But nine men against the two of us?
“We’ll be interfering with Stone business, then,” the tall man said with a cold calm that matched Dari’s, icicle for icicle. “If you’ll come with us peacefully, there’ll be no need to fight.”
Aron desperately worked to sort out if he should use his graal in this situation. They were threatened. Their lives were in danger. Was this an incidence of serving the higher good?
Dari might think so, but Lord Baldric had told him never, no matter the circumstances, and Stormbreaker never resorted to using his mind-talents, even to save his own hide, or the lives of those in his care.
Platt said it was a tool—my tool. And Stormbreaker’s graal is different from mine. His is harder to control.
“Come with you where?” Aron asked, not intending to let Dari die or be captured, no matter the personal price.
“Our camp. To meet our… guild master, if you will. Canus has special interest in all Stone apprentices.” The tall man nodded toward Aron as clouds of breath laced his shrouded face. “Especially boys.”
A fresh, righteous anger kindled in Aron’s depths. Canus the Bandit was at the root of this attack. Canus was the real foe in this situation; these were just his foe’s outstretched hands.
“He likes boys,” another of the robed outlaws agreed. “Takes most stray lads in and raises them for his own. You’d be a nice addition to the collection.”
Aron clenched his jaw so firmly it ached.
Even if they fought well, they had no prayer against so many. But he could use his mind-talents and get them safely home. Lord Baldric would likely send him to Judgment, but Dari would be free and breathing. That’s what mattered.
“Don’t,” she said, as if she knew what he was thinking. “Not now. Not to save me.”
“I will,” he countered, fighting to regulate his mental focus. “If it’s the only way.”
Dari’s answering snarl sounded more animal than human, and Aron’s heart stuttered. His concentration wavered, and the tip of his sword dipped, sending moonslight fracturing through each level of his thoughts.
“He’s trying to go through the Veil,” one of the men shouted. “So is she.”
Before Aron had time to be surprised at their awareness, the tall man bellowed, “Take them now!”
All nine bandits lunged toward them at the same moment, blades raised.
Reflex forced Aron to sweep his sword in a low arc, but the man nearest to him blocked the blow so completely it nearly jarred the weapon out of Aron’s grip. His hand clenched on the hilt, then burned from the impact. Before he could recover, fingers dug at him. The men pawed and grabbed, snatching at his legs, his shoulders, his elbows. Aron slashed and struck with his sword and fist, but the men wrestled him to the byway dirt and tore the hilt of his blade from his desperate grasp.
Dari screeched, sounding more angry than afraid. Fury blasted through Aron and he fought his captors even harder, until he thought his muscles might burst. He had to get free. He had to help her!
With what little focus he could grasp, he tried to throw his essence through the Veil, and caught bits of what the outlaws were saying to each other, mind-to-mind.
Don’t allow it….
Hurt him if you have to….
Kill her; she’s not the one we’re hunting….
The bandits’ legacy conversation shifted to echoes.
“No!” Aron roared with all the force left in his lungs. “Leave her alone!”
He could see nothing but blurs and dashes of moonslight. Feel nothing but the crushing weight of bandits covering his body. One of the men stuffed his sleeve into Aron’s open mouth, choking him on salty, oily cloth even as he reached the edges of enhanced perception.
Dari’s mental strength surged around him, touched him, but didn’t rest in his awareness or restrain him. Her energy felt different. Larger, somehow.
Buried beneath a pile of growling outlaws, Aron kicked against his attackers. He tried to spit the cloth out of his mouth, but the man nearest his face shoved his burly arm harder into Aron’s lips and teeth. Aron ignored the agony. Reached with his mind. Reached harder.
Even as his five senses exploded with furious awareness on the other side of the Veil, Dari’s graal crushed against his in a splendor of colors, more brutal than any bandit’s fist. Aron’s head slammed backward into the dirt as his essence hurtled back through the Veil to normal space and time. The bandit’s arm seemed to sink completely into his mouth, separating his jaws as he let out a shout of pain and surprise.
More shouts rose.
These were terrified.
The arm crushing Aron’s mouth withdrew, and almost as fast, the bandits let go of him. He heard them stumble and struggle, falling backward, falling away as popping and groaning and new, terrible shrieking rose into the night. Blood flowed across Aron’s teeth as he managed to close his lips and roll to his side, then stand and snatch his sword from the dirt.
The nine bandits slammed into one another as they ran, screaming, and flung themselves into the brush.
“Blath,” Aron mumbled through his swelling, bleeding lips, assuming Dari had sent a mental call to the Sabor hiding herself in the trees. He knew people feared Sabor in fighting form, but these men had to be pure cowards. When he heard the telltale whump of big wings, he turned to see Blath soaring across the tableaux of black sky, white stars, and glowing twinned moons—and dropped his sword.
Aron’s knees went soft on him, and he wavered on his feet, coughing up a bloody, hacking gasp of surprise.
Blath sailed downward toward where he was standing, directly in front of a scaled, long-necked beast the size of a castle tower.
The creature was white with dark markings about its clawed forelegs, a barbed tail that seemed as long and pointed as a dantha tree, and massive, outstretched leathery wings. It had luminous eyes like black, liquid pearls, and its mouth was open to reveal rows of teeth like white, curved blades. A thin reed of smoke stretched upward from the beast’s nostrils.
Dari, he thought weakly before his stunned mind began to urge him to move before the beast belched a flesh-eating cloud of fire.
Dari was nowhere to be seen.
You are seeing her, his mind jabbered. You’ve always known she was Stregan. That her other form was dragon, not human.
A sensation like rope unraveling at the fibers overtook him as he tried to keep hold of reality, to accept it, and failed.
“Dari,” he said aloud, hardly able to pronounce the syllables with his damaged mouth.
There was no hint of recognition in the creature’s hungry, enraged gaze. Fire licked around its deadly teeth. Aron’s graal calmly informed him that if he moved, she would cook him and eat him before the smoke died away.
If he didn’t move, the same fate awaited him.
“Dari,” he said again, hearing the loss of hope in his own voice.
In her Stregan form, this magnificent dragon had no inkling of who he was, past an easy meal offering itself to her on this remote Cobb byway.
Blath had landed, and Aron saw that she had shifted back to human form. She was running toward him, full speed, arms outstretched, as if she meant to fling herself at him before he could mount any type of defense.
Fire ripped from the dragon’s throat.
Blath reached Aron, and the flames struck her from behind as she wrapped him in her arms. Heat melted over both of them, singeing his hair, reducing him to a gasping, wheezing child squeezed in Blath’s powerful embrace.
The Sabor had to be dissolving where she stood, but Aron couldn’t smell anything burning beyond cloth and some nearby leaves and branches.
He managed to look up into Blath’s face, and her golden eyes bored directly into his consciousness. “My skin protects me,” she said in a harsh, pained voice. “But not for long. Please. We have no choice.”
Aron understood what he needed to do.
He didn’t think Blath was instructing him, mentally or any
other way. No. It was more like he was remembering a moment many cycles ago, when Lord Cobb’s riding party had overtaken the Stone travelers and rescued them from the Brailing Guard.
He had commanded Dari with his mind-talents that day, and stopped her from changing. It had been an accident born of fear and worry—but if he had done it once, perhaps he could do it again. He had to take some sort of action, or both he and Blath would pay with their lives, and who knew what would become of Dari.
Aron closed his own eyes, took a deep breath of hot air and Sabor sweat and ash, and forced himself through the Veil. Almost as fast, he separated his awareness from the body Blath protected with her own, and let his essence drift upward, slowly, controlled, until he guessed he was at the same level as the dragon’s open mouth. The pound of his heart sounded like wild drums to his enhanced awareness, and the stench of smoke and the most acrid scale-oil he had ever experienced nearly overwhelmed him.
He forced his eyes open, and found himself face-to-face with an enormous white dragon that seemed even more fearsome on the other side of the Veil.
Now he could see that the dark patterns on its legs and neck were deep green swirls almost identical to the benedets of a Stone High Master. Aron could sense the fire inside the beast, feel it like a crackling pain flowing across his essence, and he understood that Stone must have modeled the marks given to its most deadly members after the appearance of these unbelievably powerful creatures.
The intelligence in the dragon’s eyes was animalistic and heartless. Aron could tell it cared nothing for anything outside itself and its own kind. It could strike at him in the real world, or on this side of the Veil. Somehow, it lived in both places.
Stregan, Aron thought, not bothering to shield the word and keep it private.
The force and loudness of his own mental voice surprised him, and he was suddenly concerned that anyone in Eyrie possessed of any legacy might have heard him.
The creature paused in its fire-roaring attack and gazed at him with something like menace mixed with respect, because it had heard him. And on some fundamental level, it understood that he was brash enough to address it as an equal.
He centered himself as quickly as he could, focused his mental energy, and projected the full weight of his own graal into his next word.
“Dari.”
As he spoke the syllables aloud and in his mind, as he heard his call reverberate around them, he focused on an image of Dari as he knew her, and willed that image to be reality.
The Stregan didn’t change, except to pull its fearsome mouth wider. Hooked teeth flashed, and more smoke and flames tumbled forth. On this side of the Veil, the flames seemed to crackle in slow motion, with a sound like dozens of trees being bashed in half at the trunks.
Aron shoved back his own fears, lest he make them as real as the dragon he faced. “Dari.”
This time, he spoke with even more force.
The Stregan still didn’t react to his command, and when the flames struck him, he felt a wicked, terrifying heat that didn’t kill him only because Blath had hold of his physical body. On some level, Aron could sense that the color in the Sabor’s skin was more than just pigment, but something like a repelling force or charge, dissipating the effects of Stregan fire.
For now. The shield was definitely waning.
Panic competed with determination as Aron once more gathered his essence for counterattack. He let instinct guide him and threw his awareness forward, much as Tia Snakekiller had struck at him with her dangerous hood snake illusion. A harsh, hot jolt told Aron his energy had made contact with that of the Stregan before him—an instant before a crushing pressure on his essence nearly exploded his mind like an egg beneath a massive, falling stone.
He hurled his will against the multicolored pressure with the entire force of his being, and his whole mind insisted, “Dari!”
At the same instant, he imagined himself reaching inside the great dragon, finding the soul of the girl he wanted, the girl he knew, seizing hold of her shoulders, and hauling her straight out of the scales and teeth and wings and flames threatening to consume him.
He touched something—what, he couldn’t say—
And his mind blasted outward in fragments of light and bright color and terrible, hissing fire—
And there was nothing now, nothing but flying, so high Aron knew he would never touch the ground again.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
ARON
Cool water trickled through his thick lips, and Aron woke feeling like every bone in his body had been rendered to liquid, then re-formed at strange angles. This troubled him, but only marginally, as he was grateful to wake at all. For a moment, he imagined he was back at the Ruined Keep, but then he realized there were no walls around him, and he was still outside.
His skin and mind tingled with the warmth of foreign energy, and he realized Blath had been ministering to him with some powerful and deep healing graal. The Sabor woman was bending over him, covered by nothing but the burned tatters of the brown robe she typically wore on their outings from Triune. Moments later, he felt almost whole again, save for some slight swelling and cracking in his bottom lip.
Cool blue light broke the gray clouds above Blath’s head, signaling dawn breaking across the northern reaches of Eyrie. “He’s awake.” She stood and walked away from him, not bothering to clutch the tatters of her robes. She was already shifting, with streaks of yellow-golden fur forming along her limbs as she moved. “We should leave now.”
Aron’s mind turned sluggishly toward the person next to him.
Dari.
With no scales, no fangs, and no gouts of fire spilling from her pale, pressed lips.
She was only Dari again, oddly small in her scorched, smudged gray robes. She was hugging herself and shivering, her skin a sickly ash color, and her dark hair hung in disarray about her face and shoulders.
When she looked at Aron, she seemed both ashamed and angry. “Never take a chance like that again. I cannot understand how you’re still alive.”
“I had to do it.” He straightened himself on the ground and tried to look as certain as he sounded. “You’re the one who told me there would be times when it served the greater good to use my legacy. It was either die in one fashion, or risk death in the other. Besides, you might have regretted roasting me and Blath, too, and making a meal of us both.”
Dari frowned at him. “I wouldn’t have harmed you.”
Aron heard the worry and doubt in her tone, or his graal perceived it, but he didn’t challenge her. “The bandits?”
“Gone.” She closed her eyes and rested her head atop her drawn knees. “No sign of them, according to Blath. It’s as if they vanished into the dirt, rocks, and trees.”
Aron said nothing, but wondered what Blath might have done with the bandits, if she had found them. Perhaps it was better not to ask that question.
“No one will believe a handful of rogues,” Dari said as if she hoped to convince herself. Her lips pursed as a few yards away, Blath finished her transition. “No Fae has ever been able to command a Stregan, Aron.”
“That we know of,” he countered, wondering if his care and concern for Dari gave him some sort of advantage she didn’t expect. “In the old times, such things might have occurred. We did live in peace once, Fae and Fury.”
He remembered what Platt had told him, about how the two races needed each other, about neither being whole without the other, and felt like he understood this even more.
Dari got to her feet, still seeming drained to half of her usual presence. As she walked toward Blath, her gait was stiff. Aron forced himself to get up and follow her, feeling just as awkward and sore as she looked.
When he reached her, he felt compelled to tell her the one lingering truth still troubling him. “I thought I understood, about you and Kate and what you are, especially after meeting with Platt—but I didn’t.”
Dari reached Blath and placed her palm against one furry should
er. She didn’t look at him. “I know. You didn’t, and Stormbreaker doesn’t. That’s something I should remember.”
The sadness and resignation in her words made Aron want to reach out and take hold of her, but he couldn’t seem to move. He hadn’t meant that her Stregan form put him off, only that he better grasped how important it was to locate Kate, before someone did manage to employ her powers for their own ends.
Dari leaped upward and took her position behind Blath’s neck before Aron could form the right words, and a few moments later, he gave up trying. Dari had almost killed him, but she had no less effect on him now than before.
With now-practiced ease, Aron used Blath’s bent back knee to climb to her broad back. It was the next part that gave him trouble, the sliding forward and easing into position behind Dari, then gripping her waist as Blath raised her huge wings to fly them out of Dyn Cobb.
As wind blasted against his face, his senses, his very essence, he forced himself to keep his hands perfectly still, lest she take offense to any of his movements.
Why do I torture myself?
And yet how would I even begin to change what I feel for her?
• • •
The sun was bright in the morning sky by the time Blath landed in the Den courtyard. It was so late that the fael’feis was finished as well, and most of Stone was already about the day’s business. Blath had flown low and wide the last length they had traveled, to avoid villages and passersby and entered Stone with the High Master’s towers for cover, but her muscles had grown tighter with each moment they were so exposed. When they rejoined each other in the courtyard after changing into fresh clothing, Blath’s first words to Dari were, “Our trips need to stretch overnight, and we should shelter during the next day. We cannot take such chances so frequently.”
All the aches in Aron’s muscles intensified when he saw Dari’s wordless, pained surrender to this pronouncement. He wished Blath would head inside to the Den and leave him to talk with her, to see if he might finally find the comforts that would matter to Dari—but he had no fortune in that respect. Blath seemed opposed to leaving them alone for long stretches, except on hunts for Kate, and even then, she was overly attentive the moment they returned to her sight. He sought to catch the Sabor woman’s eye to try to signal her to give them some privacy, but she seemed opposed to that, too.
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