“Dragon!” she cried, taking off at a sprint toward the University District.
Toward the head.
“Liandari!” Anglarok called. He sprinted forward but was flung off his feet by another lurch from underneath them. What was left of the masonry of the nearby buildings fell in chunks around them.
Tamerlan reached out to help Anglarok up on his feet.
“She’s possessed,” he breathed in horror.
There was something wrong with the sun, Marielle realized. Something wrong with where it was on the horizon.
“Possessed by what?” Anglarok asked through chattering teeth.
“I think,” Etienne paused to cough or maybe choke. “I think that perhaps the dragon we are standing on is flying now. Are those mountains closer than they were a moment ago?”
He was right. The mountains were closer.
The sun hadn’t moved.
They had.
“Possessed by a Legend,” Tamerlan said to Anglarok and at his look of horror, he continued. “Ram the Hunter, if I had to guess – though it could easily be one of the others.”
“Mer preserve us!” Anglarok said and his hands shook as they moved to cover his mouth. “That means that we opened it. We opened the Bridge of Legends!”
Tamerlan and Etienne exchanged a guilty look.
And Marielle knew why. It wasn’t Liandari who had opened the Bridge – or at least, not the first time.
“Mountains fall on us! World swallow us up!” Anglarok screamed, looking up at the sky as the dragon screamed, too – a piercing sound like a gull crying along the shore. “We have opened death! We have brought our own destruction on our heads!”
“Now, who is crazy?” Tamerlan muttered. But his hands were compassionate when he took Anglarok by the arm and led him to the edge of the steps to help him sit.
“Take a moment. Take a breath. We’ll go after her in a moment.
“There’s no point going after her until the city lands somewhere,” Etienne said, trying to keep his feet under him as the city rolled again beneath them.
“She could be gone by then,” Tamerlan said calmly. “And who knows what she might do with a Legend possessing her.”
“You would know,” Etienne said grimly. “So tell me, Legend Boy – where will she go? What will she do?”
Queasiness washed over Marielle. With the immediate urgency of leaving the clock past, her body was calling in debts one at a time. Her scent and vision wavered, and her legs trembled beneath her. Hunger roared through her like a hurricane. Whatever magic had sustained her through her months in the clock was gone and with it, her strength.
Tamerlan noticed. He reached for her with a kind smile and eased her into a seated position beside Anglarok. Tamerlan’s leg was still bleeding. Little pools kept forming around his foot.
“Let me tend that,” she said, fighting the urge to vomit as she felt his injured leg.
“Thank you.” Who thought a word could be so full? But from him, it spoke a thousand things at once. Things implied by his smile, but the glint in his blue eyes and by the fact that he was here – here saving her instead of anywhere else.
But after that brief smile, he turned to Etienne. “It looked like she was going after the dragon. So that means the palace, right? The one place where there’s a chink in its armor.”
Etienne nodded grimly.
“We have to go after her,” Anglarok said, head in his hands. His voice sounded strange.
“Of course,” Tamerlan agreed.
“Wait!” She tore his trousers around the wound. “This is bad. A sword cut. Who cut you?”
“Someone who was trying to help,” he said mildly, his eyes lingering on her as if just watching her could give him something. She felt her cheeks growing hot under that gaze. It felt more than personal. It felt like she was his salvation. Again, he ripped his gaze away from hers. “And now we need to help her. The leg will have to wait.”
“Don’t you want the dragon dead?” Etienne asked with a look that suggested he was weighing Tamerlan and finding him wanting.
“Of course.”
“Not until this is stitched,” Marielle interrupted. Her head hurt and she felt like she might vomit, but he was bleeding worse than he thought he was. She wasn’t going to let him bleed to death while he tried to heal the world.
“Then why go after her?” Etienne demanded as Marielle opened her belt pouch and took out the needle and thread she kept there. It was clear he wasn’t going to wait. Maybe if she hurried, he’d at least let her stitch it.
Tamerlan looked haunted as he answered Etienne. “She isn’t herself. And I don’t want her to have to pay the price of being an avatar for a Legend. She’s no friend of mine, but no one deserves that.”
They nodded together and Etienne held out a hand. “Agreed.”
Marielle stabbed the needle into Tamerlan’s leg and started to stitch as he took Etienne’s hand. He barely flinched as she worked. He really was crazy. And tough as an ox.
“We’ll need a way to hold her once we get to her – and if there’s a way to destroy this dragon, we should take it, too,” Tamerlan said. “And we have to find Jhinn.”
He shivered and Marielle felt a shared burst of horror. If the dragon was in the air, would there be any water left in the whole city?
“How long do you think Liandari will be possessed for?” Etienne asked. The ground still shook under them. It was a wonder that the two men could stay standing with the very city under their feet swaying as the dragon flew. The sound of falling masonry and crumbling buildings made talking over it a chore.
Tamerlan shook his head. “This is different than ... well, you know how different it can be.”
They were both silent, looking in the direction that Liandari had disappeared.
It wasn’t until she was almost done stitching that Marielle realized Anglarok was gone.
“Where’s Anglarok?” she asked as she finished the last stitch in Tamerlan’s leg.
She looked over at where the other Scenter had been. He wasn’t there. Somewhere in the distraction and noise, he had slipped away, leaving a single word written on the stone in blood – scrawled messily as if the owner of the finger that wrote it had been wrestling for control of his own hand.
It read “help.”
Marielle felt the blood drain from her face as she met Tamerlan’s working eye.
“Did the swath of magic touch him, too?”
Tamerlan shook his head – not a denial, simply confusion.
“I don’t know,” Etienne gasped.
Marielle swallowed as she put the thread and needle away and found her weary feet. “The Legends were determined to find new avatars and to do what they’d always hoped for – live again in this world. I think they’ve found two new avatars.”
“We’ll just wait until it wears off,” Etienne said sensibly. “And then, Tamerlan, you will destroy every scrap of that Spice you have, do you understand?”
Marielle swallowed, but it was Tamerlan who spoke first.
“They didn’t smoke,” he said, turning in a circle to look in every direction as if he was searching for Anglarok.
“What?” Etienne’s voice as all edge.
“They didn’t smoke. This isn’t temporary. Don’t you see? I think that one of them – or maybe both – is permanently possessed by a Legend.”
“And what does that mean?” Etienne asked.
“It means the Five Cities of the Dragonblood Plains are doomed,” Marielle said. “It took everything Ram had to quell the Legends – every trick he could find. And if they’re out there now, it will take every trick we can find, too.”
Epilogue
Tamerlan
THEY’D FOUND CLEAN clothing for Marielle and dried meats in one of the buildings that was still intact. It wouldn’t be enough to help them for long. Wherever the dragon was headed, it was a place colder than the Five Cities. Already, they clutched cloaks around them against the cold as
he flew ever onward and the day bled into the dark.
Jhinn had not been where they left him and there was no water in the canal when they checked. That alone had left them grim faced.
“We could set up camp,” Etienne suggested halfheartedly when night fell, but no one bothered to reply. There was nowhere safe to stand still. Every one of them had survived a close call with falling buildings or been swept off their feet by a sudden movement from the dragon beneath them.
Crossing the city was harder than they’d imagined it would be. And when they finally reached their destination, there would be two Legends to fight. Tamerlan touched his oilcloth frequently to check it was still there. There were six rolls in there – or there should be. Six left. Would it be enough?
It will be.
One thing was certain. Neither of the Legends that had taken the Harbingers was Ram the Hunter.
I trapped them once. I can trap them again. But first, we hunt dragons.
He reached out and took Marielle’s hand, desperately grateful when she let him. He needed to remember why he’d fought so hard to open up that clock – especially now that there were twice as many Legends free because of his choice.
Twice as many Legends to dance havoc across the Dragonblood Plains. Twice as many Legends to destroy everything.
READ THE NEXT PART of Tamerlan and Marielle’s story in Winterfast: Book Four of the Bridge of Legends.
Behind the Scenes:
USA TODAY BESTSELLING author, Sarah K. L. Wilson loves spinning a yarn and if it paints a magical new world, twists something old into something reborn, or makes your heart pound with excitement ... all the better! Sarah hails from the rocky Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario -
learning patience and tenacity from the long months of icy cold - where she lives with her husband and two small boys. You might find her building fires in her woodstove and wishing she had a dragon handy to light them for her
Sarah would like to thank Harold Trammel and Eugenia Kollia for their incredible work in beta reading and proofreading this book. Without their big hearts and passion for stories, this book would not be the same.
Sarah has the deepest regard for the talent of her phenomenal artists – Francesca Baerald who designed the gorgeous map for this series and Lius Lasahido and his team at Polar Engine who created the gorgeous cover art that accompanies this book. Without their work, it would be so much harder to show off this story the way it deserves!
www.sarahklwilson.com
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