The Dragons of Summer

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “No,” I answered, taking charge as Captain of Ordnung’s defense. “And it’s coming this way. It doesn’t matter if we close the gates, the walls won’t keep it out. If you won’t do this, Zynda, then we need to come up with other options fast or everyone here will die.”

  “I’d be happier with an enemy I could cleave with my sword,” Kral growled.

  “Or take apart with daggers,” Jepp added.

  Ursula threw them both an appreciative look. Something settled inside me, a realignment of sorts, that we were all the same side. Hlyti had guided my footsteps to this time and place—and these people—but so too had it brought Kral. Two points of the triangle, bound together.

  With a third still out there. For the first time in years and years, I entertained hope that Jenna might also find her way here. If we survived this.

  “I’ll do it,” Zynda decided. “Though I’m unprepared, so it will take a bit to build the necessary power to clear an area this big.”

  She became a hummingbird again. Jewel bright, she zoomed to the watchtower, where hopefully Dary wouldn’t be too startled.

  Ursula shaded her eyes, staring up at the tower that now held two women. “She didn’t wait for instructions,” she complained.

  “She knows what to do,” Marskal murmured beside her, mirroring her stance. “Your Majesty,” he added belatedly, then grinned at whatever Ursula muttered under her breath at him.

  “She’s used a lot of magic today already,” Ursula noted, a hint of worry in it, “lots of shapeshifting and healing.” She deliberately didn’t look at me. “I hope she’s up to this.”

  “She is,” Marskal replied definitely. “Dragon form has launched her into a new level of ability—beyond what any of us might have predicted.”

  “Is that so?” Ursula looked over to me at last, raising her brows. “Finally, some good news.”

  I smiled back at her.

  She and Marskal fell into conversation, discussing countermeasures should Zynda’s effort fail. He summoned several Hawks and they sent them running with messages to secure people in parts of the castle without outside egress.

  I scanned the strange battlefield, the fallen on the ground, the prowling smoke creatures. Groups of guards herded people toward town, giving rides to stragglers. A cadre of messengers on fast horses burst from the castle, moving too fast for the smoke monsters to catch them, the dust of their wake quickly settling, unlike the unnatural ash. We could take Ursula out of the castle the same way. I glanced at her, taking in her wide stance on the walls of Ordnung, in her element as she made fast decisions and crisply issued orders.

  I’d never pry her out of her castle either.

  The only people left on the road were the three young women, who were clearly winded but still struggling up the incline to the castle gates. A cloud of clawed creatures emerged from a copse of trees, advancing on them from the side. All the other troops were engaged elsewhere, leaving them unprotected.

  Measuring their relative speeds—the exhausted young ladies in their fancy slippers not meant for such rigor, and the billowing humanoid ash figures—I knew the women would never make it.

  I couldn’t stand by and do nothing. With Ursula focused on protecting Ordnung, I stepped back, then shimmied down the nearest ladder and ran.

  With any luck, I’d be back before she noticed I’d left.

  ~ 14 ~

  I bolted through the gates, with a snapping gesture recruiting two more gate guards to accompany me. They obeyed with practiced alacrity. With the incline in our favor, we raced for the young women. Their faces red with exertion, they cried out when they saw us, holding out their arms in stark fear.

  Younger than I’d thought. No more than girls, perhaps in their first pretty grown-up dresses, thinking they’d have nothing more than a sweet summer afternoon outing. That’s what they should’ve had. Nothing more than seeing the market and flirting in their summer frocks. Not this vile attack.

  The two guards with me each seized a gratefully squealing girl, swinging her into their arms and running for the castle. The third girl, in a white dress with pink rosebuds, lagged behind. As I ran toward her, I saw she’d lost her slippers—or they’d fallen off in pieces, because she’d run her feet raw, blood and dust caking her feet.

  The smoke creatures reached her as I did, the oily ash cloud snaking around her, the distorted faces snarling silently. She screamed, a piercing sound of agony and despair. Reaching into the cloud, I tried to yank her free of it by seizing her wrist, the resistance as strong as if actual men held her. She cried piteously as I wrenched her shoulder.

  Thrice curse it. Because I had to try, I swung my broadsword over her head through the murky figures. It passed through them as if I sliced at nothing, the unimpeded swing nearly taking me off balance. Recovering, with no time to sheathe my sword as the girl now hung limp in the cluster of shadow shapes, I tossed it aside and reached in for her.

  The smoked slimed over my skin, the ash like grit in my eyes and nose. Memories and emotions not my own filled my mind—violence, despair, and a grinding need to reach Ordnung, to devour the living. My lungs strained for air, my heart booming in my chest, struggling to pump blood growing thick and oily, as I wrestled the creatures for the girl.

  Digging in, using all the strength I’d built over the years, fiercely glad for Kelleah’s healing that had me in top form, I took one step back, then another, dragging the girl back. Some of the writhing creatures came with us, but the others dug in also. Good for me as that allowed my head at least to pop free, and I took a deep breath of clean air, like a drowning man barely able to push his face above water.

  The girl had gone entirely limp, dead weight in my arms, and I struggled back with all my might.

  A warrior’s howl cut through the thick silence, the oily smoke parting around me as a sword cleaved it. The Deyrr creatures released their grip so abruptly that I fell back, the girl cradled in my arms.

  “Give her to me,” a woman in silver armor demanded.

  I blinked at her in confused disbelief. Kaedrin, warrior priestess of Danu. Her brown eyes snapped with impatience in her lean face. “Give her to me,” she repeated.

  I relaxed my hold, and Kaedrin snatched up the girl, taking off at a run. Kelleah waited a safe distance away, wheeling to match Kaedrin’s stride, already laying hands on the girl, a green light emanating out.

  Skull throbbing, heart still pounding and lungs tightly laboring for breath, I tried to stand but barely managed to sit. Until I saw Ursula.

  A whirlwind of black and silver, rubies shining like beacons of fire, she spun faster than a hummingbird’s wings, slicing again and again at the increasingly indistinct figures. With each pass of her sword, the vaporous shapes lost human form, reduced to swirling clouds. The ruby on her sword hilt glowed with light brighter than dragon fire—but that seemed to burn the ash away as she defended me.

  I struggled to my feet, trying to call for her, no breath to do it with. Reaching for her.

  Ursula.

  Essla.

  Danu save her.

  Even as I thought it, a deep blue glow washed over me, the feel of it somehow the same as the depths of Zynda’s eyes. My lungs abruptly cleared, strength returning to my limbs.

  The blue wave of magic expanded, pushing out until it blended with the deep blue midsummer sky. With a palpable pop, it vanished again, leaving the fields clear. The taint of ash gone again, so only golden light of the long, light-filled evening ahead remained to fall over the growing fields and ripe orchards.

  Abruptly bereft of an opponent, Ursula lurched much as I had, gracefully regaining her footing in a spin that brought her to face me, a wild expression on her face. One that crumpled into relief when I opened my arms to her.

  I grunted as she launched herself at me, a lithe arrow of a woman, bracing myself to absorb the impact as she rained kisses on my face, wrapping her long legs around my waist and clinging to me with all the considerable ferocity in her
.

  “I could fucking kill you,” she said between kisses. “What in Danu’s freezing tits were you thinking?”

  “That I had to do something,” I said. I stopped her with a long kiss, waiting until some of the tension dissolved in her body and she relaxed in the surety of my embrace. Then looking her in the eye, I offered a rueful smile. “I couldn’t just stand there and do nothing.”

  “I know.” The knowledge showed in her steely gaze, and she sighed heavily. “You wouldn’t be you if you could.”

  “But what in Danu were you thinking?” I growled, letting my fear for her turn into righteous anger. “You had no business coming after me. The High Throne comes first!”

  She met my gaze evenly. “It should. I know that in my head. But in my heart, it’s not true. I’ll never be able to just stand there and do nothing if you’re in danger.”

  I laughed a little at how neatly she threw my words back in my face, my own heart squeezing at the staggering impact of her declaration.

  “I wouldn’t be me if I could,” she added, with a quirk of a smile.

  Unable to frame a reply, I kissed her long and deep. When we came up for air, I set her on her feet and surveyed the area. We both retrieved our swords.

  “Why did your sword work and mine didn’t?” I wondered aloud.

  “Salena’s rubies, I think,” she replied. “The thought came into my mind, bright and clear, that the rubies would disperse the magic. I needed magic and that was the only thing I could think of.”

  “You think Salena infused them with some sort of defensive magic?”

  “Why not? The Star certainly is magic. And our mother was very specific about those rubies being distributed among her daughters. We know Salena saw far into the future.”

  I took her hand and we turned toward Ordnung’s white towers, climbing the hill together. People streamed past us, going to collect the fallen.

  “You’re going to marry me tonight, yes?” Ursula asked, though it sounded more like a demand than a question.

  “It’s not the best decision for the throne, for the alliance with Dasnaria,” I cautioned her.

  She threw me a blazing look of scorn. “Do you have any other objections, besides that?”

  “No.” I raised her hand and turned it over, brushing a kiss over her callused palm, delighting in the shiver that ran through her. “In this, as in all things, I am yours to command.”

  ~ Epilogue ~

  “You ever were the luckiest of us,” Kral commented, signing his name with a flourish. “Landing in honey, after all your protests to the contrary.”

  I grunted in non-reply, hoping he’d drop the subject. No such luck because Kral’s grin sharpened knowingly, fully his namesake the shark, scenting blood in the water. My blood.

  He leaned in, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and switching to Dasnarian. “Tell me, rabbit—you had this planned all along. All that Elskastholrr nonsense. It was all part of an elaborate scheme to get you to this point, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course.” I spread my hands at the spare chapel of Danu, lavishly heaped with summer blossoms and dripping with garlands, the air sweet as honey. “I intuited decades ago that Dasnaria would go to war with an obscure coalition of kingdoms where an eight-year-old princess would end up as High Queen. I figured back then that if I studied the art of Skablykyrr, I could work my way into her confidence and one day manipulate her into marrying me as part of an alliance to fend off conquest.”

  “Exceedingly clever,” Kral agreed, clapping me hard enough on the back that I had to brace myself. Then he sobered. “It might not work.”

  “No.” I scanned the small assembly, everyone in their finery, awaiting only Ursula’s arrival. Kaedrin prayed quietly at Danu’s altar, ready to perform the ceremony. She hadn’t explained her abrupt reappearance, except to say that Danu had guided her to us because she’d been needed. The empire required only a contract, and Kral and I had drafted one—to his infinite amusement, as it bore only superficial resemblance to a traditional Dasnarian marriage contract—but Ursula and I would be wed by a priestess of the goddess of warriors as befit us both. “It likely won’t satisfy Hestar, but Ursula is determined and I cannot refuse her.”

  Kral lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “You wouldn’t be a Konyngrr if you’d stand back and allow another to take your woman, no matter the stakes. It is, after all, a grand Dasnarian tradition to make exceptionally foolhardy political choices for the sake of love. It seems your Ursula will fit right into the family. And this will surprise Hestar, so that makes it even better.”

  “Will you be willing to lie and say the wedding—and this contract—predate his offer?”

  Kral showed a smile full of white teeth. “Oh, baby brother, I will savor every moment of defying and lying to Hestar. That fucker.”

  I laughed, the amusement full-hearted, and I clapped him on the back, satisfied to see him lurch forward before he caught himself. “I’m glad you’re here,” I told him, surprising myself that I meant it.

  “I am, too.” He sounded subdued, uncharacteristically so, and met my gaze. “I want to offer apology, for what I did to you and Jenna.”

  My heart caught, as it always did at the sound of her name, even though it had been said aloud so many times today that it should have lost its potency. It seemed Kral and I stood together again at that inn, Jenna a white ghost between us, all of us so painfully young.

  “I forgive you.” As I spoke the formal words, something seemed to let go inside me. “None of us are who we were then. All joking aside, none of us could have foreseen where we’d end up. Certainly not here, like this.”

  “True,” he mused thoughtfully. “We cannot retrace those footsteps…and yet, I wish I could make amends with Jenna. I can’t give her back what was stolen, but I wish her happy and would do whatever she asked of me. I owe her that.”

  “Jenna?”

  We both turned to see Kaedrin standing there, a quizzical look on her face. The silver-haired warrior woman looked between the two of us. “I apologize for interrupting and eavesdropping. I don’t understand Dasnarian, but I heard a name I know and wondered. I knew a young woman, long ago, named Jenna. Not a common name in the Thirteen Kingdoms, but she was also Dasnarian.”

  This pivotal day hadn’t finished with me, apparently, holding yet one more shock to turn my blood to water. I stared at the priestess, unable to summon thought. Fortunately, Kral had no such issues. “Where did you know her?”

  “She trained for a while at the Temple of Danu in Ehas,” Kaedrin said. “My sister priestess brought her there—Kaja, who was Jepp’s mother.” She gestured toward Jepp, who stood conversing with Marskal, both of them smart-looking in the formal uniform of the Hawks.

  “Ehas?” I repeated, able to grasp at least that nugget of information. Surely Jenna hadn’t been in Ehas all this time. And at the Temple of Danu. It didn’t bear considering.

  “Yes.” Kaedrin returned her gaze to me, her face clear and unlined, despite her age. “It had to be, oh, more than twenty years ago, but I remember Jenna. So lovely, so determined to learn to be a warrior of Danu.”

  Now Kral gaped along with me. “She became a warrior of Danu?” I asked, trying to imagine it.

  Kaedrin smiled, enjoying our bemusement. “Indeed. She was a dancer—I don’t know if you knew that—and many dances have their roots in martial forms. Kaja taught her to use knives instead of jewels within the forms she knew and I helped fill in the holes.”

  At last I could move. “Kaedrin,” I said, and her eyes widened at the urgency in my tone, “is she still in Ehas?”

  She looked rueful, shaking her head. “No. She only stayed a short time. She was running from something, which I suspect you know, so she changed her appearance and her name.”

  Disappointment, a sodden and familiar weight, returned to fill the spaces lightened by hope. “No wonder I could never find her,” I commented.

  Kral’s hand fell heavy on my sho
ulder, and he looked at me with shared feeling. “It was too much to hope,” he said, “that we might recover her after so long.”

  Kaedrin watched us, a canniness in her gaze. “I know where she went,” she offered.

  Slowly, afraid of shattering the fragile possibility, we both turned to look at the priestess, cautious, Kral’s hand still on my shoulder. Neither of us seemed able to ask the most important question.

  “At least, I sent her news of Kaja’s passing, and I have reason to believe she received it,” Kaedrin added that last enigmatically. “Do you swear before Danu that you mean her no harm?”

  I went down on one knee without a thought. To my surprise, Kral joined me in the same movement. In one voice, we swore it together.

  Kaedrin smiled with a soft radiance unusual for a follower of the sharp-eyed goddess. “I think Kaja would be pleased. She always promised to continue her service as Danu’s handmaiden, to help us along as she saw fit. I shall give you the information, Harlan, as a wedding gift. And her new name: Ivariel.”

  Ivariel. I took it in, a name I could use like a balm to heal those old wounds, so recently purged.

  Kaedrin’s eyes lifted to the chapel entrance. “Time to begin,” she said.

  I rose to my feet and turned, absorbing the final stunning blow of the day—this one a punch of glory. Ursula stood framed in the chapel doorway, a vision of bright light and surpassing loveliness.

  She wore a gown I’d never seen—a spectacular work of art, made entirely of finely worked metal feathers, all in shades of bronze, copper, and gold. The high collar rose to frame her long throat, a ruff of the metallic feathers radiating out from a deep bloodred at their base that matched her hair and picked up the gleam of Salena’s rubies in her necklace and at her ears. From there the gown flowed in gleaming layers, sweeping down into a long, trailing skirt. Zynda, also dressed in a coppery gown, finished arranging Ursula’s train and, giving her a kiss and whispering something that made her cousin smile, slipped aside for me.