Drawing himself from the realm of sleep had been hard enough when she spilled her horse’s blood and the same forged the connection between them. The sadness of her mind had been overwhelming, the despair.
He knew that feeling well.
Had responded to it.
Damn him.
She was so like her ancestor. And he was still the fool willing to answer the call for aid when it came.
Amece had betrayed him once.
This girl had made no sureties that she would not do the same.
What else could be done to him?
Death was the only threat left against him, and if he longed for the same, he would not speak the words aloud and give them life.
Not when the snake goddess was back and would enjoy finally sending him to his end.
He’d meant it, when he said he wouldn’t harm her.
Hell, for his freedom, he might even be willing to give up his revenge.
Ouros was old.
Old, not in the way of years like humans aged, but in temperament, in mindset.
She’d come to the sea and spoken of him and the hope of release, and, if he thought of taking his revenge, if the thoughts lingered still, so be it.
But he wouldn’t.
He never would have been able to.
He exhaled, and her breath heaved with his.
She was not alone in her exhaustion.
Ven…
She’d ridden further than she likely realized, but it was not far enough. Her horse had turned sometime during the night, was returning to the home it remembered and she was not horsewoman enough to keep its head on a different path. The trail the beast had taken was a circle. She would eventually have seen the great city she’d fled if the stallion had not mis-stepped and fallen down the hill.
Always the sand with her.
He wanted to feel grass again. He wanted to stand in a frond of trees and feel their branches scratch over his wings, the leaves that fluttered down around him with soft caresses.
Never that with her.
Ven…
I’m still here, dragon.
He wondered if she called hun by his species as an insult, or as a way of distancing herself from him. Most he would have been angry with for naming him as a creature. Addressing him by his name acknowledged his intelligence, but he did not sense being called dragon was an insult from her.
There was more reverence in the title than he expected.
I am sorry, little one, but I can give you no more of myself if you wish for my aid when you reach the waters. But I can help you channel your own power, use it.
I have no power.
Even Amece had admitted to having some magic in her.
Not her heir.
Of course you do. He could feel her power humming, the fading strength of that which he’d given her to use already subsumed by her magic.
She was energy incarnate, even if she did not know how to use it.
Just like her damn grandmother.
Open to me.
I don’t know what that means.
Ouros didn’t know how best to explain. You feel me, do you not? Not just my mind brushing against yours, my words, but me. The shawl you gave me. You felt it when it brushed across my face. You can feel the wet sand beneath my scales. My mind is open to yours, merged with you. I need you to open the same with me, as you did in the prison cell, when we counted bricks together.
I don’t know how I did that.
You stopped pulling away.
He could sense her need to argue, her want to do the same.
They were enemies, were they not?
Enemies were meant to pull away from each other or attack when they drew near. He was asking her to do the opposite, and, she was right, there was little trust between them. She did not have to believe his words or his vows.
A crack widened.
More than just the breath she breathed, he could feel the pain of her ribs as though they were his own. Her hands were rough and abraded where the sand scratched at them.
Did she realize her throat was burned? The skin irritated from where the viper’s hand had gripped her?
Her skin was raw there.
She didn’t realize it, not with the concerns of the moment around her.
He wouldn’t think on it either.
It would heal, given time.
Ouros allowed his perception of himself to flow away, immersed entirely in her mind, her flesh.
Separate but the same.
They raised her arm. They flexed her fingers.
Your magic is in the blood, girl. The stronger the blood, the stronger the magic. Yours is the strongest blood here.
What am I to do with my blood?
Shall we see?
He had expected hesitation.
Amece had known enough about herself to understand that blood was the price for the magic she performed, but this heir knew nothing of her power, yet Ven didn’t flinch from the claiming.
They swallowed and reached for the scale in their pocket.
The wind picked up, the sandstorm threatening once more.
He could not calm a storm intent on raging. He could unleash it, but he had never been able to quell what was called.
Amece had never thought to try.
He’d never thought to tell her to try.
They slit their palm, a long gash that stretched across the lines of her life on her skin, bisected them all so that blood pooled in the cup of her hand.
He drew their focus to her blood, wove it into a cyclone that formed in the center of her hand, a mirror image to the whipping breeze trying to buffet them.
The sands tinted red even in the dark of the night.
They opened their mouth, blew the cyclone away.
The wind died.
The night grew quiet.
The cut on their hand throbbed, and she clenched her fingers tightly together, sealed the drying flecks of red to her skin, the power infused in the same held within her grasp.
How does that help me get to the sea?
He smiled tiredly, eyes closing in his watery cage.
He was nature, the elements that made up the world. She was the creator, the shaper. Ouros snorted, for he’d said the same a long time ago to Amece.
You are a creator, Havence. Create something.
His consciousness slipped from hers, the connection unbroken, though he no longer shared the feelings of her body, had the sense of her, but not her every thought and movement.
It was not hard to see the way her head twitched to the side, towards the horse she’d killed.
Creator, Ven. Not a healer. I am sorry, djinn. But Amece could not have healed the horse’s leg either. I do not know the magic to teach you that would have affected the same. It is not my element to call.
Call.
That was it!
He was the sea and the land and the wind and the flame. He touched all in his forms. He could call to them all in his forms, like the fish of the sea whose minds he stole to do his bidding.
Maybe you do not need to create something to take you to me.
Just something to amplify his call.
Storms, but it had been a long time since he tried to summon a beast of the land to him. There were so few that lived near the sea shores.
She’d ridden on a horse away from the city.
Her companion had ridden too.
The other horse, Ven. What was its name? It ran with you when you fled. I can call it to you to help you now.
It did not have a name that I knew.
He growled, paced by the moving of his head from side to side, the only freedom he had in his chains.
How many horses could there be this near to where the girl had fallen? Surely, if they reached out together, if he shaped the command and she fed it strength, surely, they could manage to summon one of the creatures to them, command it to carry her to the sea?
The sand beneath her knees began to bounce.
> Ouros frowned at the ground, turned his gaze to the dune at her back, the army making its way down the bank.
Only three men.
Not an army at all.
Enough to kill one little girl.
Ven scrambled to her feet, inched further away along the narrow ravine between cliffs of gold.
There was nowhere to run where they could not find her, not now.
Even in the darkness, she was a shape clearly other, easily identified.
The soldiers were coming straight to her, and their horses were far surer than hers had been.
Ven, he called her name, reached to cup her cheeks in his hands, turn her gaze from the men to whatever it was she saw of his form before her. Ven, your grandmother was an archer. She would coat the tips of her arrows with a drop of blood before she drew the same along her bow. She never missed.
I have no arrows, Ouros.
But you have sand. And I am the earth. He did not ask to borrow her skin to make a spear. His will overwhelmed hers, subsumed her consciousness for a moment of time in which he willed the fine grains littering the earth beneath their feet to reform into sharpened stakes, heated with fire, forged into weapons.
She didn’t need to know how to wield them.
All she needed was a drop of blood and the strength to raise her arm despite her pain, let fly the bolts with the intent to strike her targets.
She stumbled when he separated their minds. One knee gave out and she toppled to the ground, the spear held in a hand while she raised the other to her forehead.
He could imagine the pain there, her body not meant to hold the connection between them this long, to use that bond to channel magic the way they’d been working out for the past hour or more. She was exhausted and in pain.
Scared.
There was no time to pity or coddle her.
Will the spear to stop them, Havence. Or they will kill you.
She’d never killed anyone before.
Now was not the time for morals to come into play.
The first rider was nearly upon her, sword drawn, no games anymore. The male would end her where she stood if she did not act first.
VEN!
Her hand still bled freely, the slice along her palm making her grip on the spear slick, infusing it with blood magic.
Throw, damn you!
It was not his will that overpowered hers to action.
Self-preservation won out over his need to take her over.
Ouros should have watched her throw.
Instead he watched her face, the sick slide of green that blanched her features when the first thud sounded in the air and a riderless horse thundered past where she knelt.
Look at me, Ven. Look at me now.
Her grandmother had never cried either.
Ven’s eyes grew wet and her lip trembled, but no tear slipped down her cheek, and she firmed her jaw when he turned her gaze once more to his, the teal of his scales so bright against the paleness of her skin. She wouldn’t be able to see the color of his scales in the night, not now when her magic was focused elsewhere, when that which he’d lent her was bled away into the dark. He could see her though, this woman who looked nothing like her grandmother, and yet was the spirit incarnate, curiosity and compassion and strength all rolled into one mortal being.
I will call the horses to you.
She flinched at his voice, but he recognized the distant sound of a body hitting the ground and prayed that her reaction was to that and not his presence.
Spring Rains, but he didn’t want her to fear him.
I will call the horses to you, Ven. You have to ride now. I will lead them to the sea, but you have to mount and ride to me. Do you understand?
I killed those men.
He wrapped his arms around her, a dragon’s arms around mortal woman, impossible and yet not. They would have killed you.
Her hands were a weak thing when she pressed them to his holding her. The touch between them was more a phantom embrace than truth, but he imagined he could feel her there, holding him, pleading with him.
He kept the length of his claws from her cheeks when he brushed his thumbs across her flesh. They would have killed you, if you had not defended yourself. Even your gods would understand that.
She shook her head in denial.
They would, Havence. Do not let their lives be lost in vain though. Do not die out here in this sand when you have fought so hard for your life. Do not give in to them.
Fire sparked in her gaze, her anger so much better than the despair that lingered in the stoop of her shoulders. Better her fury than her anguish. Do not forget to set you free, you mean.
If that’s what it takes to get you moving, then yes, Ouros pulled back, expanded wings made of ether, stretched his body in a way his physical self could not move beneath the waves. Do not forget yours is not the only freedom at risk.
Chapter Twenty-Three
If she were one to pray to the gods, she would have prayed then, when the dragon whose mind she’d felt merged with her own took his true form before her, even if he was only a ghost of himself.
His wings stretched so wide that he blocked out the horizon. The teal scales on his stomach moved from nearly black beneath his snout to pearlescent white. Over his heart, where his scales were the same color as the one he’d sent to her, there was a single plate regrowing, its color less intense, the blue not quite the same as its mates.
Gone was the beast that had sat before her in her room, shared her bed. There was no mistaking his size now, no mistaking the true majesty of the creature he was when compared to her own diminutive stature.
Not that she’d ever felt small before, but in comparison, she was a grain of sand.
He made the horses pawing at the ground behind her seem miniscule.
Yet when he drew near, when he settled back to the ground and reached to touch her cheek once more, he was similarly sized. Where his hands could have crushed her between his fingers, they were gentle gripping at her arms.
Deadly, should he wish it, but he’d promised he meant her no harm.
More will come, Ven. You must flee.
She could see his snout, the long, narrow jaw that arrowed toward her. He had teeth that overlapped his lips, ferocious, but not to her. Her hand rose without conscious thought, traced along the ridge of his nose, the heavy plates that protected him, the small scales that interlaced with the larger ones, armor in truth, impenetrable, even in the smallest of gaps.
There had been patches on his wings, dark patches that were unlike the coloring of the membrane itself. The only part of his body not protected by plates, and even though he was just an image in her head, she knew that it was his wings that had suffered the most in his binding.
She wanted to see him fly.
She wondered if his wings aided him when he moved through the water.
Ven…
Her name was just a whisper, the soft sound drawing her attention to the red of his eyes watching her. His stare as potent as the viper prince’s had been, and yet she felt nothing but comfort, belonging, when she gazed into his stare.
“I will set you free, dragon.”
His eyes narrowed, the strange, second eyelid, blinked once at her spoken words, words he could not hear without her mind seeking his.
I will try. But I do not know the way.
Her voice trembled, or her thoughts trembled.
His hands soothed over her arms, imparted heat with his touch; the rips in her jacket, the cold of the night, the tension of her flight, forgotten in his hold. The horse knows the way. I will guide you to me. Do not stop again.
Whether she nodded her assent or not, she couldn’t say.
One moment he was before her, heat and strength surrounding her, and then he was gone, the starkness of her mind empty when his thoughts fled, and she was alone in the desert.
Alone but for three horses, and three corpses cooling in the night.
She had already emptied the
contents of her stomach once that evening.
She bit her tongue, forced the thoughts from her head, the knowledge of what she had done to the back of her mind, and reached for the reins of a steed cantering past her.
Ven mounted.
Heels dug into the horse’s flanks, she gripped the reins and the stallion raced across the land, called by the dragon to the edges of the sea, Ven just along for the ride.
She rode through the rising of the sun, her body bent over the neck of the horse.
Her mount had long past stopped running, its steps slowing to a trudge as it moved ever forward through the heavy sands.
A camel would have been better suited to her journey.
Only the wealthy still had horses, but, of course, the prince would be the wealthiest of all.
Ven tangled her fingers in the horse’s mane. She’d taken to calling the beast Fewlis. Her father had said that there was a horse that could ride the waves as easily as the sands, and that it was called Fewlis, and that it only came to those in desperate need.
She qualified, didn’t she?
A single tear slipped from her closed eyes.
Each step the horse took made her ribs ache. The pommel had struck her stomach so many times, she wouldn’t be surprised to see the bruise when she dismounted.
Far too much sand left to cross until she reached the shore.
The waves crashing along the beach.
Bubbles bursting along the foam left in the wake of each ebb tide. There was a shooshing sound, the water carrying away the sand into the deep ocean, that she’d always been fascinated with, found soothing against the silence of the mainland.
Her lips parted; she licked at the drops of moisture that sprinkled her face.
A lovely dream…
The horse dipped its head forward, and she slid further down its neck, her eyes springing wide as she fought for a grip to keep from falling off the beast.
The sand had never looked so blue before.
In the bright light of the midday sun, Ven sat up on Fewlis’ back and stared out over the sea stretching before her.
Ocean spray tickled her ankles where the water crashed against the beach and soaked through the cloth of her gauzy pants.
Fewlis was standing hoof-deep in the surf, and for the first time in her life, Ven felt the touch of the ocean on her skin.
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