A Shade of Dragon 3 (9 page)

I
had told
Merulina to let me get some bandages for my hands, and we would venture down to the prisons, where I would be her lookout, and she could see Altair again. But apparently servants were the last people who got to decide what they were going to do over the course of their day. The life of a servant girl in the Eraeus castle was more like the life of a dog, or a ball of trash, or a speck of dust; you just got whipped from one place to the next, and if you got a moment to even think, you were lucky. It wasn’t until nightfall that I was finally able to pull Merulina aside without Dorid looming behind us. We’d been shunted from dinner to dishes to making beds to cleaning fireplaces and now laundry. We had folded a giant stack of white linens and deposited them on a cart to be taken by another couple of maids to an upstairs closet. Dorid had just departed for the servants’ quarters to settle some dispute about a missing vase.

“Come on,” I hissed in Merulina’s ear. “If we don’t go now, God knows we’ll never get the chance.”

Her emerald eyes shifted between the door to the hallway and the pile of folded laundry. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “You don’t understand, Nell—they’ll kill me if they find out.”

“Oh, I understand. And you’re right.” I wanted to tell her about how I had been carried off into a gigantic nest by some horrific bird-woman because I had dared to follow Theon out across the beach one night. I wanted to tell her that I had been tortured for him in the same dungeon Altair inhabited now. I wanted to tell her that I had stolen the mystical astrolabe and disappeared into a wild snowstorm for the mere chance to see him again, the mere chance to give him an edge in this war that wasn’t even my own to fight. But I held my tongue. It would be nothing but boastful. Merulina had to make her own decisions. It was possible that she didn’t love Altair in the same way that I loved Theon… and if that was so, it would do her well to realize it now and not waste too much of their time.

“If you don’t want to go, you can just say so,” I reminded her. “No one is forcing you. The risk is yours. The decision is yours.”

Merulina’s eyes shifted again between the folded sheets and the waiting door. She expelled a violent sigh and marched to twist the knob in her hand.

“Let’s go,” she said, flinging the door open and darting out into the hall. “Before I change my mind.”

A
s we trundled
down the stone steps, I thought that perhaps I should have considered whether or not being caught would be worth it for me, too. After all, it wasn’t as if I would be innocent in all of this. I already had enough strikes against me. I would need to invent some reason why I was down in the dungeons when I was supposed to be up at the laundry bins.

“I’ll stay here,” I whispered, lingering at the final twist of the stairwell, where I could see up, to the station where guards would often pass for the changing of the shift, and down, where meager torches lit the cells of the remaining fire prisoners. “I’ll speak loudly if I’m asked why I am here.” From my days as a prisoner, I knew that the timing was almost impossible to speculate. Sometimes guards would mosey down into the dungeon as if by happenstance, chatting amongst themselves with nowhere to go and no true task to which to attend, and other times we’d been forgotten for what felt like—but couldn’t have been—hours. “I don’t know how much time you have.”

“I used to be the dungeon’s water girl,” Merulina explained. “I can say that there is never a guarantee that a sentry or a servant will not pass through. But if you’re lucky, you can have all the time you need to express your love. We shall see. But—you were right. The risk is mine. The decision is mine. If a guard comes, tell him that you were sent to look for the missing vase.”

I scoffed. “Dorid would never agree that she had said—”

“Not by Dorid,” Merulina hissed. “By me.” With that, she whirled and descended the stairwell to hunt for Altair among the cells. It was almost impossible to see them—an occasional shift in the shadow let me know that a body was moving—but I heard Merulina’s expression of gratitude, and heard Altair join her chorus in surprise. Her silhouette moved to the bars of a dim cage and the torchlight played over her hair, showing me that his fingers had found their way into her tresses.

They kissed, a long, luxurious kiss, as if they had all the time in the world.

I stared after them and thought helplessly of Theon. Our interaction the other night had been so brief…

I wished I could go with Merulina and tell Altair that I knew his brother, if only to in some way be with Theon again by being with his family—to tell him that I was his sister-in-law now, and possibly the queen of The Hearthlands, if they ever became The Hearthlands again. But I didn’t want to ruin their moment. Merulina was gasping with tearful breath—an ice dragoness crying for love, what a beautiful thing—and Altair murmured sweet nothings in her ear… which traveled quite well due to the acoustics of the dungeon.

“I was starting to think I’d never see you again,” he confessed. “It’s been days since a beautiful girl brought me water.”

“Dorid suspected,” Merulina sobbed. “She said I was awfully happy to be doing such abysmal shifts, and perhaps I deserved to be promoted. She was trying to keep us apart—and she succeeded. The only reason I’m here now is that your sister took pity on me… she’s being my lookout right now.”

“You should know that the fire dragons do not have sisters. We are a race without women since the war under my grandfather’s reign.”

“Your sister-in-law,” Merulina answered. “Theon’s wife.”

“Theon’s wife?” echoed in the prison. I resisted the urge to go. I would need to be here, looking, in case a guard approached—

“The new girl, aren’t you?” a voice emanated from behind me, and I jumped, whirling. My heart slammed into my ribcage with every passing second.

“Uh, yes,” I said.
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.
“I just… it’s so dark down here!” I threw my voice farther to catch Merulina and Altair’s attention, to pull them from their lover’s embrace. “I was supposed to be looking for that missing vase, but—but—I think I lost my way?”

The man behind the blue cloth mask considered me, skeptical, then nodded his head back toward the guard post. “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll take you back to the servants’ quarters. The vase got found already. It was in the library with a different set of finery. Mismatched. Bad housekeeping. But never mind that. The servant responsible was apprehended and punished.” His eyes were cold as he spoke. Apprehended and punished for misplacing a vase. I could only imagine what they’d do to me, much less Merulina, if they knew the truth.

“O-okay,” I said, loudly again. “Thank you!”

I glanced over my shoulder once—I risked it, like a fool—before following the guard up the stairs.

Merulina was gone.

T
he stars
over the Ixwane Ocean were large and bright, shimmering down onto the beach like photographs, reminders of the sky under which The Hearthlands had once resided. Of course, that land mass was now more often than not covered by clouds. But the stars had not changed—except in position, perhaps.

I had been taught to read the stars when I was younger, but had not taken the time to truly examine them in years. There were enough seers in the castle without needing to use the skill myself. My mother would have been appalled if she had known. But Einhen and I scanned the stars from the ogres’ beach and I thought of Penelope. She was all alone in that castle, being ground to a pulp beneath Michelle’s thumb… And my wife, I felt people failed to realize, was quite resilient. She would not be ground to a pulp, and if she would not be ground to a pulp… she might be returned to the dungeon, to see what the manacles might make of her.

And I couldn’t lose her. I couldn’t lose my father, and Altair, and Penelope, all in the same month. I was resilient too, but not that resilient. I needed something left in my world.

Beside me, Einhen sketched out the patterns of the stars and examined them more closely with a ruler and a magnifying glass, etching little dotted lines between them to show their trajectories. In the sand alongside him was a telescope. I was too lost in my thoughts to be of any help. Perhaps that was the real reason I had never closely consulted the stars, instead, consulting a court-appointed seer. I couldn’t be troubled to concentrate for that long on the series of silver speckles.

My mind continued to wander to Penelope. What if Lethe thought he could take advantage of Penelope? He certainly still loved her. She was my wife… and if he laid so much as a hand on her, I would be forced to take measures of my own. Things would certainly get ugly. Very ugly. What if he—

Off to my left, Einhen’s writing utensil scratched harder and faster on the surface of his yellowed papyrus scroll.

“Dear gods,” he breathed, distracting me from my worry. “Theon!” Einhen tore his eyes from the scroll, darted them to the stars once more, and then turned them to me. They were wide with alert, with panic. “The stars!”

“Yes, they’re…” I wasn’t sure quite what to say. I didn’t want to make a fool out of myself. Sighing, I asked, “What are they?”

“They have not changed position!” Einhen clapped a hand on my shoulder. “They remain with us still!”

“What?” Without thinking, I snatched the scroll from beneath Einhen’s hands and examined the crude map he had been drawing.

He was right. I couldn’t see a single star out of alignment within the sky which had always hung over The Hearthlands every night of my life until the day that I had departed for Earth.

“The gods,” Einhen cheered. “The gods will give us an advantage in war, in travel, in luck… though the weather remains unfavorable.”

“Unfavorable?” A sharp note crept into my voice. “Einhen… we require the storms to relent, lest they extinguish our fire and drive us from the territory. We need a window of clarity in the sky.”

Einhen’s shoulders sagged. “Perhaps unfavorable is not the word,” he corrected himself. He scooped the telescope from the sand at his side and examined the mottled sky over Everwinter yet again. “Unpredictable. The clouds move too quickly… some are dark, some are light… it’s impossible to be certain when or where the next storm will begin in Everwinter, and impossible to tell how long it will last. I can say it is not snowing right now. And at night the storms seem to abate, to at least soften. Perhaps the astrolabe machinists retire in the night hours, and the sky clears for a precious few hours.”

“So the weather is uncertain, but the gods will grant us… luck.”

“The ice people appear to have not changed every disc of the astrolabe. And we did not notice. We never mapped them again after seeing their new positions. They changed back right over our very heads.” He looked away from his telescope, breathless with relief, with excitement. “We must strike now. Tonight. The ice dragons surely know this folly, and are working to repair it.”

“We were always going to strike tonight, to tell you the truth,” I admitted to him, pushing up to a stand and turning toward the waiting camp of fire soldiers—the loyal remainder. “One never knows if they shall live or die. Even now, we cannot be sure.” I looked away from Einhen and again thought of Nell. “The gods do not decide everything.”

T
he night sky
over Ixwane Ocean was filled with fire dragons, all in brilliant shades of gold and crimson and bright, flame orange. As we approached our distant shore—now a silvery crust, where it had once been a verdant series of hills much like the ogres’ beach—my eyes shifted from one bank of cloud to the next. As long as those snowy mists held their loads overhead… we would be able to travel onward, toward the city itself, with our weapons and ammunition strapped to our necks. My emptied satchel had been packed with driftwood, reeds, and other dried materials from the ogres’ beach. It was highly flammable, and it would do what I could not. It would cover the city itself, sent forth like an arrow.

We traveled through the frigid air, eyes half-closed against the dry atmosphere. At least, being as dry as it was, it would help the fire to burn. And it would need to be a lot of fire. It would need to overwhelm them.

For almost an hour we flew onward toward the city as fast as we could. The time was precious. There were only a few dozen of us left. If it started to snow…

“Heading into a flurry!” Einhen announced.

“We have to turn back!” one of the smaller red dragons cried below me.

“No!” I rebuked. “We can make it! It won’t last for long.”

Our wings beat the air, and one, two smaller dragons spiraled out of the squad, down to the ground below with wings cramped and locked in the cold. “They’ll be all right,” I exclaimed, fixing my eyes straight ahead as we pushed through the thin sheet of snowfall. “We have to keep going!” I could see the walls of the city on the horizon. It wouldn’t be long now.

Descending to the city entrance and frozen moat, we landed in the deep snow. I wondered if the ice dragons had been made aware of our presence yet. Knowing how lazy and overconfident they were, it was possible that the patrols had been slackened after the shelter had been raided. But it was impossible to say. We had no time to waste.

I shifted into my human form in order to use my hands, and the other fire soldiers followed suit. As it had been before, the city was left open, a vulgar display of the perceived superiority of ice forces. I unsheathed the satchel from my neck and dug inside for the salty wood and foliage, dried to the bone in the sun of the ogres’ beach. “Show no mercy,” I instructed my men. It was a phrase I never would have uttered before. “We are not trying to save anything. No ice dragons, and no structures within the city. Let it, and let them, burn.”

At the entrance of the city was the same abandoned inn where Nell and I had spent our first night as husband and wife. I gazed at it with longing and remorse for only an instant before exhaling a plume of white-hot fire into its windows.

Posted nearby were horses and donkeys, draped in heavy quilts, attached to bridles, awaiting their owners. I unbridled one horse, loosely attached a bundle of kindling to its tail, and breathed some sparks into the mass. The horse neighed and took off into the city, but before it lost the bundle attached to its tail, the snow that it kicked up extinguished the flame.

I extracted a quiver and bow from my satchel. The quiver was stuffed with arrows whose feathered fletching had been replaced, wrapped in dry reeds instead. I exhaled some sparks again and took aim at a distant building. It had once been our cobbler’s shop. But now… now it was just an empty building, or perhaps the hideout of some lowly ice dragon who hadn’t the courage to remain on his or her own land, the Obran peninsula.

The arrow arced into the sky like a teardrop of fire, descending perfectly onto the cobber’s shop.

Archery was a lesson I’d never missed.

A dim flicker began in one window. Too slow. If our fire all started with natural speed, the ice dragons would have plenty of time to extinguish them.

“Men,” I commanded. “Our sparks will not progress at the speed we require!”

“What of our fireballs?” Charis called back.

“They are exhausting,” Einhen replied.

“War is exhausting. The fireballs it is. The thicker, the better!”

Einhen sagged—not a warrior by trade—but acquiesced. The lot of us heaved and belched, vomiting streaks of white lava into the depths of the city.

They landed and exploded, creating immediate wildfires amid the kindling of our town square. The temple sparkled like a firework, its bejeweled statues and fountains, fed with the gaseous ground waters of The Hearthlands, shooting into the sky. The apothecary’s station fumed with the smoke of sage, while the physician’s office was practically vaporized by the variety of chemicals harbored therein.

I stared out across the blanket of destruction… so many of our buildings, our landmarks, gone in an instant… one of the fireballs slammed into a statue of my grandfather, melting it almost instantly into the snow below…

Wild-eyed ice dragons, still half-asleep and half-naked from their beds, came staggering out into the snow. Some of them ran in their bare feet or stockings toward the open exits of the city wall. Some of them transformed into dragons, all shades of blue and white and silver and black, then fled into the sky and over the walls. Some of them yodeled from within burning buildings they had taken to inhabiting, spewing shards of ice out windows in an attempt to blanket the blaze. But the assault was too fast, too much, too unexpected.

It wouldn’t be too long before a discerning ice dragon stepped from his or her abode and scanned the streets, not for the flaming horrors around them, but for their cause. And when that happened, we would be forced into ground combat. Soon. But it would be too late. By the time we were targeted and forced into defensive mode, forced to relent and even recede, the entire city would be aflame. Even now, we had fanned out at a distance of several blocks from one another, and our fireballs assaulted different quarters of the city. And when we fled, then… then we would tap into the gaseous moat and set it aflame, encouraging the remaining ice dragons to flee rather than walk the full length of the moat, extinguishing its waters to resuscitate a ruined city.

My gaze panned to the castle.

My only fear was not the condition of my childhood home, but Penelope.

As the fires of the city crackled and spread from building to building, creeping ever closer to the palace itself…

As the warm, yellow light played across my features, relaxing and warming me…

I worried. I worried at how the royal family would react, and prayed that they would be thrust into a panic too deep and wide to consider revenge on a lowly slave girl. They did not know that she had become my wife. Not unless she had told them herself.

All around us, a gentle snow began to fall. At first, I couldn’t even see it, as the flakes melted as soon as they came close to the fires. But then I realized that my face kept feeling sharp little prickles. Ice.

I winced. Even though it would be smart to fall back now, to save my men from the damage of the coming storm… I could not abandon Nell.