Mind, or the horde will eat your bones.
~ A warning to fractious children
STILL, THE LOR’S WORDS got everyone moving. Apparently no one wanted to spend the night in this vale haunted by such violent deaths—of our fighters and the demons. The attack had left five of Vreas’s soldiers dead: torn by demons, emptied by the dragon. Two others were…not dead—or not dead yet. But they’d been demon-touched.
One was silent, just staring at the ground, while another soldier wrapped him in white silkha. The other spoke so fast none of the words made sense, even to me with my fondness for fast talking, and he kept backing away from Captain Elaf who held out another silkha robe with no arm holes. The soldier finally submitted when Vreas approached and put a hand on that shuddering shoulder, leaning close to murmur something soft and slow and then draping the doomed man. I had no liking for the marshal, but such fearless tenderness before the unraveling aura could not be ignored.
Still, the silkha looked less like sanctified pennants and more like winding clothes.
“The marshal shouldn’t touch him,” Imbril muttered. “Not when he’ll need to attend Numinlor Kalima and the king, and there won’t be time for a blessing of the amaranthine light with sunlaris to cleanse him.”
I frowned. “Are the demon-touched so contagious?” Wouldn’t that mean anyone the prince touched was doomed too?
The lor sniffed. “Not in the way of winter ague, no, but auric virtue is too precious to risk.”
To everyone’s disquiet, Prince Aric hadn’t departed. Leaving the dragon where she was, he was stalking around the rock and rubble, seeking…what, I couldn’t tell. When the dragon attacked the other demons, her peculiar not-fire left behind only shrunken husks, without the stolen auras to sustain them.
The prince ignored those carcasses, and his steps bent well clear of the dead and doomed soldiers. The ones he hadn’t saved.
Guilt stabbed me, pike sharp. We should’ve summoned him right away. Had Vreas really believed mere flames could stop the horde?
Of course, we’d brought Lady Dyania here with her pathetic little candle like we had a chance.
As if I’d summoned her, she drifted up beside me, Zik with her. Silently, he handed me a flask. It held only cool water, not some properly gut-rotting swill to purify my tongue with unsanctified inebriating fire, but I gave him a grateful smile.
“Are you all right?” I asked the lady. “This seems worse than Velderrey, if that’s possible.”
“I’m fine,” she said. Then she frowned. “If I’m all right it’s because of you. You stopped that demon.”
“Not me,” I demurred. “Ormonde’s bone, I think.”
She slanted a sidelong look at me, lowering her voice to ask, “Is it gone? Did you really swallow it?”
I grimaced. “It just crumbled in my hand when I fell, and when I took a breath…”
“We have to tell the prince,” she said.
I stared at her, aghast. “What? Why? No.”
Casting me an exasperated look, she grabbed my wrist and hauled me along.
Even though the horde was gone, stepping outside the circle felt wrong, dangerous. I blamed the prince for that.
He paused in his inscrutable hunt to watch us come.
“Your Radiance,” Dyania said with her perfect tone of respect and composure. “Thank you for coming to our rescue—again.”
Like the dragon, he didn’t quite face us. “Almost too late.” His tone hardened. “Too late for some.”
One hand over her heart, a mourning gesture, she dipped her head. “We have…a predicament.” She pointed one of those elegant fingers at me.
The prince seethed out a breath. “I suppose I might’ve guessed that.” When I just glared at him, he lifted an eyebrow. “No clever retort?”
“Are you going to choke me again?” I kept my own voice low, hoping the bone-dust timbre was truly gone.
“No.” He hesitated. “Something about your words startled me. But I should not have touched you.”
I widened my eyes in exaggerated surprise. “Was that an apology?”
“No. An explanation.”
“You know, even princes can say they are wrong.” Why was I needling him? Wasn’t there danger enough in my life? But part of me wanted him to admit that he was wrong for mishandling me because then he might be mistaken about some of the other dire things he’d promised were coming for us all.
He turned the barest degree toward us. “If I speak all the ways I am sorry, the litany will never end.”
That was more honesty than I expected—or wanted. None of us needed a dreary review of what he had done—and would keep doing. I especially didn’t want that reminder when his next act of unstated contrition would probably come after murdering me for losing Ormonde’s last relic.
I rolled my eyes beseechingly at Dyania but she just tilted her head toward him.
I sighed. “The dragon whistle was lost.”
He stiffened. “Lost?” There was a strange hitch in his voice. From someone else’s mouth, I might’ve called it hope. “But I heard it. More to the point, she heard it.” He didn’t need to gesture to the dragon.
Shifting my weight to the toes of my boots, as if I could run away fast enough to escape a demon dragon, I said haltingly, “When demons overran the circle, I fell. The bone was in my hand, and it was so old, it just disintegrated. The dust…” I grimaced. “I might’ve, uh…sucked down some of the remains. Just a little. Which you—or, I guess, the dragon—heard.”
He was silent for long enough that Vreas shouted at the sad party of our rescue brigade to mount up.
“Anyway,” I said brightly. “That’s what happened. Time to go.”
“You stay,” he growled.
Lady Dyania clasped both her hands in front of her now, not quite a prayer position. “Your Radiance… Please, Prince Aric, it was a mishap.”
“A misfortune that will doom all the Living Lands.”
Grim and cold, his pronouncement pierced me.
“Why do you need a whistle, a child’s toy?” I snapped. “You are a prince of the realm, born to command, honed to kill, and she is your weapon.”
“She is an ancient demon, grown strong and sly over the centuries on a glut of auras, noble and not so.” He raked his hands through his hair, making the windblown mess even worse. “Ormonde himself with all his power could barely hold her, even back then when she was merely bestial.”
“But you have two hands,” I pointed out.
“Shall I chop one off to construct the summoning whistle anew? Or shall I take one of yours?”
When I recoiled, Dyania stepped in front me. “Stop,” she said. “No one is losing a hand.”
“You would’ve lost much more, Chosen One.” His snarl broke low across those demonic octaves, and even the brave lady faltered.
And in this he wasn’t wrong. I lifted my chin. “Fine, then. If I must. My fingers are plenty clever that I can spare a few.”
Dyania clutched my elbow. “Feinan, enough. We’re searching for another way. We shan’t lose hope—or more hands, not now.”
“Leave, my lady,” the prince said. “Tell Vreas to make haste. The bone was part of her captivity, that calls and controls. If the sun sets and I lose my hold on her…”
He didn’t have to keep saying what would happen.
I swallowed hard, and though I was sure I’d washed out my mouth, I swear I tasted dust. “Ani,” I said, hoping maybe I’d annoy her with the diminutive she hadn’t permitted. “Go. Make sure Zik is safe. Keep Lisel at your side. Don’t listen to Imbril if he gets full of himself. I’ll be…” I’d meant to say I’d be fine or I’d be back in the High Keep soon, but even without any dust, the words stuck in my throat. “Just go.” I dredged up a wry grin. “You did warn me not to take anything from the Dragon Prince. Next time, I swear I’ll listen to you.”
Under his breath, said prince made a rude noise, but I ignored him, watching Dyania walk away. She glanced back, her brow furrowed and her fingers sketching out a quick blessing. When Zik ran up to her, she put her hand on his head, and he stared at me, eyes wide and horrified. Lisel gathered the two closer while Imbril hovered just beyond. Even the lor stared at me with what looked like sincere concern.
That probably wasn’t a good sign.
I gave them a little wave, at the same time muttering out the side of my mouth, “Smile at them, Your Radiance, so they believe everything will be all right.”
“Everything will not be all right. After what you’ve done, nothing will be all right.” He kept glowering. “And I told you not to call me that.”
I kept waving like a fool. “Do you want them to leave without a fight? Then by the amaranthine light, smile.”
“They can’t fight me.”
Balling my hand into a fist, I turned to him. “Why are you making this worse?”
After a long moment, he held his hand out to me, a strangely courtly gesture.
Mystified—and that was the only explanation for why I did what I did—I put my hand in his.
With an inexorable grip, he turned me away from my friends and led me toward the dragon.
“Why…” In my bewilderment, the faint tremolo of the bone whistle was back in my voice.
The prince’s step faltered, almost imperceptibly, but he kept walking, guiding me gallantly over the broken rock. “Don’t look back,” he murmured. “It’s easier for them if they don’t have to look at you.”
Neh, he would know, wouldn’t he?
Though no one, ever, had walked with me like this, holding me up when everything around me was crumbling like a very old bone, I wanted to pull away.
But his fingers tightened on mine. “Don’t,” he warned. “It’ll be easier for you too if you don’t look back.”
I didn’t want that insight into him—or what it said about my own penchant for running away that I obeyed him.
Behind me, the uneasy lowing of the yaxen and higher-pitched jangle of the harts’ chariots fused into a cacophonous buzz in my mind. They were leaving. Leaving me behind with the Dragon Prince. Some part of me, deeper than the dust in my belly or the summoning stuck in my throat, longed to cry out, to call them back. But I couldn’t.
The noise of their departure faded into the keen of the wind.
With my friends gone, I balked again when we stood in front of the demon.
“Are you going to let her shred me like she does the demons and the Chosen?” I lifted my chin. “If so, I’d rather just get it over with.”
He left me standing there, rather awkwardly, as he turned away to poke the toe of his boot at something in the gravel. “Maybe I would, if I thought I could dig Ormonde’s bone out of your guts.” He glanced at me. “But you said it shattered. Why did you have it? As the highest-ranking officer, Vreas should’ve been in charge.”
“I…borrowed it.” I hunched my shoulders around my ears. “Or meant to, anyway. Because he was refusing to summon you.”
He walked a few more steps away. “But you wanted me here.”
“Wanted you? Of course. Who else would save us?”
“The marshal said he would. And your lady mentioned finding another way.”
I grimaced. “King Mikhalthe and Petro no’Maru seem to think Lady Dyania’s trick in Velderrey will win this war.”
“This war…” His tone was musing. “And who is the enemy?”
I blinked at him. “Is that not obvious?”
He didn’t answer, instead stalking slowly around the back side of the dragon’s perch.
When I gave her a suspicious glance—was he not wanting to look at me while she devoured me?—she finally moved, tilting her head, bird-like, to fix that cracked black gaze on me. The flail tail flicked, just the serrated tip, like an assassin toying with her favorite blood-soaked blade.
Her toothy jaw parted, not much, not enough to swallow me whole or even in, say, quartered chunks, but it looked like…
It looked like a smile.
Gulping, I hustled after the prince to the other side of the boulder. “What are you looking for?”
“Some sign of this glowing red Claeve.”
I huffed. “I said his sword was glowing, not him. And his cloak was flawless red, which is the most impossibly expensive hue for dyeing, or so I’ve heard.” When the prince eyed me, I shrugged one shoulder. “You’ve never before encountered him with the horde?”
“Someone commanding them? No. The demons have always been a mindless swarm, uncontrollable and all-consuming. No one could rule them.”
“Maybe not rule,” I said. “But strike with?”
The prince straightened from his search. “Whatever you thought you saw, I’m finding no glowing sword.”
“Probably not the sort of thing one loses,” I said.
“Neh, it happens,” he drawled. “Indeed, I hear someone lost the last extant artifact of King Ormonde, master of the diamonde light.”
And I had thought him courteous.
“No footprints either,” he continued. “But the ground is rocky where it isn’t torn by demon scrawlings.”
“Whoever he was, they obeyed him. They drew back when he teased us with escape, and they rushed in when he tired of the charade.” With a shudder, I glanced at the dragon. “Will she listen to you without the whistle?”
Pausing, the prince finally focused on me, and then, so slowly, he tilted his head back to look up at the dragon, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Shall we ask?”
I wrapped my arms around myself. At some point—maybe when that demon had charged Dyania—I’d lost the heavy robe that had kept me warm through the night. Now night was coming again.
And maybe my death, as well as the deaths of everyone I’d doomed by stealing the bone.
“I always figured I’d be killed with something that didn’t belong to me in my grasp,” I grumbled under my breath. “But I might’ve hoped it’d have rather more jewels, or at least a sweeter taste.”
Prince Aric didn’t reply, but seemingly in answer, the dragon rose to her haunches, swiveling to face us. With a ghastly sound like graveclothes whispering over an open crypt, she spread her wings.
Oh, she was terrible in the air and on the ground, but like this, poised as if snared between the two, she was worst of all.
The stink of cold stone and long-dead coals wafted from the darkness of her wings. The leathery skin was lined with veins, but unlike the fine, lifegiving filigree through mortal flesh, these tracings bulged and sank like stagnant rivers.
Despite the fearsome spread of her wings, she didn’t rise. Above the heavy iron collar, she bowed her neck back, that awful skull skewing skyward, jaw agape without sound, and her talons pierced the stone beneath her. The rock broke with sharp retorts and stinging bursts of grit that made me cringe away.
The prince’s ice-clouded eyes didn’t blink, and I realized her broken-glass gaze was fixed on him despite her contortions.
Straining, she spread her wings wider yet, the membranous vanes tightening. From where I cowered underneath, I noticed paler marks scoring the black leather. Scars, I guessed, left by her demonic brethren.
And from here, I saw too the thicker scars on either side of her sternum and down the ridges of her protuberant ribs. The only place she wasn’t marked was the center of her breast, outlined by the studded black leather and chains of the yoke.
Where her prince was bound.
The breath seized in my own chest. Had those terrible wounds slashed across her body also crossed over him when he hung there, trapped? She was an undying demon, but how had he lived?
Because he was a demon too, I reminded myself harshly. Or enough of one.
Whatever the war between them—and they were both my enemy—she didn’t blink either, but after an endless moment, she lowered her wings and her head, falling again into that sullen slouch.
As the prince turned away, I drew in a shuddering breath. “What was that?”
“A lovers’ quarrel, of sorts.”
“Did…did you win?”
“You and the rest of the Living Lands will know when I don’t.”
I couldn’t wrap my arms any further around myself, so instead I just sank wearily to my haunches—looking, I supposed, about as morose as the dragon. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I shouldn’t have taken the bone. I shouldn’t have tripped and fallen. I shouldn’t…” But what did it matter? The words died in my throat.
The prince glanced back at me. “That is not a very long list of sorry, and yet you just gave up.”
I glowered at him from my shivering crouch. “Oh yes, your litany is so much more magnificent and meaningful than mine. I should never have dreamed of disturbing you with my troubles. And I definitely shouldn’t have summoned you!”
He just stood there for a heartbeat. “Truly, you shouldn’t have.” He stalked toward me.
I cowered away, falling to my backside, groping behind me to brace myself—and finding only the rough rock of the dragon’s perch.
Wrapping his fingers around my arm, the prince dragged me upright…and tossed his cloak around my shoulders. “If you freeze, your death will be even more pointless.”
Short on him, the black cloak was long on me. And unexpectedly soft. Was it…heyo, it was fuzzy on the inside.
Apparently even the Dragon Prince got chilled in the mountain air. I curled my fingers into the plushly felted yaxen fur. It was warm from his body, which was even more shocking than the softness.
I’d believed him as icy, through and through, as his eyes and his demeanor.
But so what if he wasn’t? It made no difference to our fate.
I tightened my grip on the borrowed robe, and the high collar tightened around my neck. Not unlike his fingers had done. Had I conveniently forgotten that? Just because he too had been abandoned to an uncertain fate was no reason for me to relate to him, not when he was a prince and I was a stray.
And definitely not when he held my life in his ungentle grasp.
But… Maybe with the bone dust lingering in my mouth, I controlled a bit of his fate too.
I squared off to him. “So are we just going to lurk here in this empty valley until…?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “It doesn’t seem that she’ll slay us immediately. But the chain always seems unbreakable until the weakest link gives out.”
Which of us was the failure here?
I thought for a moment. “I don’t know if any of us three is the most dire threat anymore,” I mused. “I have Ormonde’s bone, you’re a prince, and she’s a dragon, but Claeve commands the entire horde—or at least wields it.”
“There are many ways to lose and die,” the prince said.
I rolled my eyes. As terrifying as the dragon was, as imposing as the prince was, my capacity to be cowed apparently had a bottom. And I’d reached it. I spun on my heel and started walking.
“Where do you think you’re going?” The prince’s voice followed me though his body didn’t.
I didn’t look back. He was the one who told me to never look back.
I hadn’t even reached the earthbone road when he caught up with me. “What are you doing?”
I still didn’t look at him. “I’m walking back to the High Keep. It’s going to be dark soon, and I’m getting hungry, so I might as well be moving on.”
“One old finger bone didn’t fill you?” he grumbled. “It’s too far to walk.”
I slanted a glance at him finally. “Neh, you don’t have to walk,” I pointed out. “It might be far, but…” I shrugged. “I’ve nothing better to do while I wait to see which one of you is going to kill me.”
“It won’t be me. Or not only me.”
As if that made a difference.
“Why did Vreas have the whistle anyway?” I griped. “It should be yours.”
“They don’t want me to have that control. And since I’m never supposed to be away from the dragon, summoning her is summoning me.”
I kept walking, and he kept following. Like an ordinary road, the earthbone wouldn’t carry me on foot as fast as a conveyance or steed, but it would still be faster than walking in the gravel. Just as I was about to step onto the nearly imperceptible glow, dark wings swept silently over us.
We both looked up, though neither of us flinched. The dragon settled heavily on the road, looking blacker than ever against the snow.
The prince stalked toward her. I swallowed hard but followed him.
This was the closest I’d been to her yet. At this distance, the stone and ash stink of her was laced with something else, something disquietingly honeyed. Like a frail winter rose—or death.
My hackles prickled when that shattered-glass gaze drifted to me again. There should’ve been no way to tell where exactly she was looking, not with that unnatural structure. But there was an uncanny little glow somewhere deep in that broken obsidian stare that seemed to mark the point of her focus—which at this moment was me.
The prince strode up to her as if she were nothing more than a particularly large, recalcitrant yaxen. He gave the straps and chains of the harness a testing tug. “Let’s go then,” he announced.
I boggled at him. “Go where?”
“The High Keep. Isn’t that what you said?”
“I did, but…” When had anyone ever listened to what I said?
He muttered something under his breath—a curse or prayer? “Come here.” He held out a hand to me, not the courtly gesture like when the others were watching, but an imperious command.
“I am not one of the watch canids for you to order about,” I snapped.
“Clearly not, for they are well fed and obey their handlers.”
While I sputtered, he took me by the scruff of his cloak and hauled me closer to the dragon. “The harness is designed for only one, but it’s not far to the tower.”
I wanted to object, to just keep walking away—since apparently I’d already committed to not running away—but where would that get me? Certainly not back to my friends before the hazards of the mountain night led to my inevitable demise. Whether to my bed in the castle or my death, the prince would get me there quicker.
So I let him strap me to the demon dragon.