Chapter 7

As the roar came a third time, the undiluted rage in it had Leras hunching over in bed. Prey instinct bade him to look upward as if, even now, a predator swept down upon him.

But he couldn’t cower in his room, hoping the monster would depart. Even if he wasn’t a warder, he could defend his home. Futile though his aid promised to be against such a fearsome-sounding beast.

Darting for his werelamp, he activated it, then dragged on his clothes. All the while, he waited in breathless anticipation, wondering when the next bellow would come.

He was still unprepared when it did. As the reverberations rattled through his limbs, he crouched, half-dressed. This time, words accompanied the tumult.

“Thiefling! You cannot hide from me! Fail to face me, and I shall burn your home to its roots!”

His mind quailed. He hadn’t heard the words, yet they somehow filled his skull with aching volume.

“I feel you, soul-thief! I have your scent! Come, or I shall perish all your kin!”

From where did it come? What creature could speak so? With trembling hands, Leras belted on his rapier. Though he doubted the thin blade would be of use, it felt the height of foolishness to rush toward such a creature unarmed.

Dressed, he stumbled toward the door, vision sparking and splintering. Wrenching it open, he stepped out into the night.

And found it glowing like the red of dawn.

Leras craned back his head. Searing winds descended from above, cutting through the coolness of the morning. Flecks of ash fell against his face from a pulsating glow, the source of the red light.

Then he smelled it. A stench all feared in Elendol, a city built among the trees.

Smoke.

Leras sprinted up the spiraling steps. A suspicion grew as to the creature behind this conflagration. If he was right, he couldn’t change the outcome of this encounter.

Yet neither would he stand by while his home burned.

He wasn’t the only one awake. Despite the early hour, House Venaliel bustled with frantic activity. As he sprinted up the winding staircase, Leras pushed past wide-eyed servants hauling buckets of water, the stairs slick as it sloshed from their trembling hands. Reaching the feast hall’s platform, he found the Queensguard pressing ahead of him, armor and weapons rattling as they moved upward.

All the while, the intruder blared its warnings and demands.

“Take shelter, Your Highness!” a guard at the column’s rear shouted at him. “We shall handle this beast!”

Leras ignored the man and trailed after them. The guardsman had no choice but to turn after his fellows and keep pressing on.

As they ascended, Leras kept glancing above. The increasing smoke hid much from view. He wound around the kintree again and reached the primary platform. Only then did he catch a flash of blue amid the gray—his first glimpse of the creature. Even that peek showed it to be massive.

“Lies!” the intruder roared above, seeming to speak to someone Leras couldn’t hear. “Still, you dare to lie! Do you not see there is nowhere your thief can hide, mortals? I know their touch and scent. Deny your duty to deliver them, and you shall know the full wrath of the Protectress!”

Even at the baffling threats, Leras ignored his guards’ advice and pressed on. Only a final turn remained.

A discordant song rang in his ears.

At another time, Leras would have paused. Who could play at such a time and hour, much less an entire orchestra? The distant notes of the resolute march beat in time to his stride.

Yet he couldn’t afford to waste time. Distractions now could cost lives.

Legs trembling, heart hammering, Leras turned onto the highest platform of his House. The smoke dispersed enough that as he raised his head, he could behold their intruder in full for the first time, clinging to the trunk of the kintree.

Dragon.

Its size was staggering. The dragon covered the entire side of the tree, a tree so large it was equal to any palace—and that was with its wings tucked along its ridged back. Its barbed tail swept down the platform while its sinuous neck curved around to glare down at them with eyes like bubbling pools of molten gold. The flames burning down the obliterated branches reflected in those eyes like they were glimpses into the red hells. Though there were no obvious signs of its sex, and its voice held both high and low tones, Leras somehow knew it to be female. It was something in her scent, though how he smelled her reptilian musk through the smoke was beyond him.

He didn’t stand alone on the platform. Almost his entire family was present. His mother, he’d expected, as he had his father; neither would hide when their home was endangered. Rolan, too, stood at their parents’ side. Only Syl was absent. He hoped his little sister had been secreted far away.

Prendyn Agarae, Captain of the Ilthasi, also lingered near the edge of the platform. Though he had never struck Leras as a coward, his bald pate shone with sweat, and he visibly trembled as he stared upward. Behind him spread two dozen royal guards, spears pointed at the dragon, though challenging one meant certain death.

Leras knew he should be afraid. Instinct bade him to scurry into the deepest hiding hole he could find. Instead, he straightened, eyes narrowing and nostrils flaring. Affront paired with a protective fury so that he nearly snarled up at the intruder.

The bright sparks in his vision condensed and coalesced. The smoke-laced air burst into a net of shining lines.

Once more, he beheld the Lattice.

After so many years of dreaming of seeing it again, he could hardly fail to know it. Yet he had no time to waste on wonder. Focusing on the threads connecting him to the dragon, Leras understood them to be significant; there, his mysterious intuition flailed. He knew nothing of how to use them, if he could.

The threads vibrated as if in warning as the dragon turned her gaze upon him.

“YOU!” The dragon’s words tore through his thoughts. “Approach, thiefling! Do not attempt to flee. There is nowhere you may hide from the ava’duala. Come now, and your suffering shall end swiftly.”

Thiefling. Damning as her words were, the sharper blow came with the Lattice’s unraveling. Before his eyes, the bright lines snapped and fizzled away. Leras staggered, barely keeping his feet as he stumbled into the railing behind.

But his courage hadn’t entirely vanished. This creature sought him. She burned his home for him. Flee, and he feared she would burn all of Elendol hunting him down.

Leras rose to his feet and prised his grip from the wood. His hands felt numb as they fell to his rapier, yet he drew it still. A puny and futile weapon before such a beast, smaller than any of its teeth, though he felt braver for holding it.

His gaze drew up to his assailant. How easily the sapphire-scaled dragon could swallow him. He might have laughed, but for the consequences.

The dragon rumbled, gleaming eyes swirling as they beheld him.

“Courage has not entirely left mortalkind. Come then, soul-thief. Surrender what you have stolen.”

At the dragon’s words, all others on the platform looked around. Leras winced at his mother’s stricken look. All emotion leaked through her composure.

“Kaleras,” she said. Pleading. Warning.

He gave her a small, tight smile, including his father and brother in it, before raising his eyes back to the dragon.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he called up, voice cracking as he spoke. He swallowed before continuing. “I’ve stolen nothing from you or any dragon.”

“LIES!”

Leras staggered before the accusation. His skin felt stretched and hot. Unendurable heat exuded from within him like a fever before its breaking.

“Great Voissara, please—you must heed me.” It was as close to begging as he had heard from his mother. “This is my son. I know he speaks the truth. He has never left the borders of Gladelyl; rarely has he even left this city. It’s impossible that he has done what you accuse him of.”

Her words stung, a reminder of how little he’d seen of the World, how little he’d impacted it. But it mattered not in the presence of a dragon. Leras shook his head, wishing it would clear. His muscles ached. Sweat beaded his skin.

“What crime has been committed?” He looked to his mother, his father, then up to the dragon—Voissara, according to his mother. “What am I accused of stealing?”

Draconic eyes drew him in with their mesmerizing whirls.  No succor lay there. Drawn in, they would grind him into dust, like falling into pits of churning stones. 

“I do not play mortal games.” Her words seethed with barely restrained flames. “You know your guilt, thiefling. I will not be taunted!”

“Peace, Great One. It is too soon for accusations.” His mother tore her eyes away from the domineering beast to glance at Leras. He could guess at her dilemma. As the monarch of Gladelyl, it had suddenly come down to a choice: her son or her queendom.

The answer was clear.

Realizing a bared blade might hamper rather than help, Leras sheathed his rapier. “Please, Momua,” he murmured. “She won’t let this go without talking it through.”

He suspected Voissara would require more of him than conversation. Much more. But he kept that dark thought to himself.

Ashelia Venaliel moistened her lips, a little more of her queenly authority crumbling, letting the mother show through.

“A soul,” she said, speaking audibly for all on the platform to hear. “A dragon’s soul. Great Voissara believes a mortal here in Elendol has stolen one. And, in doing so, has harmed one of their kind, preventing them from hatching.”

Leras dredged up the little his parents had told them of dragon cycles. Dragons were said to reincarnate upon their deaths, their immortal spirits experiencing countless lives since their inception. They kept much of their knowledge and memories with each rebirth, but started anew in body. While dragons had been prevented from rebirth by their battle against the Whispering Gods, their eggs had been mined and made into artifacts. Enough had been destroyed over the eons that there had been too few for the remaining dragons to be reborn in time. Some had returned to the World’s Womb and the oblivion that waited there.

Even if dragons weren’t prideful and malicious creatures, as this Voissara seemed, such a history might make any sensitive to a whiff of theft. Sucking in a deep breath, Leras met the swirling golden eyes again.

“My queen mother speaks the truth. I have never left my homeland. Never seen a dragon—an ava’dual—before you. I cannot have done that of which you accuse me.”

The dragon’s head lurched toward him. Leras flinched and raised his arms, though nothing would prevent her from eating him. But though she stopped far short, her closer proximity seemed to heighten his strange fever.

“Still, you lie! Do you think me deaf to my kin’s song? Do you think I do not smell it on you?” Her eyes were dizzying to gaze upon, muddling his mind. “You possess it here and now, thiefling. You carry it within you. It gnaws at you to be free!”

Leras had to look away from her gaze. His head spun; his knees felt weak. The heat that made his skin too tight and his throat parched took on new meaning.

You carry it within you.

“What do you mean, dragon?” His father stepped between them. There was fear in Bran’s posture, but Leras suspected it was not for himself. “You’re saying the soul is inside Leras?”

Voissara blew out a breath, fragrant with sulfur and the scent of heated stone. “So I have spoken! Do your tiny minds always turn so slowly? But for the Queen’s orders, I would be done with this farce by fang and flame!”

“But she has ordered otherwise.” His father remained resolute before the creature’s threats. “Yvärras knows better than to burn down potential allies.”

A belly-deep growl issued down the dragon’s long neck. “Thalkunaras, they called you,” she rumbled in Leras’s head. “Stone in the Wheel. But you will break no cart now, manling. You possess no power to speak so to me!”

“I possess the only power that matters here.” Bran seemed ignorant of the differences in their strength, size, and sorcery. As he stood in defiance of the dragon, Leras glimpsed the man he’d once been. The sorcerer who brought about the Godfall. The man behind the legend.

“I know the truth,” his father continued. “The one that matters. My son is innocent. I won’t deny he possesses a dragon’s soul—you’d know that better than I. But if he does, it was by no crime of his or ours.”

“Then whom do you accuse, mortal? Who is responsible for this malfeasance?”

Bran glanced over his shoulder, first at his bond, then at Leras. At length, he raised his head back to the dragon, graying hair falling over his shoulders.

“The Three.”

The Three. Leras was surprised to hear them evoked. Ever since the Godfall, the Whispering Gods—as the Three had once been known—had been assumed to pass from the World. A part of his father had carried them into the World’s Womb, the cradle of sorcery, and smothered them with its killing song.

But if his father had survived, perhaps a part of them had as well.

Voissara shifted her grip, causing the tree to groan and branches to break. Royal guards shifted uneasily around the edges of the platform. A small squawk of fear came from the Ilthasi captain behind Leras.

“The Three!” she boomed. “You would accuse those exterminated from the World?”

“Not of present acts, but past.” His father seemed to consider his words before continuing. “Leras has never stepped foot outside of Gladelyl, but he was conceived before that final reckoning. My wife carried him inside her during the battle atop Ikvaldar. Perhaps…” He shook his head. “Perhaps that’s when this occurred.”

Leras thought the dragon would scoff at the idea. He felt a wild desire to laugh himself. A dragon soul latching onto him at the Godfall? He’d known he was conceived before the battle, but he would have been tiny within his mother’s belly then, barely formed. Surely incapable of housing the soul of such a mighty creature.

Could that be why I’m broken?

An outlandish idea, and far less likely than his human blood being to blame. Yet he found the notion hard to dismiss. The presence of the dragon had roused something within him, something he couldn’t explain. The Lattice had appeared after so long only when Voissara was before him.

There was too much of the feel of truth for him to dismiss it as mere fantasy.

Voissara issued a low rumble that seemed contemplative rather than furious. The platform vibrated under Leras’s feet.

“It is unprecedented. Unknown to us. Never in all the turns of the World has this occurred. No—it is impossible.”

“Just because something has not occurred does not mean it cannot. Much that happened that day had never happened before. Why not one more marvel?”

The dragon turned her whorling gaze back on Leras. He endured it even as heat scoured his body.

“Only one may determine his innocence or guilt. Only one may find the path forward to reclaiming what belongs to the ava’duala. Great Yvärras shall decide his fate. What must be done now remains the same: your soul-thief son comes with me.”

“No.” His mother practically growled the words. “No, Great Voissara. You will not take him from me.”

The dragon bristled, claws gouging the kintree’s bark. “Spare me your defiance! My patience is abundant, but your bleating has drained it to the last.”

“I will go!”

Leras stepped between his parents, parting them. He faced the dragon, all his feverish weakness dissipating before his resolve.

“I will go,” he repeated, “if that is what must be done.”

“Prince Kaleras,” his mother snapped, “that is not your decision to make.” As if he had never spoken, Queen Ashelia looked up at the dragon. “If the Protectress wishes to weigh in on what must be done, she must come here. We will speak, queen to queen, or nothing will be done at all.”

“You dare?” The dragon’s mouth parted, and Leras glimpsed a glow behind the long teeth. His father had told him dragons didn’t breathe fire from their bellies like the stories claimed, but cast their spells so that it only seemed so. Yet he’d heard too many tales to banish the concept. “You dare? I speak for the Great Yvärras! It is with me you must treat. You have heard the demands of the Protectress. There is no need for what you request!”

His mother remained resolute. “Those are my terms. Should they fail to be met, our nations can have no fruitful alliance.”

“Our common enemy is vanquished! The ava’duala are free!” Voissara’s roar blew over them with such force that Leras barely kept his feet. The others looked in a similar state of disarray. “What need have we of alliances with frail mortals? Your terms mean nothing! I will take the thief myself to be judged as the Protectress sees fit.”

Leras expected the dragon to lunge toward him that very moment, yet Voissara remained on her perch. For all her bluster, some hesitancy held her back. Perhaps she feared injuring the dragon soul nestled inside him. Or perhaps the ava’duala did indeed need mortal alliances, though he couldn’t imagine why.

His father spoke again. “Voissara, please, heed us. We’re parents worried about their son. You cannot expect us to just give him over to you. Do you not fret for your kin?” Gone was the defiance, replaced by a supplication Leras winced to behold. “We have shared cause with Yvärras before. Surely, if we speak, we may come to an accord.”

The dragon appeared unmoved by his appeal. “Only one solution shall satisfy me,” she responded. “I must bring the mortal boy to Great Yvärras.”

Around and around, they spoke. It all came back to the same thing. Bracing himself for what must come next, Leras cleared his throat and forced the words out.

“Mother. Remember what you told me?”

The Elf Queen looked slowly at him. A single word more, and he would shatter her.

“If I’m a prince of Gladelyl,” he murmured. “you must let me act as one.”

She shook her head. “No, Kaleras. Not this way.”

Bran broke from watching their exchange to face Voissara again. His shoulders bunched around his neck, tight with anger. “If nothing else will satisfy that tyrant queen, then we’ll go to her. But we’ll make our own way there.”

We. The word implied much, but as the dragon flared the crest framing her head, he was distracted from them. “Crawling upon the earth like worms? My kin suffers a fate unimaginable to you. No—I shall carry the thiefling there in a fraction of the time.”

“And leave ourselves at your abundant mercy?” Sarcasm dripped from Bran’s words. “I think not, dragon. We travel there ourselves, on the ground, or we don’t go at all.”

Voissara leaned down farther, her fearsome head hovering a mere score of feet above. “You could not stop me, manling, if I wished otherwise.”

Leras stared at her teeth, as long as his arms and spear-sharp, and saw it then. The one way he might convince her to follow his father’s plan.

Even if it damned him.

“Great Voissara, if you let us do as my father bids and make our own way to your queen, then I swear I will submit to her judgment. If I have caused harm to the unborn dragon, if I have wronged the ava’duala, I will pay whatever price Yvärras deems necessary.” 

He felt his family’s eyes on him. Felt the horror, the pain, the sorrow. Worst of all was the resignation in their silence. They knew as well as he this was the only way.

Voissara breathed as she considered him, her fetid air difficult to inhale. The gold of her eyes wove together, then apart. Beneath that stare, his blood grew hot again. It felt as if boiling water poured through his veins, like through the apothecary pipes Uncle Aelyn had once shown him.

“Great Yvärras bade that I not make war,” the dragon said at last. “So I shall allow your pointless crawling. But you shall not delay. Fail to arrive at the Siv’Dual before the first snows fall, and all mortalkind will suffer!”

Even as Leras reeled at her declaration, the dragon surged upward, tearing deep rends into the protesting wood. Then she leaped from the trunk toward the opening in the canopy, broken by wings and flame.

The World again splintered into lines of white, the Lattice flashing into his vision. As soon as it reappeared, though, it vanished once more.

Leras watched the dragon ascend, smoke whirling with each beat of her wings, the ashy foliage battered away. Then, faster than seemed possible for such a colossal creature, she was above the trees, into the sky, and soaring into the fading dusklight.