Knightswrath (The Dragonkin Trilogy Book 2) (40 page)

Chapter Forty-Six

Nâya

R
owen felt as though he were wading through fire. Somehow, it did not kill him—but it singed his skin and burned him deeper than that. His mind buzzed like a hornet that had burrowed in through his ears and nested in his brain while he slept. But it was awake—and angry.

He ran. He thought he was running from the fire, but somehow, he ran to it. Dimly, he heard screams of panic and terror on the other side of the flames, but he paid them no mind. Once, he thought he heard someone call out his name, but the buzzing in his head drowned out the sound. Then he was running again.

My name… My name…

He realized he had just forgotten his own name. He began to wonder if he’d ever had one, if he’d ever been anything but a nameless, wretched thing set at the center of a firestorm. An image formed in his mind: a great, burning flower with a skull at its center. A death’s head.

That’s me,
he thought then laughed.

Only then did he realize he was holding something. Alternately cold and hot, it frightened him. It hurt him more than the flames did. He tried to throw it away, but it seemed to have become a part of his arm. Red tendrils snaked through it, into his skin, winding up his arm, into his chest. He imagined them flowing into his brain—not tendrils but rivers. Rivers of blood. Blood on fire.

Gods, I’ve gone mad. What am I? Where am I?

He heard someone call his name again. He knew somehow that it was his name, though he could not hear it over the buzzing roar. He knew, too, that the voice should have been familiar. Someone he knew—the voice belonged to someone he trusted.
A woman,
he thought, but he could not reach her. Every step toward her voice only seemed to lead him in the wrong direction.

He concentrated on the flames instead of running from them. For the first time, he distinguished their color—purple—and something else: the flames were coming from his own body. They were him.

Fear turned to fascination. He stopped running and stared at his hands. He still could not drop the thing he was holding in his right hand, but whatever it was, it no longer frightened him. He studied it. It looked like a span of white-hot fire, slightly curved, a little longer than his arm. The end he held seemed to be composed of tiny twisting dragons.

The woman called to him again. Her voice came from all around him. His panic returned. Though he knew she only wanted to help him, he couldn’t let her see him panicking. He had to free himself first—or at least figure out what he was, what he’d become. He ran again.

But the woman followed. The voice eased in all around him, into his mind, soothing him like water. Slowly, slowly, the buzzing faded. In its place, he saw forests, walled cities, faces he could not recognize. He thought that the visions must be memories, though not his own, and he had the odd feeling that this had happened to him before.

One image commanded his attention. It was a woman, though she was not the woman who had called to him. Her face seemed both strange and familiar. He could not wrest his gaze from her. She had long, tapered ears, violet eyes, and hair the color of a vast, starless sky. And she was naked.

Gods, she’s beautiful…

She turned to face him, as though she’d heard his thoughts. Though she looked young, he had the strange feeling that she was old—far older than anyone he had ever known. She smiled sadly. Then she, too, was surrounded by fire. It surged about her thin, pale body, ferocious but absolutely silent—purple at first, then white. When she opened her mouth as though to speak—
To warn me,
he thought, though he did not know why—she stiffened in pain.

He tried to approach her, to help her. But suddenly, he could not move. She turned away from him. Wings of white-hot flame blossomed from her naked back. She leapt into the air and was gone.

Moments later, he heard her scream. Darkness flooded his senses, as though all the flames had been sucked from his universe. Pain vanished, but something fell from his grasp. Something precious. A fresh panic filled him. He turned and twisted in nothingness, trying in vain to scream.

A new image flooded his sight. It began as a cold, rocky landscape beneath a starless sky. Then stars burst to life, forming the constellations one by one. On the earth below, bare rocks blossomed into dark grass and deep-purple flowers. The landscape blurred, shimmered, and cleared. And he saw dragons.

They filled this new, alien landscape of dark plains and silver lakes. Some slept while others flew on two, four, even six wings. Some were feathered, others scaled. One with horns that curved like scimitars flew next to another dragon with antlers and broad golden eyes.

Something compelled him to turn his head. He rotated slowly, taking in the whole horizon. More of them dotted the dark, endless plains. Hundreds, thousands, even millions. Far away, a great kaleidoscope of them leapt into the air and passed over the stars like a cloud of moths. Such was their beauty that he wept.

He was still weeping when the storm began. No water fell from the heavens, but he heard great and terrible thunder in the distance. The dragons reared their heads, craning their long necks toward the sound. Many of them cried out, screeching like enormous birds—not in fear, he sensed, but with grief.

Something blinded him. At the same time, a man’s scream filled his mind, the horizon, then the whole world. By the time his vision returned, he saw a great burning shape fall from the heavens, arcing toward the distant horizon. It looked for a moment like a man, flailing in pain. Then it was gone. Everything disappeared. A new horizon of green forests and ash-gray mountains appeared—the same world, but it was older. Much older.

He still saw dragons, but far fewer. Then his vision focused on one in particular. Tiny compared to the rest, covered in scales of alternating brass and silver, with two wings like wind-filled sails, it still dwarfed the creatures hunting it. The hunters, men and women in dark cloaks, carried no weapons. But flames leapt from their hands.

The little dragon screamed and fell. For some reason, it could not fight back. He could do nothing but watch as the hunters encircled it. One by one, they touched it, laughing. And the dragon screamed as the hunters’ touch sucked the fire from beneath its scales and sapped the life from its bones, until its eyes darkened to the color of ash.

Then he was burning again. The old panic returned. He ran. But he had not gone far when the flames parted like a curtain. He saw himself. Small, frail, and bloody, he stooped to pick something off a wooden floor. A sword. Just a sword. But as soon as he touched it, the blade turned to white light. Light turned to fire. He screamed. He tried to throw away the sword. But he heard a woman’s voice—but not the woman from earlier. It was Silwren, telling him what he must do.

At last, he saw her hovering in front of him. Naked, burning but unharmed, she embraced him. His skin tingled as though he were being prodded by alternating jolts of fire and ice. He felt a surprising surge of lust, replaced quickly by panic.

She was not melting into him. No, she was melting into the sword! He cried out for her to stop, but it was too late.

“I’m sorry,” she said then said it again.

He opened his mouth to answer, but a fresh wash of violet flames flooded his sight. The awful buzzing returned. He could not tell whether he was running or being carried. But the sensation did not last long.

As though a veil had been pulled from his eyes, the madness left him. He remembered his name. He realized what he was holding. And for the first time, he saw that instead of a wooden floor, he was standing on a marble walkway, surrounded by corpses.

Shade screamed in victory and wrenched his sword from the body of a dying Sylv. Another came at him—one dressed in the black fighting garb of a Shal’tiar—but Shade burned the man’s legs out from under him, stepped forward, and cleaved the head from his shoulders. Then he stepped through the shattered remnants of the Moon Gate.

The actual wooden gates had already been hacked to splinters, letting wave upon wave of Olgrym through. More Olgrym scaled the walls, scattering most of the Moon Gate’s defenders.

Shaffrilon is ours. Gods, we’ve done it! We’ve finally won.

Shade wept even as the sight of so much blood quickened his pulse to a maddening rhythm. He took a deep breath to calm himself. The battle was far from over. The Sylvs would try to flee Shaffrilon via the walkways that joined the city to the surrounding trees. If they were not stopped, they would regroup and continue the fighting.

Moreover, glancing up at the sky, beyond the endless height of the World Tree, he saw the sky roiling with dark clouds. A storm was brewing. That could slow the fighting and give the surviving Sylvs a greater chance to hide.

He spotted Fadarah ahead of him. Fury had seized the Sorcerer-General, prompting him to outdistance the Shel’ai and fight side by side with the Olgrym, slaughtering the few stubborn Sylvs who stood their ground. Only a few yards separated Fadarah from Doomsayer himself. For a moment, they seemed almost identical.

Shade resisted the urge to fight his way to the Sorcerer-General’s side. Fadarah could take care of himself. Better he guard the remaining Shel’ai in case Silwren came back.

He had already tried repeatedly to reach Silwren via mindspeak. She had not answered. He could not sense her nearby. Perhaps she and the Isle Knight had already fled. A surge of jealousy brightened the wytchfire smoldering from his fist. That his wife had betrayed her own kind was bad enough, but to think of her sharing company with a Human—

A fresh sound interrupted the thought, rising over even the screams of dying Sylvs. For the first time in his life, Shade heard Olgrym screaming in terror. The bottom dropped out of his stomach. He turned to the other Shel’ai and found them staring back, equal parts alarmed and horrified.

“Silwren?” one gasped, looking to him for confirmation.

“Stay back,” Shade called to the other sorcerers. He started toward Fadarah.
Gods, don’t let it be Silwren!
He was not sure he could really face her, and
kill
her, as Fadarah had commanded.

The panicked howls of the Olgrym grew even louder. As far as he could see, their entire charge had ground to a halt. Some Olgrym had fallen prostrate on the battlefield. Others covered their eyes. Still more threw down their weapons and fled, nearly trampling Shade in the process.

Doomsayer passed him, brushing his shoulder. The Olgish chieftain was backpedaling to keep pace with the ranks, but his expression spoke of brutal fascination. Shade remembered that look.

He directed his gaze up the Path of Crowns, but the retreating Olgrym obscured his view. Shade wished he still had his bloodmare so that he might have risen in the saddle for a better view. He spied a nearby heap of bodies and scaled it. Ignoring the dampness of warm blood and the press of cold flesh, he reached the ghastly summit.

What he saw made him wish it was Silwren after all. All the fight and bloodlust drained out of him in an instant. He stared a moment longer then fell with a choking sob. He fell hard, bashing his forehead on a dead Sylv’s armored shoulder, but he hardly noticed. Shaking, he started to crawl away on his hands and knees. Then something stopped him.

A woman’s voice echoed in his mind.
“Kith’el.”

Shade froze. Then he straightened. He stood, wiping the blood from his eyes. “Silwren?” he called out weakly. He turned.

By then, nearly all the Olgrym had fled beyond the shattered Moon Gate, but a few remained prostrate. They whimpered like frightened children.

The remaining Sylvs might have killed them with ease, but most had already withdrawn farther up the Path of Crowns. They formed a shield wall so that they could stare, terrified, at the bizarre scene unfolding below.

Shade stared as a familiar red-haired Human made his way down the Path of Crowns. Instead of armor, the Knight wore bloody, singed clothing. With a burning sword, he cut down Olg after Olg. Then he jerked to a stop, as though he had been struck by an arrow. The flames dimmed, still pulsing, and the sword’s bearer looked down at himself as though waking from a daze.

The remaining Olgrym pulled back. Fadarah stood alone. Shade was about to cry out to him, beg him to withdraw. Fadarah charged. Wytchfire flowed from both hands in bright gouts, more furious than any spell Shade had ever seen him cast. The bruise-purple flames flowed over the Isle Knight, completely obscuring him.