by Grace Draven
Were she not a prisoner, she might have stood in awe of the palace’s interior. The entire place was an architectural marvel—yet it was presided over by a sovereign who defiled the prison itself with her presence. Halani’s guards didn’t allow her to slow or linger but pushed her toward another pair of massive doors set in one side of the grand receiving room.
The space beyond was even grander. And peculiar. Halani sensed a strangeness about it even before she saw the cryptic symbols carved into the floor and embedded in the decorative designs painted on the walls. She swallowed back a cry when she spotted Malachus watching her from the center of a circle carved into the polished marble floor.
Dalvila stood nearby, a cluster of guards and men wearing robes embroidered in arcane symbols in attendance behind her. She glided toward Halani. Like those in the guardroom, she wrinkled her nose, and her lip curled into a sneer. “You stink,” she declared. She pointed in Malachus’s direction. “Make her stand there at the circle’s edge,” she instructed the guards. They leapt to do her bidding, yanking Halani toward the spot the empress had indicated.
While the guards’ revulsion for her state hadn’t fazed her, Dalvila’s remark sent the heat of humiliation into Halani’s face by virtue of the fact that she’d stated an obvious and unpleasant truth in front of Malachus. As if he understood the source of her embarrassment, his eyes warmed. “You’re beautiful, Halani,” he said. “That will never change.”
Judging by the view revealed through the windows lining one wall, she’d been trapped in the cell for a day and a night, but that was all it took to smell like the reeking middens adjacent to the prison. She greedily soaked up the sight of Malachus with her eyes, relieved to see he bore no new wounds. Still, in the time since Dalvila had taken him from the prison, a noticeable change had descended over him. His breathing was labored and his skin had turned a sickly, jaundiced shade. Dark circles ringed his eyes, and smoke wreathed his frame, drifting even from his nostrils with every exhalation. “You look so ill,” she told him.
Her alarm knew no bounds when he told her, “It’s hard to control the draga now.” He gave her a slow blink. “You should know,” he said in a lethargic voice, “I found her. She’s back home.”
He didn’t use a name, but Halani knew to whom he referred, and her joy in the news burst past the wall of her fear for a moment. He’d rescued Asil. She stepped closer to the circle’s edge, stretching a hand toward her lover. Her palm collided with an invisible barrier that revealed itself only in a brief ripple of air and an odd vibration that coursed through her swollen hand and made her broken finger throb even more. “Thank you, Malachus,” she said in fervent tones that offered him far more than gratitude. His pinched features softened, even as his eyes glittered with a banked anger at the sight of her injured hand.
Dalvila sidled up to the circle’s edge, blue gaze avid as any raptor’s. “I thought you might like to see what you’ve been fucking,” she told Halani. “He can’t break free, even without chains, even with draga strength.”
Halani could only imagine what manner of cruelties must have taken place in this arcane, breathtaking chamber. She lowered her hand and stepped back from the circle to glare at the empress, reckless in her anger. “Then if he’s trapped and not a danger to you, why not just give him the mother-bond? Do you enjoy the torture?”
“Halani, please.” Malachus’s plea begged caution.
Dalvila only laughed. “As a matter of fact, I do, but you’re right.” She raked Malachus with a sneering gaze. “He won’t be much good to me if he burns himself into an ash heap.” She gestured to the robed men, who stepped forward to stand at points outside the circle. One started the first notes of a droning chant and was soon joined by his compatriots. Gooseflesh pebbled Halani’s skin, and the fine hairs at her nape stood up in warning. Spellwork. In the palace of a sovereign whose laws punished those accused of witchcraft and sorcery with pitiless efficiency, magic pulsed and swelled in the rise and fall of a cant. Cold light spooled out of the magicians’ fingers, slithering past the perimeter’s wards to wrap around Malachus’s arms and legs like the iron shackles he still wore. These were shackles as well, forged from sorcery instead of metal but no less binding. Halani could only guess the purpose of these newest bonds. If the empress was involved, it could only be a dire one.
Satisfied with what their spellwork had wrought, the sorcerers ceased their chant and stepped back from the circle’s edge. When the one who initiated the chant nodded to Dalvila, she tossed something into the circle that Halani hadn’t seen since the day in the Goban market when she’d begged Hamod not to buy the artifact whose power had soaked into her skin. “Your trinket, draga.”
The mother-bond tumbled across the circle’s carved barrier, and Malachus snatched it neatly from the air, fist closing protectively around it before pressing it against his chest. The effect of its touch was instantaneous.
Both Halani and Dalvila backed away from the circle’s perimeter when he uttered a plaintive cry, back arching as if bent by an invisible hand intent on tying him into a knot. Halani would have charged into the circle if she could.
Malachus’s ordeal worsened as the spell that trapped him in human form fractured and shattered. He contorted and convulsed in the throes of a transformation that seemed designed to extract every drop of agony from its victim before it finished.
She refused to close her eyes or look away when he fell to his knees, then his back, writhing and twisting in agony that robbed him of the ability to even scream. The sounds spilling from his throat were no more than guttural moans. Halani feared she’d retch when she glanced at the empress and saw the fevered lust in her face. The cruelty.
The ghostly smoke that had wafted off him earlier grew denser, darker, until it resembled a red fog that slowly filled the space within the circle, obscuring Malachus completely. Halani had assumed such a change entailed a gentler transition, complete with glowing light. How wrong she was. How foolish.
There was only pain and the bloody miasma that roiled and swirled within the circle’s confines. It was more than a thick mist. It swelled and writhed, spitting whips of fire in every direction that bounced against the circle’s wards with blinding flashes and waves of heat. The circle bulged against the force of so much contained magic, as if it fought to cage a burning sun.
The fiery smoke thickened even more, developing defined angles and curves, coalescing into a shape Halani had seen in paintings and sculptures, depicted on temple walls. She gazed in awe, staring up and up toward the expansive roof high above her.
Where a man had collapsed in agony, a creature of legend now stood, shaking off the last of his old form with a snort from arched nostrils and a ripple of bright scales. Colossal, with a head that nearly scraped the chamber’s soaring ceiling, the draga defied any attempt to capture the scope of his size, his power, the sheer magnitude of his presence in the room. The imprisoning circle’s invisible walls rippled, and the tethers woven by the sorcerers’ spells stretched taut against powerful legs and the curved claws tipping a pair of membranous bronze wings.
Halani wept silent tears. The lover she’d held in her arms was gone. After centuries of waiting, the draga had come into its own, complete with scales, claws, teeth long as boar spears and ten times more lethal, eyes more fiery than the bloody sunrises that heralded a coming storm. Its wings lay tucked against a back wide enough to carry two free trader wagons side by side.
“Magnificent,” Dalvila said, the awe in her voice the first thing Halani could empathize with. The notion made her slightly queasy.
The draga’s great head swung on a serpentine neck, plummeting toward them, jaws partially open to reveal the awesome fangs and a long red tongue resting within his mouth. Dalvila backed away, despite her boasts that the circle’s wards would hold anything inside its circumference. She needn’t have worried. The draga’s attention rested solely on Halani.
Halani stepped to the circle’s edge, heart in her throat at being this close to something so enormous, so lethal. She lifted one hand to press it against the invisible shield a second time, once more experiencing the tiny shocks of sorcery darting through her hand, numbing her fingers. “Malachus?”
The pupil in one of his large, fiery eyes expanded at the sound of his name, and the draga bent his head even closer, finally pressing one scaly cheek to the ward shield where her hand rested. Jagged shards of sorcerous light arced across the wards at his touch.
Behind Halani, Dalvila celebrated and planned. “The people of Domora will be in raptures over the spectacle I have in store for them! Bards for generations will tell a new version of ‘The Sun Maiden.’ Instead of Golnar, it will be Malachus who will fulfill his role, and all shall praise my name for restoring the Empire’s glory.”
Halani ignored her, focused entirely on her transformed lover. A mistake she soon learned to her cost.
“Take her,” Dalvila snapped. “Have her bathed, painted, and brought to the north wall.” Halani whirled to face the empress and was instantly caught up in the guards’ unyielding grip. She thrashed to get free, biting, kicking, and clawing until one of the guards cocked back a fist and struck her. Just before the world went black, a draga’s roar shook the chamber’s walls, and the floor shivered under Halani’s feet.
* * *
* * *
Halani regained consciousness long enough to discover herself naked and half submerged in a bath. A woman’s voice sounded above her. “She’s awake. Let’s get the elixir down her before she comes to enough to fight us.”
Someone gripped her chin, forcing her mouth open even as they pinched her nostrils shut with their fingers. Halani gasped for air, then choked and gagged when someone else poured a bitter brew down her throat. The black shroud of oblivion fell over her again, wiping away all resistance.
* * *
* * *
Roused a second time, Halani raised her aching head at the dull roar of thousands of voices all around her. How long had she been senseless? Hours? Days even? A bright sun speared her eyes from the east, and she blinked several times in an effort to clear away the blurry fog obscuring her vision. To her horror, she found herself shackled to a pole on a dais set on the battlements high above Domora, her hands and ankles bound with rope. Her skin itched and burned, even as the effects of the narcotic she’d been force-fed threatened to pull her under once more. She glanced down, struggling to understand what she saw.
Gold. As bright as the sun and gleaming with a metallic sheen to dazzle the eye. Halani jerked hard on the ropes once her mind worked past the drug-induced confusion. They’d painted her in the stuff. Whoever had fed her the elixir had covered her nude body from head to foot in a thin layer of gold paint. Even her hair, scraped back from her face and clubbed at the nape, was lacquered in gold paint. From what she could see of herself, she resembled a statue. A golden statue of a woman. The Sun Maiden.
Terror blasted through her, obliterating the elixir’s lingering effects. Halani lunged against the ropes, her movements evoking shouts and catcalls from the excited crowd gathered below on either side of the city’s encircling wall.
She twisted against her bonds, looking to either side of her and then above for any sign of Malachus as the draga. The battlements were crowded. Aristocrats in their fine clothing shared space with soldiers armed with both longbows and crossbows, and at regular intervals, teams of soldiers grouped around ballistae parked on the wall, loading either stone shot or large bolts into the rails. The rhythmic clink of the winches and the creak of the torsion springs as the teams ratcheted the ballistae’s bowstrings back rose above the crowd’s noise, an awful sound in her ears disproportionate to the roar of the gathered audience. Halani’s vision blurred with tears. She wanted to scream down curses on the heads of those who’d come to watch siege weapons tear apart the man—the draga—she loved, but she kept silent, refusing to offer them the entertainment of her sorrow.
Malachus was nowhere in sight, and Halani prayed she wouldn’t spot him bound like her, waiting to be butchered in some brutal game to appease the audience’s bloodlust. They gathered below her, cheering and chanting Dalvila’s name as they waited for whatever their empress had in store to entertain them. Where was Malachus?
A sudden roar traveled through the crowd like a wave. Halani twisted in her bonds, turning just enough so she could see the source of such loud adulation: a palanquin carried by a half dozen bearers, three on either side of the horizontal support staves. They carefully set the sedan down at the bottom of a set of steps leading to the eastern parapet, where an awning had been erected to provide shade from the worst of the sun’s blinding rays. The crowd roared again when the empress emerged from the palanquin and gracefully climbed the steps. An escort of soldiers surrounded her as she walked beneath the awning and stepped onto a more decorative dais than the one Halani occupied and raised her arm, silently demanding more cheering, louder voices, the roar of her name in the people’s throats. They complied, deafening Halani.
“My people,” Dalvila shouted, once the voices had died down. “Today I have a gift for you. A symbol of the Empire’s endurance, its strength, despite the loss of Kraelag.” She paused as a torrent of hisses and disapproving whistles rose from the crowd. When they faded, she continued. “We are not defeated, only inspired. We will crush the Savatar and make the Nunari pay for the insult of their betrayal. We will rebuild our garrisons in the east and overrun the Goban.” She worked the crowd into a frenzy with her words, every last one of them ready to take up a sword and hack away at anyone they thought remotely resembled a steppe nomad. “How can we do this? Because we are Kraelians! We are powerful. Our armies are fearsome. And no pack of steppe dogs can stand against an Empire that can capture a draga!”
The crowd once more erupted into deafening cheers and applause, which soon changed to terrified screams when a monstrous black shape emerged from a place inside the city walls and took to the skies with the thunderous clap of giant wings.
“Malachus!” Halani shouted his name, her cry lost amid the cacophony rising from those on the ground.
The draga continued his ascent toward the clouds, his great wings concussing the air around them as if the wind had a heartbeat. Reassured by their sovereign’s lack of fear as she watched the draga’s flight, the crowd settled, pointing and exclaiming at the sight of a creature all had thought long extinct.
Dalvila continued seducing her audience, extolling her own powers in the most glorious light. “The beast does my bidding, succumbs to my will. And today, it will entertain you with a story much loved and oft told. I am descended from the great Kansi Yuv, and this draga is one of Golnar’s kind. And once more, we have a Sun Maiden. Do you want a story?”
“Aye!” the crowd roared, itself a singular beast.
“Are you ready for a killing?”
“Aye!”
Angry sobs swelled Halani’s throat when the draga beat his bat-like wings against the thick summer air and dove in a clumsy swoop toward the city walls. His massive shadow passed over Halani, and a blast of wind buffeted her when a wing flapped close enough to her to touch if her hands were free. “Fly away,” she shouted as he passed her. “Please, Malachus, fly away!”
Surely he saw the ballistae rolled onto the wider parapets and perched on the loggia, manned by soldiers and loaded with arrows the length of a man’s arm, their spiked tips guaranteed to punch a hole through anything they hit.
A hum of discordant earth magic surged through her as the draga flew past, the shimmering trail of the sorcerous tethers still bound to his legs and wings on one end, the other ends anchored to the earth. Dalvila’s sorcerers had done their work well. The draga could fly high and far enough to give the crowd a good show, but he couldn’t fly away, leashed to the ground by powerful earth magic.
Halani
herself stood in the sights of loaded crossbows, a warning to the draga that if he tried to cheat the empress of her spectacle, Halani would pay the ultimate price.
Malachus burst skyward before making an abrupt dive. One of the ballista teams fired at him, the arrow spinning toward him in a death spiral. The draga executed his own midair spiral, and the arrow sailed harmlessly past him. The crowd bellowed its approval. Halani sagged in her bonds, her heart pounding so hard against her ribs, she was sure it would burst free from her chest at any moment.
A vicious game of cat and mouse played out between draga and ballista teams to the onlookers’ excited encouragement, as Malachus dodged the arrows and stone shot fired upon him while attempting to snatch Halani from her place atop the platform. Twice Halani screamed his name in terror, the first time when a ballista bolt found its mark, slamming into the draga’s flank hard enough to knock him out of the air. Malachus crashed to earth, wings flapping as he thrashed on the ground, and the terrified people gathered outside the walls fled in every direction. Injured but undefeated, he gained his feet and sprang skyward with a bellow and a gusting flap of his wings. Blood streamed down his flank, dripping off his claws to splatter some of the Kraelians below him.
Another hit from a different ballista prompted Halani’s second cry, this one to Malachus’s right wing by a round of stone shot. Shrapnel missed the elongated finger bones to which the wings were attached but tore through the membrane itself, once more sending the draga spiraling toward the ground. This time he recovered before he hit, wings beating hard to keep him airborne as he roared his fury and pain to the bright blue sky.
He banked toward her again and again, managing to avoid the kill shot from the numerous ballistae firing bolts and stones at him with increasing speed and accuracy. The ballista teams were learning his flight patterns, adjusting their aim. The sorcerous tethers made him an easier target. Even without those chains, Halani’s presence trapped him here. She was Malachus’s greatest vulnerability and the empress’s most effective weapon against him. Better even than the most powerful ballista operated by the sharpest-eyed archer.