Dragon War: The Draconic Prophecies - Book Three (6 page)

“No,” he said, “meet me at Kelas’s real office, in the Tower of Eyes. It faces the west side of Crown Hall.”

Crown Hall was the queen’s palace. It made Aunn nervous to get so close to the heart of the whole affair, but he needed a secure place to take Gaven, and few places were safer than the stronghold of Aundair’s Royal Eyes.

“I know where it is,” Cart said. “I went there with Haldren once. But how will we get in?”

Aunn pulled some paper and a small writing set from one of Kelas’s pouches. Using Cart’s back as a desk, he scrawled a hasty note and signed it in a perfect imitation of Kelas’s hand. He touched a ring he’d pulled from Kelas’s dead fingers to the paper, felt with his mind for the tiny knot of magic contained in the ring, and tripped it. A pattern of faintly glowing lines appeared on the paper beneath the signature, and Aunn smiled in satisfaction.

“Show this to the guards at the door and tell them you have an appointment to see me. Tell them to summon me if they give you any trouble. I’ll take Gaven there now and wait for you.”

Cart took the paper, scanned the words and nodded.

“Be careful,” Aunn added.

“Always.” Cart held Gaven’s arm out for Aunn to take, then Ashara took his arm and they strolled off together toward the eastern side of town.

Aunn looked at Gaven and smiled. “All right, Gaven, we’re going this way. Can you walk with me?”

Slowly Gaven shuffled along beside him as Aunn made his way to the Tower of Eyes.

*  *  *  *  *

Walking beside Ashara was the opposite of marching in a unit of soldiers, Cart thought. His stride was long and even, like the steady cadence of a drum keeping soldiers in step. Her shorter legs made her steps quicker, and she had trouble keeping up with him, so she’d occasionally take a flurry of little, half-running steps, her boots pattering like hail on the cobblestones. There was a pleasing music to it, somehow—her melody playing against his constant drone.

Aunn and Gaven were long out of sight, and the busier streets of Fairhaven’s downtown soon fell away behind them, replaced by quiet rows of homes and apartments. Cart was lost in the rhythm of their steps.

“What’s wrong, Cart?” Ashara asked, breaking the silence.

Cart took a few more steps before he answered. “You don’t really think I’m yours, do you?”

“What?”

“Back there. I said I didn’t have papers and you said, ‘He’s mine.’ Like it was nothing.”

“Oh, Cart, no. I just wanted to make sure they didn’t give you any trouble, that’s all. Sometimes House Cannith can still be very possessive about warforged.”

“But those were warforged we were talking to.”

“Warforged who might as well still be slaves owned by the House,” Ashara said. “They’re not legally slaves, but they don’t get paid what human guards do.”

It came to Cart like a dawning realization, full of wonder. “Nobody owns me,” he said.

Ashara clutched his arm. “Of course not.”

Cart walked in silence again. They approached a group of young men, who stopped their boisterous conversation and stared as they walked past, arm in arm. Ashara shifted her grip and Cart thought for a moment that she might release his arm in embarrassment, but she held on. Her hands were warm where they touched the cords and sinews between his armored plates.

“I think,” Cart said, “that I would like to get identification papers. Would you help me?”

“You’ve never had papers?”

“I had military identification, but that was before the Treaty of Thronehold. Those papers showed me to be the property of Aundair. I belonged to Haldren. Right up until I killed him.”

“So now you’re free.”

“I suppose I am,” Cart said. “I’m not sure what to do now.”

“What did you do while Haldren was in Dreadhold?”

“I waited.”

“That’s all? Just waited?”

“I did odd things here and there to pass the time. I worked in Passage for a while, carrying crates. Senya dragged me into an old Dhakaani ruin once with some half-elf wizard who promised her a fortune. Mostly I waited.”

“So what do you want to do with your freedom?”

Cart looked down at her, into her warm, brown eyes. He eased his arm free of her hands and wrapped it around her shoulders, pulling her close to his side. She put one arm around his waist and laid the other hand on his chest, and her head rested beside her hand. It was confusing to him—he hated the thought of being owned: her dismissive words to the Cannith warforged had cut him like daggers. But the urge to hold her close, keep her beside him, protect her—it was a fiercely possessive urge.

“Freedom is a strange thing,” he said. With her body so close to his, he slowed his step and she matched it, so they found a slower rhythm together. “Nobody owns me, but Gaven and Aunn and you seem to have a hold on me anyway. What I want to do is to be with you.”

“Freedom is the ability to choose your commitments,” Ashara said, “to choose what owns your loyalty.”

“Then perhaps I am yours after all.”

Her smile spread all across her face, touching every one of the tiny muscles beneath the skin—such an intricate construction, he thought, like the work of a divine artisan.

“And I’m yours,” she said.

*  *  *  *  *

Aunn stood at the door to Kelas’s study. Out of habit, he cast his mind over his body, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, making sure every detail was in place for Kelas’s inevitable scrutiny. Only this
time the details were those of Kelas’s own appearance, and no one would be in the study to inspect him. He glanced at Gaven, motionless at his side, then pulled a ring of keys from one of Kelas’s pouches and found the right one. Taking a deep breath, he turned the key in the hole and pushed open the door.

Nothing had changed. He knew the room at least as well as his own suite, which he hadn’t seen in months. The large oak desk gave the room its color and character, dark and solid. For an absurd moment, Aunn wasn’t sure where to sit. A wooden chair between the desk and the door was Aunn’s accustomed place; the one behind the desk, upholstered in leather, was where Kelas would sit. He shook his head to clear it, then led Gaven to the wooden chair and walked around the desk to Kelas’s chair.

“Well, Gaven,” he said, “perhaps you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here.”

He ran his hands over the chair’s leather, worn but well cared for. He sat gingerly, then settled back against the cushions. It was a comfortable seat—it fit Kelas’s body perfectly.

“Frankly, I’m wondering the same thing. This seems a bit like madness.”

He spread his palms over the oak of the desk, which he had never touched before. It was smooth, immaculately clean, warm. Only a single sheaf of papers on his left side marred the dark, polished surface.

“But here we sit, until Cart and Ashara come back with whoever they think can bring you back to your right mind.” He looked at Gaven, whose eyes were fixed on some point behind the wall, then pulled the sheaf of papers closer. “Let’s see what Kelas was reading, shall we?”

The writing on the paper was written in thick, angular letters that made Aunn think at first they were in Dwarven, but the letters were Common:

“What in the Traveler’s ten thousand names …?” Aunn breathed. He thrust a hand into a pouch at his belt and rummaged until he found a piece
of stone, a fragment of the masonry wall that he had picked up at random while he stood in Gaven’s cell. On it, scratched with the metal stylus the Dreadhold guards had allowed him, Gaven had written the same words, or at least the last two lines. Part of the Prophecy.

Aunn pushed that page aside and read the next. The hand was the same, presumably one of Gaven’s jailers, a dwarf of House Kundarak. Another verse of the Prophecy:
Showers of light fall upon the City of the Dead, and the Storm Dragon emerges after twice thirteen years
.

“How did Kelas get these?” Aunn said, looking up at Gaven as if he expected an answer. But Gaven’s eyes had closed and his chin dropped to his chest.

“You’re right, my friend. It has been a very long day.”

J
ordhan wasn’t the Storm Dragon, but he was a dragonmarked heir of House Lyrandar, with the Mark of Storm etched across the side of his head. When he needed to, he could bend the wind to his will and urge it to fill his galleon’s sails. And with a dragon rising up from the Blasphemer’s horde to pursue them, there was great need; he coaxed the wind to speed his little airship along.

Rienne clutched the bulwark rail at the aft of the ship, squinting into the darkness behind them for any sign of the dragon. A ring of elemental fire surrounded the airship, arching high above Rienne’s head and bathing the deck in warm firelight, which hurt her ability to see far beyond the lit circle. She strained her ears for the beat of the dragon’s wings. Just as she started daring to hope they might have outdistanced it, she saw the glitter of its eyes reflecting the light of the fiery ring.

“Here it comes!” she cried.

A gust of wind shot the airship like an arrow away from the onrushing dragon, and its eyes disappeared into the darkness again. Rienne heard it roar, and a liquid sound like the eruption of a geyser, then the wind brought a spray of fine mist that stung where it touched her skin.

“We’ll never get away from it,” she called to Jordhan. “It can see us from miles away.”

“But if it can’t catch us, it might give up,” Jordhan said.

“Who do you think can keep this up longer? You or the dragon?”

“What’s your plan?”

Rienne looked over the railing to the darkened ground below. They had flown over the barbarian horde, and its fires were a glimmer in the distance. The dragon was still shrouded in the darkness behind the ship.

“Take us down,” she said. “Let’s fight this thing on the ground.”

“You want to
fight
it?”

“I don’t think we have a choice. We’re outrunning it now, but you’re
going to get tired eventually, and I’m guessing it can outlast you. But we
can
choose whether to fight it in the air or on the ground. In the air, it can wreck our ship and send us plummeting to the ground without ever coming within our reach. On the ground, we have a chance.”

“Even without Gaven?”

Rienne’s heart was a jumble of emotion—regret over the harsh words she’d said to Gaven on their last journey together, grief that he wasn’t there to fight by her side, an irrational anger that he’d left her to take care of herself. She found a scrap of joy and clung to it: she imagined telling Gaven the story, when it was all over and they were together again, of the dragon she killed.

“Even without Gaven,” she said. “Trust me.”

Jordhan clutched the helm and the ship veered downward. “How high are we?” he asked.

Rienne leaned over the bulwarks. The airship’s fiery ring lit only empty air below, as far as she could see. “I can’t tell.”

“Pretty high, then. You have to be my eyes, Ree. I’ll try to watch for the dragon, but I need you to shout as soon as you see ground—or anything else we might hit on our way down.”

Rienne nodded her understanding and took a slow breath to focus her mind. She heard the faint roar of the elemental fire, the creaking of the wooden hull, and the rush of air past the ship as she descended. The air smelled of burning wood, with a lingering hint of the acrid scent of the dragon’s caustic breath. Finally the ground came into view, painted in pale orange light.

“Sovereigns help us,” she breathed, before she called to Jordhan, “We’re still a bowshot above the ground, but it’s going to be a rough landing.” The charred skeletons of the forest thrust jagged stumps and branches up toward them, as if reaching up to pull them down.

“It always is,” Jordhan said. “Airships aren’t meant to be landed.”

“To starboard, just a bit,” she called. “Fewer trees. Gently!”

The airship drifted downward at Jordhan’s command, floating a few yards to starboard, then a few more when Rienne shouted a warning. Rienne marveled at the precision of its movement—unlike a seagoing galleon, which had to obey the ocean currents and winds as well as the pilot’s commands, the airship went exactly where Jordhan willed it to go.

“Dragon!” Jordhan shouted.

Rienne whirled, then darkness swallowed her. The airship’s burning ring, the distant glow of fire in the forest, even the dim scattering of stars
that had shone through the cloud-burdened sky—all light disappeared. For an instant, Rienne thought she was floating alone in a void, then she heard Jordhan’s sputtering curse, the continuing roar of the flaming ring, and the flap of the dragon’s heavy wings, very close above her. The dragon must have conjured the darkness to blind its prey.

“Just take her straight down,” Rienne said, “as fast as you can without crashing.” She slid Maelstrom from its sheath and stepped to the center of the deck, bracing herself to meet the dragon. She heard the beat of its wings, and its slow intake of breath, and she realized her mistake.

As the roaring sound of the dragon’s breath erupted overhead, she dove for the wheelhouse but hit the deck harder than she intended, sending Maelstrom skittering from her hand. She rolled several times before the acidic spray splattered over her, searing her back and left side. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she lifted herself to her hands and knees before the airship tilted sharply to port with a splintering crash of wood, sending her rolling across the deck again.

The airship slowed, then stopped, listing to port. Rienne heard the clatter of Maelstrom sliding down the deck and crawled after it. The dragon’s wings beat once, twice, closer … a third time, and then it slammed into the ship. The airship tore free from the trees that had held it in place and fell through splintering branches until it settled again, this time slanted to front and starboard. As the hull settled into its new position, though, the darkness fell away—Rienne saw the dragon in all its terrible majesty, filling the deck, ready to spring. Beyond it, she could see the charred branches that held the airship in place, just above the ground, outlined against the fires on the horizon. The airship’s own fiery ring was extinguished, probably at Jordhan’s command, to avoid reigniting the trees around them.