“Bloody—” Ellis scrubbed at the stubble on his cheeks and chin. “I’m sorry.”
He wasn’t sure for what. For not knowing what to do to help the poor beast. For not being dragonkin. For not understanding what his dragonkin was up to until it was well past too late.
Again, the dragon merely watched him, blinking slowly, her posture relaxed in the lush grass of the levee, lying with her back legs tucked beneath her and her chin on her forepaws like a cat on a hearth. Her tail swished slow and lazy through the grass, her wings splayed out to her sides. The dragonstone was a comfortable, familiar burn in Ellis’s pocket, and when he took it out to curl it into his palm, he could swear the dragon shivered and melted a little more into the grass.
Ellis tipped a sympathetic smile, said, “Well, at least you don’t seem to be in pain,” and when she merely closed her eyes, tail swooshing to an eventual sluggish halt, Ellis drifted off to sleep wondering if it meant something that a dragon would trust him enough to sleep so close to him.
HE DREAMED of Milo, but he’d hoped he would. He wanted comfort. He wanted to feel close. Connected.
He didn’t get any of it.
It was dark wherever Milo was, and fogged over so thick Ellis thought maybe Milo had done it. Ellis couldn’t get a clear idea of where Milo was, but it was somewhere with a river or at least a wide stream, because Ellis could hear the water flowing. Could see Milo’s boots sinking into ankle-deep mud as he ran. Toward? Away? Ellis couldn’t tell.
And then he could, because Milo broke through the wall of fog and into—
“Oh, Milo, no.” It made no sound, but that didn’t stop Ellis from saying it again, “No!” and then shouting it, “Milo, no!”
Even if Milo could hear him, Ellis suspected he wouldn’t have listened. Because this…
It was nothing like caves or hot springs or anything that resembled a preserve. This was like stables, or… no, a kennel. A strange open-air kennel that was clearly less about caring for the occupants than it was about controlling them.
Nine dragons sat nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, no room to spread massive wings or even turn around in place. Not that they could anyway—collars circled each neck, chains running from one to the next with links as thick as tree trunks. Because there was probably nothing one could stake a dragon to strong enough to keep it down. Except, apparently, other dragons.
One of them looked dead, its lax body forced upright by proximity but its long neck twisted sideways on the ground in front of it, head skewed to one side, and milky eyes open. Two looked like they were on their way to the same fate, scales even now dropping from blotchy bared patches all over their bodies, and necks practically naked where thick iron collars rubbed away armor and scraped the hide beneath raw and bloody.
All of them looked angry. All of them were snarling, eyes wild and half-mad. All of them had clearly had their fires fed, glowing trails piping up their throats. And all of them were now entirely focused on Milo.
Ellis might’ve shouted some more. He couldn’t tell. Not with the chaos that rose up and swatted the scene with confusion and madness and violence that didn’t show Ellis trails of red possibilities and steps not taken. Because this was Milo, and it could only go one way. And damn him if Ellis didn’t recognize the determined set of that jaw, even beneath the beard he’d likely never get used to.
Teeth set, Milo ran in, throwing up a shield but not stopping, not stopping, when three blasts of fire hit him at once. He just kept going, yelling something Ellis didn’t hear, one arm up over his head as though to hold the shield, and one hand reaching for the chain closest to him. He laid hold of it, gritted his teeth, snarled, and the chain broke in three places and slithered groundward.
Milo yelled something—“Back off, the lot of you!” it sounded like—but the claws and fire and teeth still came at him when he darted for another chain. “Damn it, I’m kin, you will listen!” except they didn’t.
They were going for each other now, as well as Milo, great jaws clamping onto whatever was closest, claws extended and swiping. Cries went up alongside screeches high and loud enough to burst eardrums. Milo’s shield held when two dragons snapped for him at once, but Ellis could see how Milo staggered backward with the force of the blows. It still didn’t stop him—he dove into the midst of angry dragons again, reaching for another clump of chain, expression turned once more wrathful and resolute as he broke the chain then went for another.
Light flooded the… field, Ellis could see now it was a field. Out in the open with nothing around it but the stream Ellis had heard before chaos ensued, and what he recognized as a forge.
…And possibly a military fort. An old castle being used as one, anyway.
And didn’t that just figure?
“Damn you, Milo!”
Ellis had never felt so helpless in his life.
The fog had scattered once Milo had stopped paying attention to it. The lines of sight would be clear now. Ellis had never heard machinegun fire before, but when he saw the bright sporadic flashes in the distance, he thought that was probably what he was hearing now. Shouts rose in what he recognized as Verdish beneath the warbly wail of an ear-splitting siren.
Fortunately for Milo, the dragons seemed more pissed off at the gunfire than they’d been at him. They turned toward where the shots were coming from and snarled, venom dripping from bared teeth, heads jutted forward and wings pulled back, clear attack stances, and… that was all. They stood there—glaring, yes, ready, yes, but still waiting.
It wasn’t clear for what until a small ball of light wafted from above where the flashes of gunfire were strobing the dark. Not small and a friendly blue like a magelight; silver-white and sharp, crackling like a firework, and sailing out of the dark ahead of the nimbus it dragged behind it in a fizzy tail. Every dragon’s eye watched it come, still waiting, until it smacked into Milo’s shield without a sound, and then kept pushing in.
Milo looked at the little ball. Looked at the dragons, their eyes on him now, mouths opening, fire pulsing up their throats, flames igniting the dribbling venom and lighting small fires around their feet. Looked back at the ball.
Jaw set, Milo dropped his shield, snatched the ball, and lobbed it back to where it came from.
The dragons didn’t wait this time. They watched the ball land just in front of the soldiers still shooting, then splash out and stick to every one of them like hoarfrost on glass. The soldiers started yelling, backing away, but the dragons seemed as though they’d been anticipating exactly this—they dropped their jaws with roars that were abounding rage made sound, and razed the ground in great gusts of flame like blazing rivers bursting from half a dozen dams.
Milo took immediate advantage—he put his head down and concentrated on working methodically through the chains.
The castle… fort… whatever it was, it was now on fire, already an inferno beneath the dragons’ concerted, very clearly furious onslaught. Everything was going up, even the wet grass trampled into mud by multiple sets of huge clawed feet. When the brilliance leveled off, lumps of what Ellis suspected had been people thirty seconds ago lay burning in the mud. Some of them were still moving, though slow and tortured, so Ellis stopped looking.
Milo ignored it all, ignored everything, dodged talons and tails and fire and bullets and teeth until he’d broken every chain, set every dragon free.
It took a moment in the chaos for them to realize they’d been set loose, apparently for them to even notice Milo was yelling “Go! Go!” at them. It took another for them to stop breathing fire or fighting with each other long enough to try their wings and take off. Dragonsong spiked the air above the violent skirmish, incongruously smooth and lyrical as dragons took to the sky, wings for a moment blotting out the bright lights flooding away the dark and making a clearer target of the man who’d freed them.
Until he turned toward it, waved both arms in a quick, disdainful sort of gesture, and every light flared overbright, sputtered, then went out i
n brilliant fountains of yellow-white sparks.
Ellis couldn’t see what happened next. The flash of exploding lights was too bright. He only saw vague silhouettes against the shifting framework of rising flames. One of them running, gun in hand, raised, getting closer; one of them—Milo—not turning in time. Ellis saw the flash from the gun’s muzzle before he heard the crack of the shot. Saw Milo jerk forward and to the side, hand flailing up to grip at his shoulder, before he heard the cry and pained grunt. Saw Milo complete the staggering spin, arm whipping out as though for balance, but it wasn’t—the figure with the gun went swirling back as though caught in a dervish, brutal and powerful, each limb thrashing out in its own helpless spiraling wrench.
It was a woman, Ellis could see when she landed with a violent, sickening twist, arms and legs splayed or wrung in unlikely contortions, head turned the wrong way, neck screwed nearly all the way ’round, eyes open and staring up into a sky dark and heaving with the beats of dragons’ wings.
Milo’s stare looked no less lifeless, fixated on what he’d just done, disbelief and incomprehension coiling into something numb with horror.
His magic, Ellis thought, frantic. Pain made using magic impossible for some, extremely difficult for others, sucking up energy and crowding out concentration. Ellis didn’t know how getting shot might compare to magic eating a hole into one’s back. He did know, though, that Milo was going to find out any second.
If only he would bloody move!
Gunfire was still rat-a-tatting from the other side of the conflagration, shouts were still sounding, and the enemy was trying to flank Milo now, getting closer, because Ellis could hear their footsteps squelching through the mud. And Milo was just standing there, staring at the twisted body on the ground, breathing too fast, still clutching at his shoulder.
Ellis couldn’t tell what finally brought Milo out of it. It certainly couldn’t have been his own shout of “Move! Milo, go!” but something in the chaos got through the too-clear shock.
Milo turned around and ran, hand red and glistening with blood from where he’d been gripping his shoulder, head tilted back and mouth open as fog started pluming from it like breath. Thicker. Heavier. It rose from Milo’s mouth as he ran, then curled down over his shoulder like water, dripping to the ground, rising, spreading. A moment, mere seconds, and it nearly blanked out sight altogether into nothing more than gauzy midnight-gray bloodshot by fire in lurid waves.
Well, that answered the Is he in too much pain to use his magic? question, at least.
And then, like but unlike the stories Ellis had grown up with and only half-believed, the dark shape of a massive beast with glowing red eyes emerged from the mist, bellowing and snarling as it wrought itself from shadow, and glided beside Milo on wings that hadn’t even taken shape yet. It paced him, thick muscle made of fog and magic flexing and pulling beneath its smoky black scales, wings making themselves seemingly out of the night itself, widening, expanding, until Milo flung his arm toward the formless dark haze behind him and shouted, “Go!” The dragon curled upward, circling over Milo as it grew and grew and grew, gained substance, plucked sooty detail from vapor, then boomed out a roar that could shatter eardrums. As though pleased by Milo’s command, the dragon spun, wide jaws made of smoke opening, dripping with mist like venom, and winged off toward Milo’s pursuers.
The dragons—the real ones—were still singing as they glided away into the night sky, calls soft with distance now, and weirdly sweet, considering. A direct paradox to the sounds of a great savage dragon made of magic and the shouts of those who watched it come for them out of the dark as Milo ran for his life.
So it was exactly the wrong time for Ellis to wake to the redcrest crooning out a similar song, crouching not a person’s length away from him, and with its nose stretched out toward Ellis’s hand, still gripped around the dragonstone. But that was what happened anyway.
Chapter 20—Transition
: a bridge section between two musical ideas
Crilly had been gone within two weeks after Riverfest. Ellis didn’t know if he’d been dismissed, arrested, or merely disappeared into whatever hole Alton favored, and he didn’t care. The new commander of the Wellech Home Guard was Colonel Saoirse Walsh, transferred in from a Werrdig post, and Ellis liked her the second she asked him, “What are we doing about the missing three?” Perhaps a bit less so a second later when she told him her callsign was “Hammer,” then called him “Prince” and didn’t bother to hide her smirk. Still, it made the covert parts of what he’d been doing much easier.
He put Petra on coordinating with Walsh on the parish management portions of the missing spy problem, Tomos on the parts that intersected with the Wardens. For the first time Ellis was confident in leaving at least that crisis to people he knew would solve it.
And they did. Mostly. Within a week, two of the missing saboteurs were caught trying to steal explosives from the Mali Bracer mine up by Caeryngryf. Still with their eye on the Millway Dam, no doubt, though Walsh’s people hadn’t yet got anything of value from questioning them. And absolutely nothing on the one both Ellis and Walsh were sure was still out there, though there’d been no way to confirm it. Still, the presence of the two indicated the likelihood of the third, so they kept looking.
Unfortunately, they’d been looking for months now. If there was a spy somewhere in Wellech, they were holed up in a place no one knew to look.
“It’s getting…” Dilys didn’t finish, static taking up the space where words should have been, but Ellis knew what she didn’t say anyway.
Winter had set in hard, as though making up for the unusually hot summer and mild autumn. It worked in Preidyn’s favor, though—the Blackson turned vicious in the cold months, and the islanders who lived in the middle of it were of tough stock by necessity. Coastal waters took on lethal edges, and the tides came and went as though they had a personal grudge against the shores.
The attempts on Ynys Dawel and Tirryderch were thus rendered ineffectual and sporadic, but they hadn’t stopped. The air raids on Preidyn, though, had broken through too often now for any citizen of the Preidynīg Isles to keep believing comprehensive invasion and annexation hadn’t been Taraverde’s goal all along. Though the dragon attacks had stopped, since dragons could barely move from their caves in the winter let alone fly forced sorties, aerial bombings were still devastating coastal villages and ports. A small force had temporarily taken Greater Brisland, a minor island off Preidyn’s eastern shore. It was the first truly strategic loss Preidyn had taken, and though the island was won back within days, the shockwave was still rippling through the other islands.
All of it was compounded when Western Unified lost control of the Gulf of White Sands, though the battles still raged over it. Desgaul had wasted no time once they entered the war; they took the burden of holding the Lauxauhn Strait, and freed up the Preidynīg Navy’s Southern Fleet to move north and west to fill in gaps around the rest of the islands, and renew the fight in the gulf. With Eretia now all-in and focusing their naval forces on the Eretian Gulf and the Goshor Sea, and sending more troops to Błodwyl than there were Błodwyl citizens, Taraverde had been forced to draw back. Eretia was now a liberator, the heroes of Błodwyl, and the people of Błodwyl responded by surging the ranks of their armed forces, every new enlistee startlingly bloodthirsty and now bent on vengeance as well as justice.
The letters had started to arrive, just after Highwinter. Innocuous-looking envelopes with the Official Royal Seal carried by stoic young officers to family members who hadn’t known until the letter’s arrival that they were surviving family members. Seven Wellech families had received them so far, offering condolences to loved ones of men and women Ellis had known, played with as a child, run with as an adolescent, worked with and drunk with as a young man. Three of them had been Wardens from Ellis’s own ranks.
Bad, Dilys didn’t have to say. It was getting very, very bad.
“I know,” Ellis said into the radio. He t
ook his finger off the transmit toggle, shut his eyes tight and clenched his jaw, before he had hold of himself enough to ask, “How are you, though?”
Dilys laughed, a sharp humorless bark of it that sounded like the edge of a sob. “How d’you think?”
Less than a month later, as Wellech was deep in the throes of the worst of winter, a break came in the form of Folant, of all people. And if randoms didn’t stop showing up at Ellis’s kitchen table uninvited, he was going to find someone to set some damned wards, see if he didn’t.
“What are you doing here?” Ellis was too tired for this, too busy for it, not even a little bit in the mood. Teeth set, he shut the door that had bloody well been locked when he’d left this morning, and threw his coat at a peg. “And how d’you keep getting in? In case it’s escaped you, you’re not—”
“I know where the spy is.”
It stopped Ellis. Made him blink. “You… Sorry, what?”
“The one you’ve been looking for since Riverfest. I know where she is.”
Ellis narrowed his eyes, more suspicious than hopeful, because life with Folant had taught him to be. But Folant wasn’t looking smug and up to his thick eyebrows with hubris. He only looked tired.
“She.” Ellis leaned back against the bench, arms crossed over his chest. “Go on.”
Folant looked away, gaze roving unseeing all around the kitchen before settling on his own wide hands, loosely fisted on the table. Uncomfortable. Even fearful, maybe, but Ellis wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Folant afraid of anything, even when he should’ve been. It threw Ellis, because this was not the man who’d snarled animosity and anger and ill grace as he’d ceded the position of Pennaeth.
“First,” Folant said, eyes still on his hands, “I need to know who I’m talking to.” He looked up, clear-eyed and expressionless. “Am I speaking to Wellech’s First Warden? Her Pennaeth? Or my son?”
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