The falling stones should have crushed her. She had never visited the dungeons often enough to know exactly how far underground this lower level was, but the weight of the upper cells alone should have flattened her. And Oza, too, no matter how much she wanted to believe otherwise. Sheer determination and panic wouldn’t have been enough for her to save him.
Or shouldn’t have been. But as she groaned under the weight of the solid slabs threatening to drive her into the ground and take Oza as well, she realized dimly that she wasn’t dead. That wasn’t possible, and yet here she was, breathing, however laborious and painful each rattling, shallow inhale. Her arms and legs trembled madly, struggling to support the weight of every piece of debris fallen on top of her so she didn’t suffocate Oza underneath, and she felt no give as she shifted left and right—but she was alive. She was conscious. And although they were buried in darkness under the rubble and she
It really was Bisset’s dragon. Massive and sprawling, she lay in a heap at the bottom of the hill, her enormous head half buried in the stream that ran across what used to be the embassy house’s garden. Anzi’s heart dropped, and despite the battered state of her body, a surge of panicked strength helped her stumble down on shaky legs. She rushed past Oza and Letti and nearly fell to the ground on top of the creature’s snout, only managing to catch herself by bracing one hand right above the scaly upper lip. But the groaning, rumbling sound of pain that echoed from deep within the dragon’s belly made Anzi recoil in instant regret and yank her hand away. “What has he done to you?” she whispered. Her throat was raw and her lips cracked; her voice was too quiet for anyone but herself to hear. But she asked anyway—never expecting an answer. It came in brief flashes instead of words, glimpses into something that touched her with darkness, heaviness—with the e
The dragon’s talons threatened to crush her ribs with their perilous strength, but she clutched at them with a determined fire and grit her teeth against the pain. She had just been given a second lease on life, and Oza and Letti, too. If Doufan had run her through, he would have gone after them next without a doubt, and they wouldn’t have stood a chance. It chilled her to think how close they had all been to meeting their end just moments before, but as they rose higher and higher over the Imperial City, exhilaration and relief filled her instead, swallowing up all the fear that had weighed her down like the night clouds blanketing the moon. They were leaving. They were leaving, and she had managed to keep everyone alive. Her heart pounded harder when she thought of Kai and how she had had to leave him, but surely he would have done the smart thing and left the Imperial City as she had told him to do before parting ways. And he would be safe, she told
Oza was still perched atop the dragon’s back, motionless, and Anzi refrained from telling him a second time to come down from there. The hostile expressions on the faces of everyone present told her he was in the safest place he could be, high above, and she briefly wished Letti hadn’t come down yet either. But it was too late. They were surrounded, and despite Kai’s sharp command, no one was lowering their guard. Only a few of them were carrying weapons, but she knew well enough they had no need of manmade blades. Not if they really were dragon shifters. Out of the corner of her eye, something gray and black flitted down the great dragon’s side, and she let herself glance there for a precious half-second to see the Prince crawling upside down off the elder dragon’s neck. His wings were outstretched as he climbed down with his thumb-like claw hooks, and now she saw something else peculiar. He had four wings now, two smaller ones that the main o
It was easy to find Sa-Khente. He was with Kai on the other side of the small camp, just over the large dune. She hadn’t asked where either of them were and had simply followed the niggling feeling inside her that told her to go that way, that way, and she had. At its end, she had found the chieftain with a new ceremonial golden collar around his shoulders, and an exceedingly tall man standing beside him. She gave up trying to explain to herself how she had known Kai would be here, and there was a knowing, satisfied gleam in his golden eyes as he watched her approach over his shoulder. It was as if he was reeling her in despite standing still, and it was only when she came within arm’s reach that he turned and pulled her close with his arms around her waist, ignoring the man standing next to him. “Kai—” “Sa. Look at my mate, standing here with me. You had so little faith.” The large man g
Amunet’s body was too massive to bury in good time, but more importantly, tradition held that a dragon’s body not be buried underneath the earth, anyway. Anzi accepted this when Kai told her, and she watched carefully as he plucked several scales below her eye before turning back to face her. “They’re typically passed down in families. You’re the closest she has, so it should go to you.” That wasn’t true. There was one other. She turned to look at the mottled gray-black hatchling who sat quietly by Amunet’s snout, utterly motionless. He looked even bigger today than he had yesterday, but perhaps that was simply his body now uncompressing after all those decades trapped inside his egg. It horrified Anzi to know that he hadn’t been dormant as all other hatchlings were before they came out into the world; he had been active and aware for a long, long time. He had moved around and tried to free himself so many times, and she had seen it with her own eyes wh
It was so hard to trust unknown magic, still. She was such a hypocrite. Hadn’t she resorted to using her own not too long ago to save Oza? And yet she couldn’t scold away the uneasiness lurching and twisting in her gut as the oasis sailed over the sands, like the desert was but water on the sea. This wasn’t the cold, pruned Empire anymore. This was the wild Adaraat where the desert nomads wandered, and strange foreign magic came from here. Not rigorously trained and schooled magic with rules and pinpoint regulations in the ranks, but free magic, unconstrained, unpredictable. Like the kind that could move vibrant palm trees over sand - or a spring, because there was no mistaking that sound, however distant: water. But it stopped moving suddenly, and after a moment, she understood it was waiting for her. She glanced behind her at the camp’s edge, wondering if anyone was watching her, and indeed, met the gazes of a few of Kai’s men as they watched on eagerly. Time to go. Bes
Goosebumps raced up Anzi’s arms as if a wintry chill had suddenly replaced the ever-present heat of the Adaraat. “Druid? Of the dragons?” She scowled at Ash, wondering if the woman was crazy or if she was simply trying to get under her skin with such strange talk. “I thought you were going to answer my questions, not raise more.” “Who said I would answer anything?” The old woman threw her head back with such ferocity it was a wonder her headdress didn’t fall off, and laughed and laughed. “The old way would have been to leave you to find those answers yourself. All I would have had to do was open your eyes so you could see.” “Open my eyes to what, old woman. Get on with it.” “So angry! And so hasty.” She laughed again, and her wooden beads rattled around her neck. “You wouldn’t be so impatient to leave if you were wiser. Go on, then. Ask me. What is it you want to know first?” “Tell me what a Druid
Could she even call this creature a dragon? Could she even call it a creature indeed—so massive, so titanic, so enormous that it seemed to take up the whole world from end to end that it couldn’t be a product of creation at all. He was so all-encompassing that mountains could come out of him, the highest ones, and the deepest trenches, and sprawling valleys in between. And just as disturbing, the glassy golden eye that dwarfed her entirely was still staring at her, unblinking. What was it waiting for? It was clearly seeing her. It had come to her. And now it said…nothing. But this wasn’t real, after all—this was all in her mind. If she concentrated hard enough, she could still feel the waters of Ash’s oasis weighing cold and heavy on her skin, although the sensation was ghostly and faint as if she were only feeling its echoes from another life. But it wasn’t. That was her real life, that was the real world. This other one, this halluc