by Stephen Deas
'D-Did Zafir do it?'
'If that's your question then you should ask her, not me.'
'I d-did. They were my f-first words after I put the crown on her head. D-Did you kill your mother to get this?'
Jehal smirked. 'I imagine that went down very well. If you've suddenly taken to valuing my opinion, the thought did cross my mind. I doubt Zafir murdered Queen Aliphera, though. She may have the ambition to think it, but she lacks the nerve.'
'Y-You, however, do not.'
'Me?' Jehal growled. 'Since it appears I have failed to finish poisoning my own father despite a decade of effort, perhaps I am not as able an assassin as you think. Your Highness.'
'I will send t-truth-seekers to your eyrie. T-To Zafir's as well. B-Bellepheros already has my orders. If you make a-any attempt to interfere with them, I will kn-know you are guilty.'
'Your faith in my character is touching, Your Highness. By all means, send whoever you like, and of course Bellepheros shall have everything he needs put at his disposal. I shall demand that he is as meticulous and thorough as he can be, and when he finds nothing I shall expect you to doubt me no less than you do now. Are you done with me, old man?'
'I-I very much hope so.'
Jehal leaned towards Speaker Hyram and held his gaze. 'What if you're wrong? What if I haven't spent the last few years slowly murdering my own father? What if I've been looking for a cure instead? What if I were to tell you I'd found it?'
For an instant Hyram's eyes faltered. Only for an instant, but Jehal could almost taste the victory. 'Then I look f-forward to seeing him in the s-saddle once more.'
'So do I, Your Highness. So do I.' Jehal walked away, biting his lip, his face stony. When he was sure no one could see, he looked up to the Tower of Air.
'There,' he whispered, as if the wind might somehow carry his words to Zafir. 'Do you think that went well?' He began to giggle and then to laugh until he wept, and after that he didn't know whether it was the laughter or the tears that wouldn't stop.
5
Shezira
The snapper pack was already scattering. Shezira picked one of them and yelled at Mistral. Obediently, the dragon wheeled and dived, tucking in his wings and plummeting towards the ground like a falcon. The snapper was going to be too quick, though. It was going to reach the trees before Mistral was in range. Shezira growled softly to herself. This was what she got for riding a war-dragon on a hunt. They were so vast, their shoulders were so broad, their wings so large, that she couldn't even see what she was doing half the time. Unless she dived like this, in which case the wind almost blinded her instead. She squinted at the scattered trees below.
'Fire!' she shouted.
Mistral spread his wings. Shezira found herself hugging scales as the dragon almost stopped in mid-air. She quickly shut the visor on her helm. She heard the roar and felt Mistral quiver, and a wall of heat washed over her. Then Mistral shuddered and lurched as he landed heavily and stumbled. Shezira felt branches and leaves tear at her armour and heard the crack of a tree trunk. The air was hot and filled with the smell of charred wood. When she opened her visor it was to see a swathe of forest floor a hundred yards long burning. The trees around her were blackened; some were broken where Mistral had smashed into them. Shezira couldn't see whether the blast had reached the snapper. Slowly she backed Mistral out of the wreckage.
'You missed him, mother,' shouted Princess Almiri. Her dragon was already on the ground, some fifty yards away, clutching a headless snapper in its front claws.
Shezira instinctively ducked as something huge flew right over her head, so close that she felt the wind of its passing almost lift her out of the saddle. A sooty grey hunting dragon arched up and flew over the forest, so close that its tail slashed the treetops. Again and again, its head darted down and spat out a narrow lance of fire. Then the dragon climbed, turned and came back to land next to Shezira, squeezing into the space between her and Princess Almiri. Its rider took off her helm and waved an angry fist.
'That was my kill, mother!' Princess Jaslyn bellowed and threw her helm away in disgust. 'What do you think you were doing? You flew right into my path! Silence almost ploughed into you and your clumsy behemoth. You should have borrowed one of Almiri's hunters.'
'Height has precedence!' snapped Shezira. She had to shout to make herself heard. Mistral was scratching at a fallen tree, rolling it over. He could smell something.
'The chaser has precedence!' Jaslyn yelled back. Silence folded his wings and took careful steps sideways, until he and Mistral were almost touching. Mistral dropped the tree, shifted and hissed, and Silence hissed back. War-dragons didn't like being crowded. Shezira felt suddenly small. Dragons didn't actually attack riders unless they were commanded. Being accidentally crushed to death, however, was a very different matter.
'I was the chaser!' Shezira tried to calm Mistral down. Jaslyn was right. Mistral wasn't made for this sort of flying, and she should have borrowed a proper hunter.
'Only after you practically barged me out of the air!' Silence was baring his teeth at Mistral now. The difference in size didn't seem to bother him at all. At least being on a war-dragon means I can loo down on my daughter while we bicker.
'Did you get the snapper?' shouted Almiri. She'd shuffled her own dragon sideways too, coming close enough to distract Silence. As the eldest of Shezira's daughters and the only one married with a family of her own, Almiri had taken to the role of family peacemaker. This always made Shezira smile, because she remembered a lime when Almiri was every bit as bad as jaslyn.
'Of course I got it!'
All around them, the other dragons were landing on the open ground and the earth trembled as each one came down. At a quick count, Shezira guessed they'd got about a third of the snapper pack, which certainly wouldn't be enough to keep King Valgar happy. Snappers were a menace. Standing up on its back legs, a snapper was half as tall again as a man, twice as fast, and if it got the chance would happily bite your head off. They were cunning, ate anything and everything they could catch, hunted in groups, and weren't averse to slaughtering entire villages. Dragons were by far the best way of keeping them under control, and King Valgar had been holding back from this herd just so they could have this hunt.
Mistral took a few steps towards Silence, barging into him, and growled. Silence hissed again. The dragons were sensing the moods of their riders. Mistral was probably hungry too, and most of the other dragons were eating their first kills now. The scent of blood was in the air, mixed with the sounds of cracking bones and tearing flesh and heavy dragon breathing.
'Would you like to swap, mother?' asked Almiri, still shouting to make herself heard. 'Have a proper mount for the hunt?'
The offer was tempting, but Shezira shook her head. 'It'll be dusk before you're finished here and I need to get back to Valgar's eyrie. I should be keeping an eye on Lystra, in case she does something stupid.'
'You should have let her come.'
'A week before she's supposed to kneel before Jehal? You know what she's like, especially when she's got Jaslyn to goad her on. I want to present her the way she can be, perfect and beautiful, not the way she usually is, saddle sore and covered in bruises. No. It was nice to fly with you for a while, but I should go.'
Almiri smiled. 'It's a pity, though. I would have liked the four of us to fly together one last time.'
The words cut, although Almiri surely hadn't meant them to be cruel. It seemed only yesterday that she'd given Almiri away to King Valgar. Which had been hard, but at least their clans had been intertwined by blood for centuries and their realms were close. Besides, Almiri was the oldest. She was the heir to the Throne of Sand and Stone, and letting her go had been right and proper. And she'd still had Jaslyn and little Lystra.
Somehow, over the years, she'd lost Jaslyn to her dragons; now she was about to lose the last of her daughters to a prince she barely knew, to live in a palace more than a thousand miles away. A necessary arrangement and certa
inly not without its benefits, but once the marriage was made, Lystra would be a stranger to her. She was going to have to get used to the idea.
Almiri must have seen something of Shezira's thoughts in her face, for she added, 'Once you sit in the Adamantine Palace, you'll be able to summon all of us as often as you like. You can have as many hunts and tournaments as you want. Prince Jehal will have to bring Lystra with him if you tell him to.'
Which was all true, but she couldn't shake the feeling that it would never quite be the same. She sighed. 'There will be a day, Princess. One day. Would you spare Mistral half your carcass? He's restless.'
Half a snapper was little more than a snack for a monster like Mistral, but it seemed to settle his mood. With a pang of regret, Shezira left the hunters to their fun. She turned him on the ground, cumbersome and slow as he was, and then he started to run. That made the other dragons sit up and take notice, for the footfalls of a running war-dragon could shake the earth enough to shatter houses, and it took a lot for a beast like Mistral to take to the air. When he did finally spread his wings and soar into the sky, though, all his ungainliness was gone. Shezira had him circle once above them and tipped a wing to wish them luck. Then she put the mountains and forests to her back and headed out over the plains. She allowed Mistral to set his own pace, and let herself enjoy the feeling of the wind in her hair and the utter sense of being alone. It wasn't often that she had the skies to herself, and yet she had long ago come to realise that that was what she enjoyed most. That was when she was truly free, free to pretend she had no titles, no burdens, no family, no daughters to marry off, no plotting nephews to watch, no subjects to rule, no obligations, no responsibilities…
Catching herself thinking these thoughts made her laugh. And here I am, set to become the next Speaker of the Realms. Would I really turn my back on that if someone told me I could? Would I really take Mistral and fly away across the Stone Desert to the secret valleys beyond, where no one would know me and no one would find me?
The answer, she knew, was that she wouldn't contemplate it even for a second. Which probably made her a fool, and that in turn made her laugh even more, and by the time she reached Valgar's eyrie, she felt ten years younger.
She'd hoped the feeling would last after she landed, but it didn't. It died at the exact moment that she saw her knight-marshal, Lady Nastria, walking briskly across the scorched earth towards her. Nastria was already half in her armour, as if in a rush to leave, and was waving something in her hand. She was shouting.
'Your Holiness! Queen Aliphera is dead!'
6
Huros
Huros knew exactly what was going on, because nothing could happen without him. He'd sat with Eyrie-Master Isentine and explained to Queen Shezira everything about the route they would take to escort Princess Lystra to her wedding. Exactly how many dragons would be flying, exactly where they would be stopping and exactly for how long.
They left King Valgar's eyrie at the crack of dawn. Huros was expecting that, because that had been in his plan. Today was the longest stage of their journey, all the way to the Adamantine Palace. They would stay there for one day, no more and no less, to let the dragons rest. He was quietly looking forward to it. He would spend the time with the highest alchemists in the realms, perhaps even with Master Bellepheros himself. It was an opportunity to advance himself, and this had filled his thoughts until late into the night. Thus he wasn't entirely awake when someone knocked on his door. He stumbled outside while the sun was still creeping over the horizon and checked his potions were all carefully packed. Then he wrapped himself in his thick and deliciously warm flying coat, secured himself to the back of a dragon and started to count the others getting ready around him. By the time he reached twenty, his eyes had grown so heavy that he thought he might rest them for a bit. The counting was rather pointless, after all. He knew exactly which dragons were with them and exactly where they were going.
Others climbed up beside him. He felt the dragon start to run and then launch itself into the air. He had a sleepy look around, and then his eyes closed.
When he woke up two hours later, as his belly reminded him that he hadn't had any breakfast, he was in the wrong place. The mountains of the Worldspine were too close. More to the point, there should have been some thirty dragons in the skies around him. Instead, he could see the white, two other war-dragons, and that was it.
'Er… Excuse me?'
There were two men on the war-dragon with him. One was a rider, sitting up above its shoulders. The other one looked like a Scales. Huros furrowed his brow, trying to remember the man's name. Kailin. The one who looked after the white.
'Hey! Scales!'
The Scales turned around and gave Huros a blank look. The rider was too far away to hear them over the wind.
'Scales! Can you hear me?'
The Scales nodded.
'Where are we?'
The Scales shrugged.
'Um, don't you know? Where are the others then?'
The Scales shook his head and shrugged again.
'Well. Oh. Then who does know?'
The Scales tipped his head towards the dragon-knight. Huros rolled his eyes and gave up. Strictly speaking, Scales were subordinate to Huros and the other alchemists, and all belonged to the order. In reality, most Scales lived in a tiny world of their own that seemed to consist of themselves, their dragons and very little else.
His stomach began to rumble. He decided to have one more try. 'Scales! Um. Have you anything to eat?'
The Scales nodded and passed back a hunk of bread. Huros gnawed on it and quietly fumed. Under no circumstances was a squadron of dragons to split without consulting the senior alchemist present. Since Huros was the only alchemist Queen Shezira had deemed fit to bring, that was him. He would have words, he thought grimly. Words, yes. Strong and forthright ones.
They flew for hours, and with each hour, Huros clenched his lists ever tighter. Eventually it occurred to him that Queen Shezira might have changed her plans because of the news of Queen Aliphcra's tragedy. Huros wasn't sure why that should be, but then he hadn't really been paying much attention. He'd had his own plans to worry about. Besides, that didn't change anything. He should have been consulted. Ancestors! He didn't even know where he was any more, except that the peaks of the Worldspine were to the right and there were more mountains to the front. Which meant they were still flying south, away from Outwatch. He furrowed his brow. Or was that the other way round, and the mountains should be on the left?
The pressure on his bladder grew. He pressed his legs together and bit his lip, but eventually he had to give in. Dragon-knights did this all the time, he told himself, and he started to undo the straps that held him onto the dragon. Even the Scales had calmly stood up, relieved himself into a bottle and strapped himself back in again. Except when Huros stood up, the wind buffeted him and almost knocked him over, and he was so terrified that he couldn't go. The pressure turned gradually into pain, and by the time they landed, it was so excruciating that Huros was in no fit slate to have words with anyone. He didn't waste any time to see where he was, but stumbled and staggered away towards the nearest tree.
Before he was done, his dragon and its rider were already taking off again, the beast lumbering away and flapping its wings, accelerating up to a speed where it could lift itself off the ground. For one terrifying heartbeat Huros thought he'd been abandoned; then he saw the Scales and a pair of strange-looking soldiers, and when he looked up, the other dragons were there, still in the air overhead. The Scales was sitting by the edge of a wide open stretch of jumbled rocks, next to a pile of boxes and sacks that must have come from the dragon-riders. Here and there sparkling ribbons of bubbling water criss-crossed and threaded their way between the stones and among streaks and strands of silvery sand. Strips of ragged grass, perhaps a stone's throw across, lined the river's course before the forest trees took hold.
The two soldiers walked slowly towards him. They were
carrying some strange contraption between them. From the way they were walking, it was awfully heavy. Huros had a moment to wonder where the queen's precious white dragon had gone, when it shot through the air straight over his head, so close that the tree beside him shook and the alchemist was almost lifted off his feet into the dragon's wake. He clung on to a branch. By the time he'd recovered, the dragon was rolling on its back in the river bed next to the Scales, flapping and splashing its wings. Its rider was standing nearby, soaking wet, waving his arms and shouting furiously at the Scales.
The two soldiers shouted something as well and shook their fists, then carried on with what they were doing. Huros waited until they were close, and then stepped out of the trees. 'You're not dragon-knights.' Both soldiers had longbows slung over their backs. The bows were white and made of dragonbone. Precious things. The alchemist wondered where they'd got them.
The soldiers looked at him. They exchanged a glance and seemed to smirk. 'Clever of you to notice,' said the taller of the two. 'Was it the fact that we're not wearing several tons of dragonscale that gave it away, or that we're not sitting around and picking our noses?'
'We're sell-swords,' said the other one.
The tall one nodded. 'That's right. Currently we've sold them to your knight-marshal.'
'They don't come cheap, either.' The shorter one gave Huros a nasty grin. 'Our swords are long and sharp and very hard.' He definitely smirked.
'Lady Nastria?' Huros frowned. The thought of her sent a jolt through him. She'd given him a bottle of something strange, and he hadn't even looked at it. He was supposed to tell her what it was.
'If that's what her name is.'
The tall one belched loudly. 'That's the one. I'm Sollos. This is my cousin, Kemir. Since you're not the Scales, you must be the alchemist.'
'Huros,' said Huros.
'Well then, Huros the alchemist, make yourself useful. There's half a ton of luggage down there by the river. We'd quite like to move it up into the trees before the heavy brigade come back.' The sell-sword made a rude gesture towards the rider who was still standing over the Scales, waving his arms and shouting. 'I don't imagine he'll be much help.'