“I can’t let you near him.” Marielle lifted the sword’s tip. It was only a pace away from her mother’s chest. Could she strike if she had to? She shook her head, her hands suddenly shaking at the thought as memories of Variena flooded her mind. Variena hugging her close when she wept as a small child. Variena feeding her sweets and telling her she was a good girl. Her sword wavered.
“You won’t hurt me,” Variena scoffed, striding past Marielle with a look of disdain.
“Wait!” Marielle called. Her hands were shaking, but she couldn’t let Variena free Tamerlan. She didn’t dare. “It’s not the same Legend that it was before. This one will tear you to pieces. You can’t go in there!”
Variena’s mouth twisted. “What are you going to do? Run me through with that sword just for looking at a man in my bedroom? Could you live with yourself if you did that?”
She’d won already. Marielle knew it from the sour taste on her tongue and she confirmed it by the scent of smugness rolling off Variena. Not regret for hurting her daughter. Just victory and pride.
“You’re my mother,” she pled, feeling foolish. What was she? Six years old again?
“Which is why you won’t hurt me,” Variena said with a scoffing smile.
Marielle cleared her throat, pushing back the tears that welled up. “So why are you so intent on hurting me? Won’t you trust me in this one thing? I’m only asking you to do what is best for you, too.”
Variena gave her a pitying look. “One day you’ll understand, child, that a woman has very few options when it comes to embracing power and a seat at the tables of men. When your chance comes, you have to take it. No matter what it costs. There are plenty of red door women who gave everything up to raise children, taking jobs as washerwomen and maids. Horrible, work-filled lives. They were wrinkled and worn before they were forty and died shortly after that. I gave you to the Scenters for a better future – not just for you, but for me, too. And I’d do it again. Just like I’ll sell your future if it’s all I have to get one for myself. No one hands you anything in life, Marielle. You only get what you take. And if you were any good at this, you’d already know that and be takin as much as you could from me.” She paused, considering. “This can be a lesson for you. Learn to be a strong woman and stop letting mindless compassion rule you. Stop being one of those stupid women who scrub clothes until they die.”
She spun on her heel and strode through the door into the room of cages and a moment later, Marielle heard the latch of the door to the bedroom open. Betrayal welled up in her like a tide and she laughed at herself – a terrible bitter laugh. Why did she expect anything else? Variena had betrayed her again and again. Why did she think this would be any different?
She looked to the door where Variena had gone and back to the one she’d come through.
Marielle needed to meet back with Etienne at the rendezvous point. But if she left Variena with Tamerlan –
Her mother’s scream pierced the air before she’d made a decision. She leapt for the doorway, dodging through the room of golden cages as the birds screamed their defiance, and bursting into the bedroom beyond. She made it just in time to see Tamerlan break her mother’s neck with his freshly freed hands.
She never should have hesitated. She should have killed him like he’d asked.
She didn’t hesitate now. She lunged with the sword, plunging it into his thigh, and darting back to lunge a second time. She had it through his ribs before he could drop Variena. The look of shock on his face nearly ruined her.
She didn’t dare stop. She lunged again, but he grabbed the sword by the blade, not even noticing as it shredded his own palm when he ripped it from her grasp.
She was no fool. She turned and ran, pelting through the room of birds, her boots loud on the dressed stone floor. Feathers and shrieks filled the air as she fled into the study, slamming the door behind her. There was no lock. She ran to the bookcase, snatching up the book that wedged the door open.
Tamerlan burst into the study with a roar.
Marielle couldn’t help the scream that tore from her lips as she ran into the secret passageway, pulling up her scarf as she sped through the thick dust, kicking up clouds of it all around her in the dark. She couldn’t see a thing. The stairs would be coming up soon and she’d fall right down –
The ground bucked and she was thrown through the air.
Ooops. That’s quite the current in the air over the ocean. Pleasant, but a touch turbulent.
She didn’t know what ‘turbulent’ meant and she didn’t care. She was tumbling down the stairs, hard wood hitting her shoulder, her knee, her ribs, her back.
“Ooof,” the breath knocked out of her when she slammed into the floor at the bottom of the steps, cracking her chin so hard that she tasted blood.
She rolled immediately, stumbling blearily to her feet and fighting them as they tried to pull her into two separate directions. She could hear feet on the wooden stairs, descending.
Come on, Marielle!
She skidded along the hallway, coughing and choking on dust and blood.
The sound of the footsteps had changed. He was at the bottom.
She slammed into a wall and bounced off, gasping for breath.
A faint light was ahead. She sped toward it, almost able to make out where her path was now.
It was growing brighter. Her breath was loud in her ears, gasping and choking. She was almost there. What was going on? Why was there a lit lantern on the floor at the crossroads of two passages? She slowed, running past it and then stopping. She didn’t remember which way to go. A hand reached out and pulled her into the shadows while another wrapped around her mouth. She bit back a scream and then she was shoved further into the shadows as the body of her kidnapper blocked her from the light.
She heard Tamerlan’s footsteps slowing.
Her attacker struck him with something before Marielle realized what was in his hand.
Tamerlan fell like a piece of one of the crumbling buildings on the back of the dragon.
“Nothing seems to be going as planned,” Etienne said wryly, stepping into the light. He was carrying a heavy iron chain that he’d hit Tamerlan with, and he hunched over slightly, his eyes tearing in the corners as if he were fighting a pain she couldn’t see. He kneeled on the fallen man, wrapping the chain roughly around his arms and torso. “I’m guessing you didn’t plan to stab him in the leg and belly, did you, Marielle?”
“I did not,” Marielle said softly. “But I had to.”
“Any idea where the dragon is flying to?” His voice was tense.
“Xytexyx.”
“Then I guess we’ll ride this out and hope that we survive it – again.”
26: Three Days
Etienne
Three days passed as slowly as a year anywhere else. Three days of hiding in cellars and under bridges. Three days where every face he saw was a living reminder of his failure. If he’d been better, more would have lived. If he’d been smarter, he would have found a way.
They’d managed to get all of the poor out of the city – surprisingly. All of the guilds, too. Etienne had been surprised by the power of the guilds to organize, but even more surprised by the sway the criminal groups had over the common folk. If he lived to rule again, he would remember that.
Which left many of the wealthy behind. But there were still innocents among them. Women and children who had not fled. And he felt every pair of their eyes on him as he went throughout the city explaining to them what had happened and what to expect.
He felt that almost as much as he felt the presence of Tamerlan – even though the man was unconscious – every time he came to visit Marielle where she hid under the palace bridge. She’d picked the place so she could be close to Jhinn. Who would have thought the boy would be stupid enough to ride a dragon a second time in a boat?
He’d dammed the moat in preparation for it when he could have been ferrying more people out of the city. It was hard for Etienne
not to question him about why he thought that was best, but every time he opened his mouth, he remembered that it was his own failing that had brought them here. If only he’d been smarter, he could have found a way to make them listen. If only Marielle hadn’t been in such a hurry ... though when he heard her story of how close it had come to her mother becoming a second addict to that woeful spice, he couldn’t blame her.
He snorted. They must be getting close, but it was hard to find a vantage point in the city safe enough to climb up and see the horizon. The dragon had been careful enough in his flight that most of the buildings were still standing – though all were crumbling.
Etienne had climbed up the central tower of the city twice – a process that left him trembling and weak with terror as it swayed wildly back and forth like a palm tree in a storm – and both times he’d seen only ocean, but the last time had been yesterday. Maybe they were closer now.
He felt a shift under his feet, almost as if the dragon had heard him, and he hurried to the nearest wall to hold on tight as the city slanted to the right. The streets went from horizontal to nearly vertical.
There was the view he’d been wanting. Now, he was cursing himself for wanting it. He slid into the nearby alley, barely avoiding carts tumbling down the streets and barrels rolling after them. He’d seen enough in that single glimpse – a white sprawling city on high rocks beside an ocean so blue it made the sky look pale. The green plants surrounding it on the other side were brighter than any he’d seen before. These were not the Dragonblood Plains. It didn’t even seem like the same world, the colors were so brilliant.
He nodded his head as he clung to the wall of the building in the safety of the alley. They’d made it. Now, they just had to survive the landing.
27: Landfall
Jhinn
Jhinn watched Marielle carefully spooning broth into Tamerlan’s lips. He swallowed it, though he murmured something unintelligible as he did it, banging his skull against the pillow she’d put between it and the stone. He did that all day long now.
There’d been fighting on the first day when he thrashed against the chains so hard that he fell in the canal and Marielle and Jhinn had to use all their strength to pull him back up to the ledge. It had been Tamerlan who had surfaced after that. And he’d begged them to push him back in the water. Begged them with tears in his eyes. Marielle had refused. And she’d pulled her knife when Jhinn tried to do what Tamerlan asked.
Which made him her enemy now, though the woman hardly seemed to know how to treat enemies. She guarded Tamerlan like a duck with one duckling. Feeding him, wrapping him in blankets, bathing his face with a damp cloth. Even when he was conscious and raving about how he would disembowel her and fill her with ungodly magic to harness the dragons and force them to the earth, she tended him. Even when he surfaced again as Tamerlan weeping and begging for death – when he made sense at all – she comforted him.
Sometimes, Jhinn didn’t know whether Tamerlan was the crazy one, or Marielle.
Or Jhinn, for that matter.
Because he kept hearing that stupid prophecy in his head over and over again, and that was not the way a sane man thought.
He will open the Bridge and in that day, it is only the Heir of Mer who may close it again. In retribution, the heir of Queen Mer will lay waste to the Legends and return the dragons to their place and they will be quelled forever, their fury kept at bay for all eternity. In that day the landless will walk on Land and will be called the Son of Mer. In his unfaithfulness, he will be faithful. In his damnation, he will bring salvation to all.
In his unfaithfulness, he will be faithful. In his damnation he will bring salvation to all.
That was him. The unfaithful. The damned. And yet ... if he could really believe this, if he could believe that the burden he’d taken on had been for everyone and that it had been what was needed to save them. If he could believe it, it would change everything.
He’d believed it in the moment that he’d done it. But now, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d betrayed everything he ever was, and it felt like rot in his mouth and weakness in his bones.
He’d been thinking about the prophecy as he tried to puzzle it out over the days that he warned the people and then sat here with craven Marielle and her even more insane husband.
Was the heir of Queen Mer the same as the Son of Mer? What if they were two people? And the more he thought about it, the more he thought that was the right way to read that. Otherwise, why change the wording? Why not make it ‘son’ or ‘heir’ all the way through?
What if Marielle was the heir of Queen Mer? Queen Mer had been a common woman obsessed with saving a people. Wasn’t that just like Marielle? Queen Mer had given them law and hope. Just like Marielle. And Marielle was the one slaying the avatars and returning the dragons to their place. It just seemed right.
Which only left two questions.
How was Marielle going to close the Bridge of Legends?
And was Jhinn the Son of Mer? After all, he’d saved Marielle so she could finish her work. Could that mean that he had been faithful in his unfaithfulness like the prophecy said, or was he just grasping at straws as he desperately hoped there would be redemption for him?
But these thoughts had softened him.
He didn’t hate Marielle anymore.
But he did worry about her.
Because the more he thought about it, the more he was certain that the only way they could ever close the Bridge of Legends would be with the death of Tamerlan. And though he’d promised his friend he’d never let him stop them from accomplishing this, he had to admit that he wasn’t ready to kill an innocent man for no other reason than that demons had broken his mind and taken his body.
He swallowed and watched Marielle as she sang a sweet song to Tamerlan – a child’s song, he thought, while the man jerked and twitched against the metal chains Etienne had wrapped all around his body.
The world tilted, suddenly, and Jhinn was swept out of view of Marielle and Tamerlan as he fought his gondola.
Stay upright! Stay upright!
Oar in hand he plunged it into the water, pulling against the force of the sudden shift as his boat nearly collided with the wall. He pulled them back, paddling furiously. No damage.
He breathed out a sigh of relief as the water slid back again. It hadn’t breached the dam, though it was still all gathered up along one side of the canal while the other side rose above the water, showing a waterline so ancient that it was thick with brown and black scum.
The dragon was descending. Wherever he landed, Jhinn hoped there was water. He might be slowly making peace with his unfaithfulness – might be clutching at straws of hope that there could be redemption for him in the results of it – but he wasn’t ready to ever do it again.
He swallowed as the ground under them hit something hard and everything shivered causing masonry and dust to fill the air as it fell around them. His belly ached from worrying so hard. He glanced at Marielle and worry met worry in their gazes.
There was only one dragon left to free, but this one was going to be the toughest of all.
28: The Other Side of the Ocean
Marielle
She ripped her eyes away from Jhinn and back to where Tamerlan muttered on the ledge beside the canal.
“Dragons,” he said in a pained voice. “Too many. Too far.”
“It’s okay,” she said, wiping his brow with the damp cloth. “Just rest.”
But none of this was okay and it hadn’t been okay for days. He was still in there somewhere, she thought, but whatever war was raging between Tamerlan and Ram in his mind had destroyed them both. Sometimes she didn’t even know which of them was muttering to her. She didn’t even bother to beg Etienne not to chain Tamerlan. She didn’t know if it was a mercy that he was bound. Perhaps it actually saved him from the horrors he would otherwise be unleashing on the earth.
She’d tended his wounds, of course. The one on the thigh wasn�
�t bad. She’d stitched it and she changed the bandages as often as she could – but the place where she’d stabbed him between the ribs was festering and no amount of cleaning had brought the infection down. Even if he hadn’t been chained, she doubted he’d be going far with such a mortal injury.
She swallowed as she bathed his hot forehead. Tamerlan might be dying slowly despite her best efforts to keep him alive. She tried not to think about that. Tried instead, to focus on what was right in front of her.
They’d landed. Somewhere. And she would have to find the dragon now. She could smell Jhinn’s trepidation mixing with his constant stream of guilt.
What was she going to do with Tamerlan while she went looking for Xytexyx?
You won’t have far to go.
She gasped at Yan’s voice in her mind. He’d stopped speaking to her after he lifted off from the ground on the Dragonblood Plains.
I have landed beside Xytexyx, the canals on my back flowing into the canals coming from hers. But we are too late.
Too late?
This dragon died many years ago. I mourn her loss.
Then ... were they all free?
I think not. I sense another ... somewhere.
Marielle let out a moan of despair. This was what she’d been holding onto. In all the desperation, all the misery, all the heartbreak she’d been telling herself that she was almost there. And she’d been lying to herself. She was not almost there. They were going to have to track down some mystery dragon. With Tamerlan delirious and possessed and insane. With Jhinn slowly bleeding out guilt and with her bearing such scars inside that she had to keep busy every minute of the day just to keep the pain away.
She couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t do even one more thing.
This was the end. Not because she’d lost, but because she just couldn’t carry on.
The sound of lapping water made her look up and she gasped at how close Jhinn’s gondola was. His face was only an arm-length away from hers.
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