Though tense, Sutra was able to hold himself back. Julian, however, lurched from the ground so suddenly that the guard’s hands loosened enough for Julian to pull himself to a standing position and lunge at Iryse, who sidestepped his attempt and laughed as though Julian were a tiny little rat under his paw.
The guard yanked Julian back down. Iryse clicked his tongue. “No, no, no . . . that is not how a subject should act under his king.” His feral eyes raked over Julian, then Colette, before resting on Sathryn and Etzimek. He looked as if he were ready to say something to them, but then his eyes lit up and he turned to one of the guards at his side. “Wait! I almost forgot—will you bring up that other boy for me? I was only keeping him alive for this moment.”
The guard nodded and pushed himself through the crowd. A moment later, he returned with a tall young man with his face so badly bludgeoned that Sathryn almost did not recognize him.
Colette saw him and drew in a breath. “Navier,” she whispered.
Navier’s black hair hung in sweaty strings about his face, and the light of all the torches washed over his beaten face. Both of his eyes were swollen and purple, as were his lips and spots along his jaw. The bruises and cuts scattered along his body were bleeding, as were the nails of his fingers.
“Yes,” Iryse said in the brash, bold voice of his. “You are right. This is your little friend Navier, and I think he has become my friend as well. He was of so much help to me when it came to unraveling everything about each and every one of you—and I only had to beat it out of him. I know all your strengths, all your weaknesses, all your history.”
His eyes peered down at Julian. “Julian Ajasek. You have sharp canines because you’re a crossbreed. You had a younger sister, but she died at ten months old. And the sight in your left eye is bad because of an infection you had when you were young. Colette—your father is a lying snake, for one. You are terrified of tight spaces, and your mother was locked into an asylum twelve years ago and you haven’t heard a word from her since.” His villainous smile was straight out of a nightmare. “You can no longer hide from me.”
The guard threw Navier to the ground.
“There is no more hiding! No more secrets! It’s all out and in the open now!” Iryse shouted. He was panting, and his voice was no longer an eerie quiet. The night’s wind picked up, whipping his words through the air so that Sathryn couldn’t hear her own breathing.
Iryse stormed to Sutra and shoved him back. “You have gone too far!” he shouted. “You have crossed me, and you have snuck behind me, and you have betrayed me and all the brothers that trusted you. You have done nothing but doubt me! And all these years, I ignored it. I let you have your doubts, I let you sneak around, but now . . . You have undermined me. You have tried to sneak out prisoners. And I cannot let you have anymore! I’m stronger than you, smarter than you, more powerful than you! I deserve this rule!”
Sutra shoved away the swarm of sentries blocking Iryse. “Then be a man!” Sutra hissed. “And fight me! And we will see who deserves it more!”
Before Sutra could reach him, Iryse drew his own sword, and to Sathryn’s disbelief, dragged the blade across his own throat while he smiled in pleasure. Bright-red blood dripped down Iryse’s white shirt and onto the ground. Sutra stumbled back and stared at his brother the same way someone might stare at any person who had just drawn a sword across their throat for no reason.
But Iryse was still grinning. “See this, you rat!” he bellowed at Sutra. “Nothing you can do will harm me.”
Then, his skin, once a rich brown, changed to the same warm gold as the crown that fell from his head, and his clothes now fit too tight. Sathryn hurled herself backward, and the guard didn’t even move to stop her, as his eyes were fixed on Iryse’s growing body. At least that meant she wasn’t imagining things, but it also meant Iryse and his brothers’ title rang true.
Dragon Kings.
His nails lengthened and sharpened until they were thick, long claws.
The other brothers were changing too. The taller twin’s skin became as silver as a spoon, the other twin’s skin becoming the same scarlet as the drug Sathryn had seen in the jars. The last brother’s skin darkened to a matte, navy blue. And to her horror, Sutra changed as well—his skin glowed purple.
Their growth heated the night and stretched the kings’ features from human to reptilian. Their skin was no longer skin at all, but rippling sets of scales, sharp and knifelike along their heads and rounded like saucers along their colored bodies. Their once-human heads had lengthened to five reptilian ones: one red, one gold, one silver, one blue, and one purple. Their mouths had stretched to a powerful pair of long, snapping jaws armed with rows of sharp teeth and a forked tongue tasting the air. Their eyes had gone from circles of vivid color in seas of white to pairs of blank, beady, black obsidian rocks shrunken into the sides of their spiked heads.
The kings’ growth peaked when wings unfolded from their backs and brushed against the moon’s gossamer rays, blowing dirt and sand across the land as they beat the sky and pulling the kings’ feet from the ground and into the air. The earth below their hovering bodies trembled and shook gray-cloaked guards to the ground in a swirl of dust, including Sathryn’s own guard.
For a few moments, everyone was so taken aback that no one moved; no one said a word. Sathryn could only stare up and absorb the magnificence. Even the brothers themselves, now as tall as the tallest trees and many times more ferocious than they had been before, seemed both amazed and drained of energy and therefore remained motionless for quite a while.
But the silence and tranquility only lasted for a moment.
Iryse, the bright-golden dragon, was the first to rouse himself from the temporary calm the dragons were in. He shook his large, spiked head. His arms, now resting on the ground as another set of legs, cracked as if shifting in their place, and the curved, black talons that hung off of his—fingers?—clicked against the ground. He blinked his eyes. He looked around. Then, he raised one strong, spiked arm and slashed it in the air.
The claw scraped against Sutra, the purple creature who had roused after him, followed by the rest of the brothers in all their furiously bright colors, screeching and groaning as they woke.
The air was boiling and drenching Sathryn in sweat. She stood and ran past the dumbstruck rows of guards, some wavering on their feet and falling to the ground, most likely due to the waves of heat rolling off the dragons’ backs. She flung herself against the door to the castle only to find that it was still locked and cried out, striking the door with all the force she had out of pure anger. Everything was spiraling out of control so quickly that she felt as she had when the Beastmen raided Deadland and burned everything down in their wake, except now, the heat seemed inescapable. It was weighing her to the ground.
Someone grabbed her arm. She whipped around, unsheathing her sword with the intent of thrusting it into a guard, but it was Etzimek. Around him stood Colette at his right and Julian at his left, holding a body over his shoulder. Navier.
“Come on,” Etzimek shouted. The sound of earth-shattering groans from the kings filled her ears like cotton, and Etzimek’s voice barely pierced through.
She ran from the kings with Etzimek’s hand tight around hers. They had made it quite far toward the woods when another earsplitting noise bellowed through the air and to her ears, driving her, once again, to the ground. But unlike the low, white noise of guard cries and dragon grunts that all mixed together in a cloud of sound fog, this noise pierced through the air and didn’t stop—only grew.
Sathryn clamped her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. “What is that?” she shouted out. If not for the vibration in her throat, Sathryn would not have known she had even said a word—the blare of sound was too loud, too low, too piercing.
She opened her eyes just in time to see the purple dragon crack open its long, scaly mouth and spew out a billow of black smoke, followed by a stream of yellow flames. It fanned across the
brothers’ faces, blinding them more than charring them, which gave Sutra time to move toward where Sathryn and the others were crouched in the underbrush. The fire dissipated and left only smoke, and the fire’s absence dropped the blazing temperatures back to a warmth that didn’t sear her skin. And Sutra himself, though warm, was tolerable. His head dipped low to meet Sathryn, and his body lay as flat on the ground as it could get.
“He wants us to get on,” Sathryn said. Glancing at the remaining brothers, she found that the cloud of smoke encircling their heads and impairing their eyesight was dwindling as the kings swung their bodies through the smoke. “And we should hurry.”
Whether she trusted Sutra now was no longer a concern. She raced toward his purple body and climbed on, using his limbs and wings for assistance. Colette climbed on next, then Etzimek. Julian was clamoring up Sutra’s scaly body, but Navier slowed him down.
Sitting on Sutra’s back and gripping one of his horns for balance, Sathryn glanced behind her. The four brothers were now alert and devoid of smoky halos. Their eyes scanned the terrain and spotted Sutra’s body past the sea of torches in the crowd of guards that had still managed to stay alive after so much heat and sound. The kings tromped toward Sutra, each foot sending shockwaves through the ground.
“They see us!” Sathryn shouted out. She leaned over the side to look for Julian, but he was only halfway up. At this rate, he would never make it in time, and Sutra could see that too. His large, lazy head was turned back and focused on his nearing brothers. So once Julian was farther up on his wing, Sutra rose and walked slowly throughout the land, crushing small trees and shrubs with the weight of his steps. Getting used to his swaying, jerking movements was like getting used to the horse’s movements—except right now, she felt dizzier on Sutra’s back than she had the horse, and had to wait before she could lean over the side to help pull Julian up without gagging.
When another wave of boiling heat and the low groans pierced the air again, Julian had hardly made it to Sutra’s back. Sutra’s wings beat the air as soon as Julian, heaving and holding Navier in his arms, sat and gripped the horns lining Sutra’s back. As the wings picked up speed and Sutra walked faster, Sathryn crawled over to Julian and sat next to him.
Just as the air became too hot to bear, Sathryn’s stomach dropped. She looked toward the four brothers, thinking that perhaps the heat brewing from them was causing the pressure.
But when she turned back, she found the world falling away from her, like it was sinking into itself and they were launching upward.
They were flying.
Sutra’s purple wings no longer flapped, but stuck straight out so that the wind picked up underneath them and shot them higher into the sky. And for a moment, the chase away from their deaths seemed nothing more than a serene sail through the black ocean of night. The stars seemed larger than before, while below her, the castle walls were shorter and no longer menacing. The higher they soared, the smaller everything below seemed—the trees shrank away to nothing more than thick blades of grass, and the kings beginning to flap their own wings on the ground were splotches of bright color.
All four kings then launched themselves into the sky, fanning themselves out to surround Sutra everywhere but right in front of them. Sathryn screamed and rapped her hands against Sutra’s back. At the rate they flew, they would never escape fast enough.
Sutra’s pacific, sailing wings became hysterical as the dragons gained speed behind him. They broke the barrier of low, foggy clouds above their heads, shading Sathryn’s sight of the ground below, and the gold dragon pushed itself forward, quicker than the rest, hissing out torrents of sweltering heat and flames that threatened to scorch Sathryn’s face. She flattened against the surface of Sutra’s wings in panic, glancing back to Julian or Colette or Etzimek or anyone for help.
Why wasn’t Sutra blowing fire back at his brothers?
She yelled this to Julian, who was crouched beside her, bow and arrow in hand and Navier beside him. “I’m not sure,” he shouted. “Maybe he’s weak.“ Arrows flew from his bow in quick succession and stuck into the gold dragon’s side, but it didn’t seem to hurt the dragon at all.
Sathryn felt pressure build on her back again as Sutra careened over a thicket of trees at the last second. When he again plateaued, she threw herself to his back and forced bile back down into her stomach. From somewhere behind her, she heard a crash through her nausea. “Julian—what was—th-that?”
Panting, Julian pressed himself against Sutra’s back beside Sathryn. “Three of the kings flew into the trees back there.”
Sathryn craned her neck to look, but the queasiness in her stomach refused to quell.
She could, however, still see the gold dragon on her right. Iryse lurched toward them and rammed into Sutra’s side, driving him off course and into a tree and sending Sathryn careening toward the edge of Sutra’s body.
Her hands flailed, searching for a grip but unable to find anything more than Sutra’s slick scales and silky wings. A scream erupted from her throat just as she felt her feet dangling over the edge.
Someone caught her arm.
She looked up and was met with a pair of mismatched eyes and fiery-red hair.
With one solid yank, Sathryn was again resting against Sutra’s back with Colette panting beside her, a strip of boiling skin seared onto her arm.
Had Sutra not been flying like a bird without a wing, Sathryn would have thanked Colette and then worried about her burn. But Sutra was teetering, and Iryse kept driving himself against Sutra’s body and blowing plumes of smoke in his eyes.
Julian notched an arrow in his bow and aimed for Iryse. “These arrows are tipped with poison,” he shouted over the wind. “It might not kill them, but at this point I’m just hoping they weaken—” He broke off his sentence to take in deep breaths of air, and it wasn’t just exertion robbing him of his breath—Iryse slammed into them again, this time from underneath.
Sutra beat his wings faster and pointed his nose for the low layer of clouds. When they broke through the fog, Sathryn found them over a cliff and black waters made silver by the moon. “Where are we?” she called back.
Julian let another bow fly. “I think we’re over the Ebony River—but that would mean we’re no longer in—”
Another wave of heat passed right above their backs. Iryse was beside them again, following Sutra’s nose dive with his own. Sutra himself was getting so unnervingly close to the water that droplets of water leapt from the surface and onto her skin as Sutra skipped down the river.
Suddenly, Sutra shot upward again and wrenched Sathryn’s stomach to her toes, lurching to the left toward a rock face rising from the water. And just as she thought he would slam into the rock and throw them over the side of his body, he lurched to the right, dipped through the water, and skyrocketed back up toward the clouds. When Sathryn could finally look down again, she saw Iryse ram into the rock and sink into the water like a stone.
Another screech echoed from far behind them. Julian turned with his bow drawn. “The silver one is too far away to catch up to us,” he said, throwing himself to Sutra’s back beside Sathryn. He smiled at her and closed his eyes.
It seemed like hours before the heat died down from around them, though it most likely wasn’t that long at all. The silver dragon was hundreds of feet behind them, and he eventually slammed into another thicket of trees where the budding spring branches catapulted themselves into the dragon’s face and knocked him back farther behind Sutra than he had been before. But as Sutra slowed—no other dragons anywhere in sight and therefore no dragons urging him to fly faster—she saw fringes of black darkening his massive wings, reddening splotches over his tail and body where his own brothers had crisped him with their fire and hot air.
Sutra dipped his nose down through the low film of clouds once again, though there was no longer a river below them. A village awoke before her eyes, despite the moon above and the dark skies. Sathryn watched lights flicker on in t
he windows of homes smaller than those she had just seen in Kingsland, lights most likely lit by sleep-deprived citizens curiously watching the body of a large dragon soar across their skies and wondering why a dragon would be doing so in the middle of the night.
The wind no longer whipped across her face. Through their hectic ride, the wind had been driving itself across her skin until it felt like leather whips and brick walls against her face rather than torrents of air. Her skin felt raw and burned by it, and her hair had received the brunt of its force. It was tangled and knotted across her head, sticking up wildly in any direction it wanted.
She picked her face up from Sutra’s back and looked around. Julian sat beside her, tugging his hands through his own knotted and messy hair. Colette stood tall and fearless on Sutra’s back and scanned the night surrounding her as if she weren’t aware of the burn on her arm. Navier lay still in Julian’s lap, and Etzimek sat behind her near a splotch of Sutra’s burned skin, rubbing his arm in pain but also marveling at the beautiful lights below as if he couldn’t decide which was more important—his burn or the beauty.
“Etzimek?”
He tore his eyes from the torches being lit below. They were soaring closer and closer to the ground, and—perhaps Sathryn was imaging this—Sutra’s body was deflating like a hot-air lantern. “Yes?”
She pointed to his arm. “Is your arm okay?”
Etzimek laughed. His bare, red skin peered from a hole in his black sleeve. “I feel great!” he said with a smile.
Colette turned around to look at them all. “Julian . . . Etzimek . . . Sathryn,” she added, and to Sathryn’s surprise, there was a smile on her face. “We are alive.”
Sathryn smiled and glanced at Julian. He was smiling too. “We’re alive . . .” His hand drifted to Navier’s throat. Everyone saw the motion and waited, fearful of what Julian might say. But then his smile widened, and he moved Navier’s head from his lap and stood on Sutra like Colette did. His steps were cautious at first, but they soon became wild leaps across Sutra’s back.
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