When She Reigns

by Jodi Meadows

  Dissonant buzzing ripped through me. My heartbeat stumbled, my teeth itched, and my thoughts spiraled with hope and fear and shock. I knew that noise in the back of my head, that black harmony that grated rather than sang. Noorestones. Giant noorestones.

  Thirteen of them.

  “Mira?” Ilina asked. “What’s wrong?”

  I gasped, struggling to get the words around the knot tightening inside my throat. “Paorah is here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  QUESTIONS SPIRALED THROUGH ME, UNSTOPPABLE without the noorestones. I fumbled for my calming pills.

  How had Paorah gotten here so quickly?

  Where had the other three giant noorestones come from?

  Could we get any of those noorestones here fast enough to help these dragons?

  But at my declaration—“Paorah is here”—the empress and her guards pushed into motion.

  “Return me to the palace,” she said. “Send this ahead: I want the high magistrate arrested and brought before my throne. In chains. Assemble the harbor guard to surround his fleet. As for the people with him”—she glanced at me—“try not to hurt them, but if they attack, respond in kind.”

  I tried to tell myself anyone from the Fallen Isles would make the same decision, but all I could think was that my mother was on one of those ships, and if an imperial killed her . . .

  “Your will is ours,” a guard said, nodding, and pulled a small metal device from his jacket, turning toward the carriage while he sent the empress’s message.

  “It’s time to go, Your Eminence,” said the other guard. “The park isn’t defendable enough.”

  The empress gave a firm nod, but I didn’t believe for a moment that she was worried for her own safety. The high magistrate had sworn to attack the Algotti Empire, and here he was, early and with a promise he intended to keep. Her people were in danger. She turned to me. “Come along, or stay. Whichever you prefer. If you remain, a carriage will return for you in a few hours.”

  Hristo stood at my side, his jaw clenched tight. “We should go.”

  Ilina looked up at her father, her wish clear enough on her face.

  “Your Eminence,” said the guard, not quite impatient, but Apolla held up her hand, and he went quiet.

  I touched my friend’s arm. “Ilina, we’ll come back—” The dark hum in the back of my head sharpened. Widened. Became a shriek.

  My knees buckled. LaLa screamed and dove for me, but Hristo held fast to her leash, while Ilina and her father caught me just before my hands and knees struck the flagstone.

  I must have looked out of my mind, clutching my head and groaning, but the noise was so loud. It was impossible to think around, impossible to breathe around. My whole body began to shudder as the shrieking crescendoed. It was just one noorestone, but it was overwhelming. Couldn’t everyone else hear it, too?

  “Mira?” The empress’s voice was distant. “What is it?” Her guards urged her to leave, but—

  “It’s too late,” I gasped. “Seven gods.”

  The heels of my palms dug against my temples, so hard my bones felt bruised, but it wasn’t a sound that existed outside my head; I couldn’t block it like this. I couldn’t block it at all. No matter how I stretched to suppress it, the noise grew worse.

  “What is it?” Hristo held me up; he must have passed the dragons to Ilina or Viktor, because both his arms wrapped around me now. “Mira, what’s happening?”

  “Run!” The keening rose higher. The noorestone moved, propelled into the air, and I didn’t think. I reacted. I lurched away from everyone else, and I pulled.

  Power crackled toward me. Into me. So fast it cut the air and thunder broke all around.

  Excruciating fire slammed into my body. I staggered back, leaving patches of scorched grass where I stepped.

  Guards leaped in front of the empress. Ilina’s father jerked her away from me. Hristo stepped toward me, like he wanted to do something, but there was no help to offer. No way to make this right.

  Noorestone fire screamed through my veins, twisting sideways with the instability that made these crystals so dangerous. In the back of my mind, all I saw was the Infinity, exploding into a million fragments. That was going to be me, because I couldn’t contain this. I couldn’t control this.

  But still, I pulled faster and faster, because it was me or my friends, and none of them would be able to survive this.

  It was too much.

  Even now, I was separating from myself. I could see my body shuddering violently under the onslaught of power. I could see fire and wind whipping around me in a deadly storm. And I could see the others pulling away—the empress’s guards dragging her bodily to the carriage.

  Screams tore from my throat, deep and wild, and nothing at all like a girl. Plasmic wings ripped from my back and stretched wide against the world. And angry noorestone fire sizzled along my skin like scales.

  Someone shouted my name.

  I couldn’t hear it, not really, over the wretched keen, and the horror of everything I could see but couldn’t say.

  Beyond the others, above them, I saw an object flying high above the city of Sunder.

  It was the size of a small house. On its own, a rock that large would have done incredible damage, shattering buildings and cracking open streets, crushing anyone who happened to be in its path.

  But this was a noorestone: giant, deadly, and unstable. A blue-white inferno stormed around it, splintering apart where I grabbed at the power and pulled. Ropes of fire sailed across the sky, drawing stares from people across the city—those who hadn’t yet noticed the noorestone. But then their gazes traced the fire from end to end, and there they saw it.

  Death.

  Panic flared. People fled on foot, as though they could outrun what was coming. They had no idea how bad it was going to be. A conflagration. Consuming. Complete. True destruction, down to the dirt.

  I opened myself wider, drawing in noorestone fire. Faster. Hotter. It choked me, clogging in my throat, in my pores, in my fingernails. It was too much, and still it wasn’t nearly enough.

  And then—

  The noorestone hit.

  It crashed into a building. A temple to Suna, the Judge, with delicate spires and decorative arches carved from rose marble, some pieces shaved so thin that sunlight shone through the smoky stone. It was a masterpiece of architecture, awe-inspiring and imposing, and now it shattered apart.

  “No!” The roar spilled from my wide-open jaws, but it was too late.

  The noorestone exploded as it slammed into marble and limestone and metal framework, and drove into the earth below. Shards of glittering fire shot out in a thousand directions. Into the sky. Into surrounding buildings. Into carriages. Into orderly rows of trees. Into people.

  The ground quaked with the impact, and the unconscious dragons groaned fitfully. The humans with me stumbled—some toward me, but most toward the uncertain safety of the carriage.

  I couldn’t blame them; I was terrible to behold: wreathed in blue-white fire, skin shining with dark, unearthly light, and those wings. Not the wings from before, when I’d gripped noorestones in the theater or Pit, but wings that buzzed and flickered and hurt. They weren’t right. They weren’t natural. And they were going to kill me if I couldn’t do something with all this power.

  But that was secondary. There was no space to worry about what was happening to me, because in the city, a firestorm rained on buildings and parks and people, incinerating everything in an instant. I saw their faces, terrified and blackening as they died and disappeared; the intensity of the noorestone fire took even their bones.

  That was just the first few moments: twenty-three buildings demolished, three hundred and eleven people dead and evaporated, four—no, five—thousand running as though they had any hope of survival.

  The numbers grew worse from there.

  Ash mixed with falling fire—all the shards that had flown up and out after the first strike were now dropping back to the
tender earth—and terrible dry heat rushed through streets and windows, heralding the flames hot enough to melt stone, which ran liquid and black over the charred earth. It was a Sundering of a different sort.

  “Stop!” I screamed for the noorestone shards, drawing their fires deeper into me. Thousands upon thousands of threads spun off the fragments, reaching toward me, but I was too late. Too slow. Too unprepared.

  Over the palace, silence bloomed.

  It spread like a bubble, rising and stretching toward the shattered noorestone, enveloping gardens and courtyards and temples in pure silence as it rolled outward. But even that wouldn’t be enough. It would quiet the noorestone fragments, but it could not quell the fires that blazed through the streets of Sunder, or ease the heat that sucked moisture from everything, even stone, or prevent the stampede of people fleeing in every direction.

  I let out a furious cry. My wings flexed wide, scorching crescent moons into the ground around me. I pulled more and more of the noorestone’s shattering power into me, making every piece of my body buzz with dissonance, with unstable harmony, with burning. I wanted to fly into that plume of silence and let it cool the agony of this inferno, but the noorestone shards still rained on Sunder, exploding anew and killing more and more.

  Too much unsteady power. Too much ill-fitting fire. My grip on it grew soft and insubstantial as my fragile human body gave in to flame, but there was nothing to do with everything I took in. I was filled up, overflowing, bloated with the unwanted energy. Even if I could have steadied myself long enough to go to the dragons, this was not healing fire. This would rip all of us apart.

  Desperate, I slammed my palms against the ground. Thunder cracked and the planet shook as I pushed power deep, deep into the earth. Through dust and dirt and thin crust, far into the liquid fire that fueled the world.

  Silence touched the edges of my awareness. Over the city, it had reached the first remains of the noorestone, smothering the sharp ringing in my head, shard after angry shard. The violent tide of power eased as fragments went silent.

  I pushed noorestone fire into the ground.

  Silent.

  Chaos in the city spread, but new explosions slowed.

  Silent.

  Tethers of fire snapped, and that was all. There was nothing left as the silence rolled across the city, allowing the last of the noorestone fragments to fall harmlessly to the blackened pit that marked the place where Suna’s temple once stood.

  People still ran, and fires still spread, but emergency teams came in with hoses of water siphoned straight from the river. There were medical stations for some, and black mercy for the rest.

  I heaved the last of the noorestone fire from my body. Staggered. And dropped to the ground.

  At last, I knew darkness.

  PART FIVE

  SOMETHING TO BURN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE FIRST DRAGON PEERED DOWN AT ME, ECLIPSING the whole sky as she nosed my chest and breathed a puff of smoke into my face.

  Wake up.

  She was huge and black and speckled with stars, with graceful horns that curled at the points. Never had I seen scales like this, bigger than both my hands splayed wide, and light shining from within. When I peered deeper, strands of pink and blue and orange darkdust glimmered in the blackness. An illusion. A trick of the eye.

  Wake up.

  No, the stars and darkdust and galaxies were real. Each scale showed a different sky, and if I could only step through one, I’d find another world.

  Wake up.

  The dragon pulled back, and that was when sunlight caught it: a long, puckered scar down the left side of her face.

  Not the first dragon.

  The last.

  THEN HRISTO WAS there, Ilina in the background—hazy, though.

  Fractured movement.

  Everything hurt. Every breath became a scream. Every scream became thunder.

  A stranger leaned over me and drew invisible lines in the air above my face and body. They shimmered, flickering in and out of existence. I tried to grab them, make them stay so I could get a better look, but my arms were too heavy.

  I closed my eyes.

  I AWAKENED IN my bed in the palace, darkness and silence all around me.

  My body ached. Skin and muscles and bones. It all felt raw and ready to fall off. Even the soft silk of my sheets hurt, scraping places that felt like they should have scales. The muscles in my back felt clipped short, broken, pulled tight and snapped.

  Everything felt wrong.

  A groan squeezed out as my mind slipped from confusion to sharp understanding of what had happened.

  The high magistrate had attacked Sunder.

  Aaru and I had fought back.

  It hadn’t been enough.

  Even now, after, I could still feel the giant noorestones—twelve of them. They buzzed in the back of my head, terrible, but nothing compared to the nightmare of the attack. Of the crystal crashing into the city. Of the fire burning through my body. Of the shriek of something in that noorestone changing just before it was launched at thousands of unsuspecting people.

  No. This harsh humming was nothing compared to that.

  “The strangest thing happened in the park.” Ilina’s voice came from across the room. A sigil lit just above her head, illuminating the way she’d half vanished into the giant cushions of a chair. Her legs were tucked against her chest, and she wore a long nightgown of creamy cotton with embroidery stitched along the hem.

  I opened my mouth, but only another groan fell out. Still, she understood the question, and unfolded herself to rise.

  “You tried to absorb all that noorestone fire. I knew you could do that.” She sat on the bed next to me. “Hristo told us all about what happened at the theater. What he saw. What he thought he saw. So even though it was a shock to actually see you like that, I wasn’t that surprised. But there was something else.”

  I just looked at her.

  “Scorch marks,” she said. “In the shape of a huge dragon.”

  “What?” That hadn’t been what I’d thought she was going to say at all.

  “All across the grass, the flagstones, even under the dragons. It was incredible. And you were at the heart of it.” She touched my shoulder, casually like a friend, but then— ::Everyone saw. There have been questions.::

  My wingsister’s quiet code was slow, cautious, but it was a relief to know she was able to communicate like this. And the light was low enough that anyone watching wouldn’t be able to tell—unless they could see in the dark.

  Which was possible, I supposed. Imperial magic was a mystery of possibilities.

  I took her arm and tapped slowly. ::What questions?::

  ::About the wings. The scorch mark. What dragon it was. Then someone asked if it was the same kind as the bones.::

  I groaned.

  ::When I told them I hadn’t seen the skeleton, they took me into the throne room. I got a good look.::

  She didn’t need to say that the scorch mark and the bones were the same species. Drakontos celestus. The first and the last. Although she probably didn’t know what to call it yet.

  ::I said no, but I think they knew I was lying.::

  The imperials didn’t have all the answers—how could they when I didn’t even understand?—but it was still far more information than I’d wanted them to have.

  ::They heard us talking about the first dragon that first day,:: I tapped. ::By the fountain.::

  Ilina nodded. ::They already knew we were interested. Now they think they know why.::

  ::Because of me. What I am.::

  My wingsister just squeezed my shoulder. “Can you sit?”

  “Maybe.” I pushed myself up, letting Ilina help steady me. My whole body ached, like I’d been taken apart and put back together, but there was no more time for resting. If anyone even thought they knew what I could do, what I was—I couldn’t trust anyone with that kind of information. No one outside my friends. I had to take car
e of this. “What happened after—” My voice cracked.

  Ilina stood and went to a small table to pour a glass of water.

  The drink helped soothe my raw throat, and I asked again, “What happened after I fainted?”

  “Aaru held the silence as long as he could; no one was sure what would happen when he let it go. Gerel and Chenda have been out there helping every day, sending Chenda’s shadow to look for survivors. It’s hard, she said, because lots of the light sigils are broken, but usually there’s enough for her to look around. When they find someone, Gerel digs them out. And, if you can believe it, Zara has been helping in the medical tents, mostly talking to people to distract them from the pain. They really like her.”

  “Of course they do. She’s like Mother.” I frowned as the rest of what she said caught up with me. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Four days,” Ilina said.

  “Four days?” We didn’t have four days to waste with pointless sleep. I drained my water and stood, the coral-orange nightgown slipping straight across my body. Someone had changed my clothes while I’d been unconscious. “You let me sleep four days?”

  “We tried to wake you.” Ilina stood, too. “The empress’s personal healers and doctors have been in and out. We’ve all taken turns sitting with you, hoping you’d wake up. But whatever you did must have cost you. Even Crystal and LaLa came to sleep next to you at night. And before you ask, they’re with Hristo right now. They’re fine.”

  “Good.” I wrenched open the wardrobe door and tapped the interior light sigil. “What’s happened? Was the high magistrate arrested? Is my mother here? What about the people in the city?”

  Ilina blew out a long breath. “A lot happened. First, the death toll would have been much higher without your and Aaru’s intervention. As it was . . .”

  A chill poured through me as I faced her. “How many?”

  “At least three thousand.” Shadows muted the grief in her eyes, but the tightness in her voice made her feelings clear. “It’s difficult to say for sure, because there aren’t”—she swallowed hard—“remains around the impact area. There’s nothing to count. Just ash.”