Page 132 of The Priory of the Orange Tree

I will always keep you safe.

When the dragonrider did not arrive at the beach at the agreed-upon time, Niclays generously assumed that she had been unavoidably delayed and made himself comfortable. He had brought with him a satchel containing some of his books and scrolls, including the fragment Truyde had given him, which he perused by the light of an iron lantern.

His pocket watch was open beside him. The clock—the modern symbol of the Knight of Temperance. A symbol of regulation, measurement, restraint. It was the virtue of dullards, but also of scholars and philosophers, who believed it encouraged self-examination and the pursuit of wisdom. Certainly it was the closest of the Six Virtues to rational thought.

It should have been his patron virtue. Instead, on his twelfth birthday, he had chosen the Knight of Courage.

His brooch now rusted somewhere in Brygstad. He had torn it off the day he was exiled.

An hour passed, and then another. The truth was indisputable.

Lady Tané had called his bluff.

The promise of dawn was on the horizon. Niclays snapped his watch shut. There went his chance of a glorious return to Ostendeur with a freshly brewed elixir of life.

Purumé and Eizaru would be horrified if they knew what he had asked the dragonrider to do. It made him no better than a pirate, but creating the damned elixir was the only way he would ever get home, his only potential sway with the royal houses over the Abyss.

He sighed. To save Sulyard, he needed to tell the Warlord about Tané Miduchi and her crime against Seiiki. It was what he would have done at once, were he a better man.

As he trudged back up the beach, he stopped. For a moment, he thought the stars had been rubbed out. When he looked harder, and made out the flicker of light, he froze.

Something was descending.

Something vast.

It moved as if it were sinking through water. A banner of scarred, iridescent green. A bladder-shaped organ dominated its head, glowing lambent blue. The same glow throbbed under its scales.

A Lacustrine dragon. Niclays watched hungrily as it landed on the sand, graceful as a bird.

A great weathered rock hunched like a shoulder from the sand. He retreated behind it, never taking his gaze off the dragon. From the way it turned its head, it was looking for something.

Niclays hunkered down and blew out his lantern. He watched as the creature snaked toward the shore, closer to his hiding place. The creature spoke.

“Tané.”

Its massive front legs waded into the sea. Niclays was almost near enough to touch one of its scales. The key to his work, almost at his fingertips. He stayed crouched beneath the rock, craning his neck to look. Its eyes were pinwheels.

“Tané, the boy is dead,” it said in Seiikinese. “So is your friend.” It bared its teeth. “Tané, where are you?”

So this was her beast. The dragon sniffed, its nostrils flaring.

That was when a blade chilled his throat, and a hand covered his mouth. Niclays made a muffled sound.

The dragon jerked its head toward the rock.

Niclays trembled. He heard nothing of his own body, not his heartbeat or his breath, but he could picture the sword at his throat in meticulous detail. A curved blade. An edge sharp enough to spill his life if he moved a fraction of an inch.

Ahisscame through the night. Then another.

And another.

The dragon let out a snarl. Claw rang against rock, like sword on sword.

Black smoke consumed the beach. The smell of it was acrid, like burning hair and brimstone. And gunpowder.Firecloud.Abruptly Niclays was wrenched to his feet—then he was stumbling through the billows of smoke, choking on them, hauled by a figure shrouded in cloth. The sand slithered beneath his feet, sending each footstep awry.

“Wait,” he panted at his captor. “Wait, damn you—”

A tail lashed out of the smoke and caught him a terrific blow in the gut. He was thrown back on to the sand, where he lay, benumbed and winded, his eyeglasses dangling off one ear.

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