Howls challenged the dragons’ screams, and wolves emerged from doors and windows, careful to leave themselves room to return through the openings while maintaining the iron’s protection that bolstered the castle’s claim.
They ran along the ramparts and roof, the edges of walls, some with torches to feed the arrows and others with spears that they threw at the multitude of dragons that filled the sky. Aim did not matter so much when a throw was bound to hit one or another—all that mattered was to make as many of them fall as possible and to keep them on the ground.
Lysan and Callina took either side of the rose flames, using the creatures’ instinctual fear of it to their advantage.
Asha used their distraction to launch herself into the air. The wolves would not be concerned yet that they would strike their king or queen—there were too many dragons to bring down, such that the odds of felling their leaders did not merit consideration.
She was not yet comfortable enough in the air to dodge arrows and flames at the same time she dodged the deadly claws at the feet and hands of the dragons, so she focused on the latter farther away from the walls of the castle, drawn over the borders of the castle gardens and into the forest. She kept an eye on the figures of the king and Murial, dark against the blood-stained whiteness of the dragons’ bodies.
Claws much thicker than her own on toes as flexible as fingers closed over her shoulders, snagging her from the air to drag her back within the boundary of the gardens. He brought her down, not aiming for the fire but for the ground.
Asha struggled against the grip until she determined it was more solid than the iron at her wrists. She reached instead for the sword at her side. Before they plunged to the gravel, she screamed and sliced through the dragon’s legs with all the power she could muster. The effort bent the sword, but not enough to render it unusable. She freefell, the claws still embedded in her chest below the ridge of her collarbone, but Asha gathered the air to lift her up once more. She whipped around, sword in hand, to face the dragon who had taken her.
She had not yet heard that sound from the dragons—a call, a cry, a scream, and a roar all at once. Blood dripped from the stumps at the end of his legs. He struggled in the air not from any damage she had done to his flight but from panic, a wounded animal caught in a trap.
Asha could not discern an ounce of the man he had once been—warrior, farmer, merchant, or smith. He was a pathetic creature, writhing among his brothers, howling in his pain and fear. What had ever threatened his body so in the past? A human barely carried the strength to cut through a monster’s skin, much less sinew and bone, much less all at once, and the only other adversary in their life had made them what they were and would not have amputated their parts to teach them endurance.
But Asha could not show them mercy.
Other dragons darted down upon her, folding their wings to fall faster and catch her as a falcon catches a sparrow, but when she could not elude them, she became more comfortable using the sword.
The dragons would not present her with their heads, but limbs fell from the sky to feed the fire. When she could, she tore through the wings. The dragons only knew how to fly with them, unlike their master, Asha, and the king. Tearing the wings and destroying their means of flight brought the innocent demons to the ground for the teeming wolves to fight on a more equal level.
Murial’s cry preceded her claws raking over Asha’s face. Her flight was not confined by wings and therefore unpredictable. Asha fell from the air, lines dug deeply into her cheeks and torn through one side of her nose.
“You destroy far worthier treasure than you, Grayling,” Murial spat.
“Is that why you bring your treasure to slaughter?”
“He willingly brings you, his precious ruby embedded so deep in the rocks of a cave no one else would ever find it. Not enough iron chain to bind you to the foundation away from harm? Did he save you from the fate of your kingdom just to sacrifice you to me now?”
Murial ducked and darted as the king shot himself at her with a hiss like a striking asp. She kicked him from his trajectory when he spun around to launch at her again. He rolled through the air, dragons striking at him as they could. His tunic and trousers were in ruins; Murial’s had suffered its own tears, but they moved like ribbons or the trappings of a ghost as she returned her attention to Asha.
The sword tugged from Asha’s clasped hands, its escape inexorable. The hilt struck Murial’s open palm. Rather than wield it against Asha, she threw it down to the gardens. The blade struck a wolf in his back, but Murial did not stop to gloat.
“You have not been turned long enough to know what to do with your power. You are a flint knife rather than a honed blade.”
“A flint knife can still cut, mother.”
That earned Asha a reaction—the disgusted curl of a lip, a sneer edged in offense—but Murial collected herself quickly. She circled Asha, making her spin to keep Murial’s teeth in view.
“True. But not half as well as a blade made for it.”
Murial tumbled midair as the king came after her again, this time wrapping his arms around her and forcibly dragging her away from Asha.
The dragons attacked in clusters, having learned from their time with the king and with Asha not to limit their power to one on one. The dragons held the same strength within their strange bodies, perhaps more, but they were little more than clever beasts, the minds of men dulled with transformation.
In a single dragon seeking food, such imposing power and mindlessness would have suited its need to drink whatever crossed its path. Even among the men and women of the village, the dragons could take their time—few of the kingdom’s men would have been equipped to fight, with the wolves taking on the bulk of the kingdom’s violence. But such mindlessness was ill-suited for battle, and Murial’s frustration showed. Perhaps she had believed victory would fall into her grasp more quickly.
Without her sword, Asha dodged a flaming arrow, then snatched it from its trajectory. She stabbed through the wings of the dragons attacking the king, catching the leathery flesh on fire and knocking them from the air at the same time. She felled seven before Murial screamed her call, lovely but piercing, into the night sky.
The dragons wheeled, then swarmed, a singular writhing mass that somehow stayed aloft with an understanding of just how close they could be at full wingspan.
Jangling of metal on metal was the only warning.
“My lord, they have iron!” Asha struggled to find a place to avoid the dragons, but they covered the expanse of sky like fog. Whenever fire or arrow tip brought them down, another filled in its place.
The king tried to get his teeth into Murial. But just as the tips entered her, a dragon wrapped the chain around his neck and pulled him up into the fray.
Murial’s scream rippled with laughter.
Finally, the cloud of bodies parted, with iron shackling the king’s neck, wrists, and ankles, each chain held by two dragons that dragged him away from the castle and toward the wall, where they wove the chain around the iron spikes to help ground him. Passing dragons slashed at him, but the wounds were noticeably shallow, barely bleeding.
Murial lowered herself to where Asha hovered in horror. “I intend to make him watch.”
Asha flew up into the sky, sending her own call to the wolves. The alpha had bonded his loyalty to her. That spell shuddered through all of their spines.
The alpha’s answering howl gave Asha shivers of her own.
Asha twisted around back to Murial. “Do you think you are the only woman with chains?”
They had found the catapults in the old castle, covered with layers of dust that had made the wolf warriors sneeze like dogs. But the iron had rusted little, and the contraptions could still send stones hurtling through the air—all the more deadly with stone connected to stone by chain. The improvised bindings spun fast enough to cut through lesser creatures. As soon as they found a dragon, the chain wrapped around him and the stones dragged him to
the earth like weights in a lake. Once fallen, they were still bound and thus easily dispatched.
The stones and chains were indiscriminate in the number of the victims. One of the weapons snagged three at once.
“Your toys might slow my dragons down, but you have lost precious wolves as well, and your chains will not catch me.” Murial dove to one of her smoldering dragons and ripped a piece off of him. “I can make more dragons, child. At this stage of their transformation, they are nearly indistinguishable. Your wolves are not.”
She threw the fiery limb through one of the windows in the old castle. She did the same with part after part, sometimes arrow, sometimes foot, sometimes branch, until she alit the castle from within. Asha did not trust herself with fire as Murial did. Not until Murial arose without fire in her hand did Asha dart forward, claws curled and teeth bared.
Claws tore at gown and chest and arms. They whirled in the air as though they were stone and chain themselves, their legs flying behind them as they spun.
Asha went for the eyes and snatched hair instead. She could use whatever Murial handed her. Using their momentum, Asha flung Murial at one of the flaming windows she had made.
Murial hit the stone headfirst and continued to hit the wall on the way down, no magic within her lost consciousness to hold her up.
Asha followed her progress while searching for another weapon, but a dragon gathered Murial in his arms before she could hit the ground. He limped against the wall so that he could have something at his back as he forced his blood down Murial’s throat.
Asha did not know whether dragon blood could heal as animal blood did, but it certainly roused the woman. She kissed the dragon on the cheek as Asha came after her, a bloody knife in hand.
“I have a knife now,” Asha said.
The battle raged against a backdrop of flames that had spread from the rose heart of the gardens. But where Murial had fallen, the dragons redirected the wolves away. They understood that their master’s fight was of more importance than their own.
Asha tried not to see the bodies crumpled in the gravel that wore fur rather than wings.
She faced Murial once more, and this time, though she held only a knife, Asha did not have the certainty of failure that had plagued her since the night in the village that Murial had as good as killed her.
Murial had patience. She had strategy. She was heartless.
But she had forgotten survival. It was clear as moonlight in the way she fought. She carried the same Grayling fierceness, but she had not starved in five hundred years. Her victory was not foregone.
“I have your king,” Murial said. “For every wound you give me, he receives tenfold. And what do my loyal dragons bring me now? Is that your lovely little blonde wolf?”
Asha could not bite back a whimper when the two dragons threw Callina to the ground and pinned her there, one burying his jagged teeth into her and the other tearing a line across her belly. The dragons appeared to use no thrall at all in their feed. Callina screamed, beat at both, ripped at their skin until the point she had to hold her organs in.
Asha rose a cry for help, and five wolves slammed into the two dragons, with claws extended and teeth to rival.
“You have given her only a little more time, Grayling daughter, not a reprieve.” Murial stepped in front of Callina’s writhing, bleeding body, positioning herself as an immovable obstacle. “You are a dangerous woman to love. I myself cannot discern why they do. How are you different from the other women who passed these halls before you? How do you inspire sacrifice in your lovers, more pathetic of a Grayling than ever I was?”
Asha’s posture must have alerted Murial to the wolves approaching Callina to pull her from the battlefield, because Murial whipped around in the air to slash at them. Callina was not to be rescued.
“I cannot speak to their motives, as strange to me as yours,” Asha replied. “I understand the coldness of conquest. I understand practical justice that cannot afford to show mercy. I understand defense. And I have known hundreds of men who were cruel to be cruel, but not one woman.”
Murial laughed. “That is because you were raised in his kingdom, where women are taught early to shed their power in little amputations. The only reason the king chose you was because you chose amputations that appealed to him more than to the men of the kingdom. But you are lacking, little girl, even more than I was when I was taken. You weaken all those near you.”
“Then come closer.”
The woman’s smile did not wane as the two of them slowly advanced upon each other. They stretched out their teeth once more, extended their claws, and Asha tightened her grip on the knife. The wolves and dragons around them faded away. The moon and the fire dimmed.
Asha recognized the thrall too late. Claws slashed at her chest and belly—not as effective to open her up as the dragons upon Callina, but catching her off guard. The wounds ran deep enough to cause actual pain rather than the strange mingling of pleasure and pain granted her in her new form.
The thrall wove within Asha’s body to slow her down and strip away the motivation to use all of her strength and speed. Murial caught her wrists when Asha tried to strike her back.
Iron hissed against Murial’s palms, and Murial jerked her hands away. Like the king, her skin did not burn from the contact, but it clearly caused an unpleasant reaction against the magic within her that Murial had not anticipated.
It was the opportunity Asha needed to thrust her own thrall as deep into Murial as she could send it, unpracticed though she was in wielding that power. Crimson magic like blood mist swirled around them, through them. Asha found a moment in Murial’s thralled hesitation to sink her blade deliberately into Murial’s belly, mimicking what the dragons had done to Callina.
Murial coughed the thick, congealed blood of their kind, but she drew Asha in to lick it from her mouth, and Asha was still too hungry to refuse.
“I have made so many dragons with this blood. Think I could make a dragon of you?”
Asha tasted the lie in the promise of survival Murial offered, but there was no lie in the kiss that met her when Asha had finished with the blood on the woman’s mouth. Murial ripped through Asha’s chest with her claws almost as effectively as the knife in her belly, and she had less flesh to fight than Asha.
Yet their teeth receded enough to ease the shift of their lips against each other, the meeting of their tongues, more tentative from Murial than Asha would have expected. How strange, to have their hands engaged in acts of war, yet their kiss so tender.
Dark blood soaked their gowns, dripped down their legs and onto the gravel, though their feet no longer touched the ground.
Asha left the blade buried in Murial’s abdomen. She wrapped her arm behind Murial to bring her hips close as they drew away from the kiss.
One swallow of blood would not bind absolute loyalty, but with their thralls tangled with lust, Asha sensed the blood’s work on her as it seeped into her body.
“You would risk your king to kill me? Already, he suffers worse than your female,” Murial murmured, her speech leaving little kisses against Asha’s lips.
“You never intended to kill him, else you would have ended it up on that platform, declared war upon him and his wolves at that moment rather than give him time. You would not keep him chained now, even to view my death. You want to bring about his metamorphosis, humiliate your husband as your dragon slave, have him serve you as all your men serve you—a king groveling at the feet of his lowborn wife. Do not use his death as a threat to me, for its emptiness rings hollow as a church bell. However, the moment you promised his death, I would risk it to end you.” Asha caught Murial’s lip between her fangs, although she did not break the skin.
Murial’s amused pleasure vibrated through Asha’s flesh, laughter that never escaped the woman’s throat. Murial’s thrall rippled inside Asha’s body with the swell and ebb of her arousal. “If this is how you end your enemies, do continue to end me. I find your fondness for
your own most curious.”
“You only do not understand it because you cannot feel it even for your men, your dragons. Neither men nor women appeal. Another quality draws me.” Asha slid her lips over Murial’s neck, digging her thrall deeper with more deliberation, even as she made her claws recede.
“Power.” Murial finished her own slashes and reached up to cradle Asha’s head, urging her against her bared neck.
“Sharp teeth.”
Asha sank her fangs into Murial’s neck, extending them as far as they could go. The blood entering her mouth would bind her to the woman, no doubt, but it also sent her thrall even deeper, rendering Murial’s body limp in Asha’s arms. Their blood dripped like rain, but Murial exsanguinated faster with Asha draining her from the neck and from the deeper slash across her abdomen.
Dragon claws dug into Asha’s shoulders and back to rip her away, but she was latched onto Murial and could not be removed without hurting Murial more—pain that rushed over Asha’s tongue along with the unrelenting pleasure of the bite’s thrall.
“Did you think pleasure alone would render me helpless? What do you think my dragons give me when I offer them blood?” Murial yanked Asha’s head to the side, failing to dislodge her, but baring Asha’s neck for her own bite.
“This,” Murial whispered in Asha’s mind as soon as her teeth had sunk in. “He will not have given you enough of this to fight it. Paltry months, my miserable daughter.”
Asha wrapped her legs around Murial’s waist, ever more the leech that the king had made her be, bare feet scratching at Murial’s thighs. She reached down between them for the knife once more, this time drawing it up the abdomen toward the prominent rib cage.
Lust coiled so tightly within her, it could cut iron in half, but Asha was the one with iron wristlets, and Murial could draw on no other magic but the kind they shared.
At one point during the dragons’ assault, Asha’s dress had been torn partially away from her chest, and her exposed nipples hardened in the winter air below the deep slices Murial had made. Her cunt was wet with blood and arousal. Every inch she could bring the knife up Murial’s body was like a stroke to the places all over her body that could render her mad. But she had already been half-mad—such a state was comfortable to her.
Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Page 24