the falcate of guards, his back to Bresnyar, arms outflung. “Raise a weapon against him again, and you answer to me.”
“What’s going on here?”
Maleck’s spine nearly bent in relief at the sound of Thorne’s voice. For the first time in days, he laid eyes on his Chancellor, not bedridden, but awake, limping down the wall. Cistine trailed far behind him, Thorne’s old armored leather coat tight around her shoulders, eyes wide.
“Bres, what is it?” she shouted.
His eyes, fiery-gold with pupils narrow as needles, revolved between them all. “Where is Asheila? Why can I not cleave with her? Why are these tiny, edible bastards keeping me from her?”
Maleck met Thorne’s eyes, intent conveyed in a single glance. His Chancellor whistled, bringing the Vassora around, and Maleck turned and strode to Bresnyar’s side, laying a hand on his snout.
“Come down off this wall with me, and I’ll tell you,” he rasped. “But not like this. She wouldn’t want to see us this way.”
Bresnyar’s nostrils steamed, his pupils flaring wider. A hint of sense returned; then he scooped Maleck to his chest with one hand and fell backward from the wall.
It was a short, steep spiral, exhilarating until the moment Bresnyar tried to snap out his wings—and tilted sharply. Their shouts broke out in tandem when the dragon plowed into the soil, the pound of his impact overshadowed by sympathetic groans from his fellow dragons.
