“Never. I would never join with a thing like you,” I tried to make him angry. “Look at you, Enric. You are weak compared to me!”
“Hsss!” Enric’s glittering chip of an eye flashed as he sprang forward, and I felt once again, but with renewed strength, his emaciated claw clamp around my throat as he lifted me into the air.
Good. I thought, releasing the tower. I’m sorry Jaydra…
…No, Den-Sister…!
I squeezed my eyes shut waiting to feel the crush of a thousand tons of stone. “Ha, ha, ha.” Instead, Enric’s dry laugh met me as he swirled me around like a ragdoll at the end of his arm. The tower still hung in the air, supported by his magic now.
“Almost, Saffron. But you forget I have a lot of experience at tricking people.” The tyrant shrugged, and the tower above our heads was hurled away from us, down onto the rest of what remained of his Palace, and missing us entirely. We stood amidst the rubble unharmed, and the King tightened his grip on me.
“Prepare to die, Saffron Maddox. Die like all the rest…” the King whispered into my face.
Jaydra… I closed my eyes and my heart reached out to her. I did not want my last sight to be of the King, even though I could feel him inside my mind, his terrible leech-like soul latching onto mine and drawing my magic out of me. No, I turned away from that, towards the other side of my soul, to the place that was always with a dragon…
That was it. I remembered my connection went both ways, and I pushed myself back towards the dragon-in-me until I heard the softest of voices right at the edge of my mind.
Saffron, Den-Sister, do not give up.
It was enough. I had a little spiritual space between me and the leech-like properties of the king. I could think, for a moment, as the king snarled and pressed harder on my windpipe.
If he can do it, then so can I, I thought. I am more powerful than him, I know it! With a snarl, I threw my mind back towards the connection I had with the king, this time seeking out his strength, and latching onto it as he had mine. My hands swung up and seized the king’s wrists around my neck, holding his wrists in a vice-like grip, squeezing until his dark power reversed and started to flow into me.
“No! Child—you have no idea,” Enric whimpered, throwing his weight against mine to break the hold, but his real weight was no more than that of a sapling. His power filled me up, and with it, came memories.
Battlefields. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Blood and flesh so deep that his boots sunk into them, his sword dripping with ichor. Enric Maddox had strode at the head of armies and on his own, year after year, generation after generation.
Enric had feasted on the souls of those he could; first his closest court advisers and astrologers. Then came the others. Half-mad seers in southern desert towns who had a touch of power, and Enric had drunk them all. There were shamans and wisewomen, magicians and monks.
Enric Maddox had devoured them, adding their power to his dwindling supply, prolonging his unnatural life. But with every borrowed year, and every stolen day, Enric had over-spent more and more of his energy. He became desperate, searching for greater sources of power.
His brother, Vance Maddox, shouting at him to stop what he was doing, but Enric only laughed, leeching the power out of him as he had tried to do to me. He watched as his brother’s body fell to a desiccated husk at his feet.
I recoiled in horror as all of those lives flooded into me, and with a whimper the king fell down to the broken tiles of the rubble below. He hit the floor like a bag of kindling, his bones snapping and fracturing, but he was not dead.
“Saffron Maddox…Maddox,” the dried up and broken thing on the floor mewled, but I was too full of power to care.
I will never be like you, Enric Maddox, I thought with contempt. “I will not steal another’s life! Why would I, when I can have it all, right now!” I demanded, my voice growing to a sharpened shout that cracked the remaining glass in the last-standing windows of the Palace around me. I knew the rightness of what I was saying. I was powerful enough now to remake the citadel entirely. I could remake it into a fair place, a place where I ruled wisely. I could remake the entire world if I so wished….
But first, I must destroy it, I thought savagely, seeing how silly and selfish the kingdom was. The king, with his quest for eternal life, the soldiers with their search for glory, even the citizens, with their search for happiness.
“There is only one law. Power,” I intoned.
“Saffron!” a voice said, and I spun around to see Bower sprinting across the rubble. Lord Bower: the rightful heir of Torvald.
“You are no king. You are a fool with a dream,” I said, raising my hand and making a flicking motion with my fingers.
“Saffron, no!”
I watched as he spun backwards, hitting one of the remaining walls of the Palace with a sickening thud before sliding down to the floor. The power surging within me told me that I would have to kill him so he would not do to me what I had done to Enric. It was such an odious task, this cleansing of the world, but I was ready for it. I raised my hand, and—
Den-sister, a soft and small voice said from the depths of my mind. It was insistent, and a voice that I knew well. My hand froze unexpectedly.
“What is this? Why? We must remake the world!”
Saffron-sister, the voice replied. Sister to Ysix, sister to Jaydra, child of Zenema.
I didn’t want to hear Jaydra’s words or feel the pain they stirred in my heart as I remembered losing both my mothers and my family.
Saffron of Home Island. Saffron who loves to fly. Saffron the dragon-friend.
As my sister named me, more and more of my self came back into being, summoned by the simple act of recognition. With it came the tide of shame and anger and hurt and grief.
“I have lost so much!” I said, as the Maddox power wavered within me. I had lost my natural parents, I had lost my dragon mother…
“But you have us,” Bower said from the floor.
Together, Jaydra agreed.
“Give it up, Saffron,” Bower pleaded with me. “Give up the Maddox magic. It is evil, I can see that now.”
The Maddox magic roiled through me; anger and waves and storms. “But I don’t know how!” I said.
Let it go, Jaydra said. Return to me. Return to us. Return to the place that is both dragon and human within your heart.
I wanted to. More than anything, I wanted to, and so I felt myself turn towards my sister Jaydra, and release the Maddox magic that I did not even know I was holding onto. It did not flow back into the still-mewling king, but instead poured out of my mind, back out into the world, seeping into the stones of the earth and mingling with the currents of the air—returning to the elements from which it was stolen, so many years ago.
I hit the floor, the power holding me up now gone from both me and Enric below. I felt strange and new, unlike myself somehow. I am a new person, I thought. I am something else. I am not Saffron Maddox anymore.
“Ow!” Pain lanced through my side, and I looked across my body to find that my leg re-broken. There was a grumbling murmur from the ground, as every piece of magic that had been used by Enric or by me started to unknit itself.
KRACK! A distant wall of the Palace fell to the floor, sending up plumes of smoke.
“Uh, Saffron?” Said Bower. “We should get the hell out of here.” He licked his lips nervously, pushing himself up onto his feet to wince at the pains I had caused him.
“I am so sorry,” I started to weep. All of the pain that I had felt, and that I had caused. “I almost killed you,” I whispered to my friend.
“You saved us all, Saffron.” Bower said resolutely.
The shaking of the foundations of the Palace underneath us let out a long groan.
“Now come on, up! Before the rest of this place falls on our heads.” Bower rushed over to my side, lifting me up bodily, where I cried out in pain at my leg. It was a nasty break, and there was no way that I could walk anywhere.
“Go, Bower.” I tried to tell him. “There isn’t enough time. The people need you, they don’t need a Maddox.”
“Pffft.” Bower shook his head, looking up to the shape that was circling through the smokes above our heads. “Jaydra!” I felt Bower lifting me up on his two arms as my dragon-sister swept down, claws extending to fold themselves around me as easily as she caught fish.
“Bower, no!” I screamed, reaching back towards him, as my Jaydra carried me aloft over the last of the collapsing walls to the wide and high meadows of the sacred Dragon Mountain itself, far above the smokes and sounds of devastation. Below us I could see the white walls of the Palace starting to crumble, gouts of rock dust bursting, fires flaring as oil lanterns smashed. How could Bower survive in that?
Stay, my sister. Have hope. Jaydra pounced from the floor and fell into the smoke and fires as fast as thought, flying as fast as a minnow flashes silver and blue though the water, as fast as thought. I waited with my heart in my mouth, watching great holes open up as the Palace fell into its own cellars and catacombs, and stores of the cannons exploded. Had I lost my sister as well as Bower? Was I watching the end of it all?
The darkness of despair and agony rose to a crescendo in me as I watched the citadel below me burn, and the Palace collapse with my friends still inside. The pain of my leg proved too much, and I had no magic to save anyone.
I fell into darkness.
28
Bower’s Aftermath
The smoke hung over the citadel for a week, I think. It was like all of the poisons and toxins from the evil King’s long reign was finally being drawn out. First the smoke was as black as pitch from all of the fires and strange workshops and mechanical factories as they burned, but then it started turning paler, whiter, becoming nothing more than the natural smoke of woodfires.
The citadel was ruined. But I like to think that the citadel is ruined in the same way that Saffron’s leg is ruined—it has a chance to heal, and re-make itself. Whole tracts of land were scorched and destroyed by either the dragon or the King’s own strange towers. Any element of what was left of the King’s terrible siege engines I ordered destroyed, dismantled and broken apart as I would never have them causing such terror again.
“Lord Bower?” Said a voice, and I looked up from where I sat at a small wooden camp-desk in our makeshift command tent to see none other than Tan the serving boy, now wearing a Torvald livery of red and blue, but with a Mountain tribe’s fur pelt over his shoulders. He looked older, taller, and wiser somehow now. As if his terrible ordeals being the puppet of the king had made him grow up quickly.
We all grew up pretty quickly. “Is it time?” I asked.
Tan nodded, his face still a little pale and owlish. “Good. And the Lady Zenema?” I asked.
Tan winced.
“Ah. Say no more.” I dismissed him, gathering up my papers and strode out of the tent into the late morning and pale sunlight of a new day. I was standing on the high pastures and meadows that had once been off-limits to everyone high above the city. The ruins of the old Dragon Academy stood above us, and the terraces of the citadel below. There were long streamers of red, blue, gold, and purple pennants in the air, and the reedy whistle of people’s instruments as they played. I had invited any citizen who wanted to attend, to a grand feast up here above the city, as I had something to show them.
“Lord Torvald…” said a voice, and I turned to see Dol Agur and Mother Gorlas the wise woman standing amidst a sea of well-dressed people, and each looking decidedly uncomfortable in their own matching finery. “When can I get out of these ridiculous clothes?” Dol Agur took my elbow and hissed into my ear as I smiled and nodded at some of the other notables here.
“Just as soon as I can get away, too, Dol Agur.” I grinned back. The Stone Tooth Chief made a disgusted noise and shook her head.
“If one more of these lowlanders ask me to introduce them to a dragon, I’ll spit!” Said Mother Gorlas irritably, although I think that she actually quite liked the attention. The two women guided me to a smaller tent nearby, in front of which stood two of the largest Three River’s guards I have ever seen.
“Bower,” Hengist, one of the guards with an impressive red beard, said to me. He had never got used to calling me ‘lord’ or ‘sire’.
“Yes Hengist? Is the Lady inside?” I asked.
“Nope. She went out up the ridge, just a little while ago.” Hengist said, looking a little furtively.
“What!?” Mother Gorlas sounded outraged. “She’s not meant to walk on that leg for another three moons, yet! Why that girl…!”
“Warrior,” Dol Agur joined in. “How could you let her out of your sight? She is injured and is in no state for hiking.”
“Well, she did tell me that she would get the dragon to eat me if I stopped her, Dol Agur.” Hengist said a little shiftily, lowering his eyes to the ground.
“Dragon’s don’t eat people, you fool!” Mother Gorlas scolded him, as I laughed. It was going to take a long time for people to get used to the dragons, I thought—even the Clans!
But at least they are not hated anymore. I thought, looking out to where I could see the shapes of wild dark dragons and teal-green island dragons soaring and swooping through the airs above the ruined citadel.
The people had at first been terrified of them, but, as soon as the dark magic that Saffron had plucked out of Enric had been finally released out into the world again, with it went the nightmares and terrors that Enric had put into the hearts of people against the dragons.
The citizens of Torvald started staring up in amazement and wonder, with a pinch of apprehension, and not hatred, greed, or terror.
That had been a good moment on a dark day. I thought, remembering how the dark magic had ripped through the ground and the Palace. Many buildings had collapsed, and many people had died. One of the strangest stories that reached my ears was that the Iron Guard, arriving just at the battle with killing intent had wavered, shaken, and then collapsed into heaps of rusting metal. They still lie out there even now in vast cairns of black metal, and I figure that I will have to find some way to deal with them—perhaps I will melt their metal down and remake them into ploughshares.
The dragons now sensed the change in the hearts of people, stopping their attacks as soon as it happened and instead flying and hooting victoriously around the citadel in vast spirals.
“I’ll go get her,” I said to the wise women and soldiers. Hengist snapped to attention immediately.
“I’ll come with you, Bower,” he said, cracking and rolling his shoulders.
“Lord Bower now, you dolt,” Mother Gorlas hissed.
“Oh, not to any of you tribal peoples, I think.” I laughed, clapping Hengist on the shoulder. “No, stay. Try to keep the rest of the others from following and asking too many questions.”
“But Bow—lord Bower, I mean—” Hengist objected.
“That’s an order, Hengist.” I said, before heading past Saffron’s small tent and up the path that led out onto the top of Dragon Mountain. It didn’t take long for the voices, shouts and laughter of the assembled banquet to subside behind me and I was left walking amid the peeps and chirrups of the mountain birds, and the whistles and roars of the distant dragons.
My steps took me along the ridge, and the world looked like a picture laid out on all sides around me. I knew where Saffron would be, and my feet took me along the ridgeway and down the other side, towards the large crater where an old volcano had once smoked, but was now filled with trees, hot steams, pools and slabs of rock—Queen Ysix now lay on the largest, croaking her reptilian, contented purr.
Dragons had filled their old Dragon Enclosure as it used to be called, and the skies were filled with the sounds of the smaller dragons squabbling over which of the many honeycombed tunnels and cave systems would be theirs. No real hurt would be caused or dragon blood spilt in these squabbles however, as Queen Ysix would have the last say in allotting territories.
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“The dragons have come home,” I heard Saffron say, and I saw she was where I knew that she would be: with the dragons, on the very edge of the lip to the crater below. She was sitting with her back against a boulder, her splinted leg held straight out over the drop and her walking stick across her lap.
“They have,” I repeated.
“And if you have come to tell me to wear a dress or stay off my leg like all the others then I will throw you down there with the others, Bower, King or not!” Saffron winced a little. She looked paler if that was possible, thin as if recovering from a long illness.
“Is it very painful?” I asked.
“Pfft.” Saffron rolled her eyes. “Nothing I can’t handle. How’s the people?”
“Good, I think.” I said honestly, easing myself to sit down beside my friend. “You know that…” I said cautiously. “That he is dead.”
Saffron nodded, before saying. “For a while I wanted Enric to die. And then I wanted him to be punished for his crimes. And then I wanted him to be in prison for a long time, but now I see that you were right. That what happened to him was punishment enough.” She chose her words carefully, but spoke them as if she had known what she was going to say.
Enric was dead, and he had died not by the collapse of buildings or by my hand—instead he had died in a comfortable bed, surrounded by blankets.
“I could not start my reign spilling the blood of the old. Too much blood has already been spilled for the future.” I said, wanting Saffron to understand why I had saved Enric, too, from the wreckage of the citadel.
It was Jaydra who had found me, flying through the smokes and underneath the falling towers like a hawk. I had gathered the wizened old king into a cloak, and Jaydra had seized us both, carrying us up and out of the Palace to set us down not far from where Saffron herself had passed out.
I had sent the dragons to fetch Dol Agur and Mother Gorlas, and told them to do what they can for Saffron while I tended to the old king. I don’t know completely why I did that, in the end, only that I wanted the future to be built out of hope, and new life, not out of revenge. In the end, all the years that the old king had stolen returned to him in a matter of days, and he passed away in the middle of the night. We made a dragon-fire to dispose of his ashes.
Dragons of Dark (Upon Dragons Breath Trilogy Book 3) Page 21