Page 49 of The Dragon Queen

Rex had sent an aide to the library, but I had a means to tap into the past right here and now.

I didn’t want to. The muscles in my arm quivered with the need to shove the egg back into my pocket. I didn’t want to go back there, to watch humans and dragons alike scream as they all died. In some ways this felt worse than excavating their bones. That was to work out what the hell had happened.

So we could do the exact same thing.

My thumb rubbed across the egg, the thin scab on the ball of it catching on one of the ragged edges. I sucked in a breath as the world disappeared, even as my mouth fell open.

Chapter 24

“Death…” I hissed, not seeing the field or the riders, or at least not these ones. I was back in the head of the woman who had witnessed this atrocity, but this time, it was different. I was in control and she wasn’t allowed to take one last look at her lover, right before her world exploded.

Her focus was entirely on the dragons.

Not on their wings, shining like jewels in the sunlight. The glitter of their scales hurt my eyes as I, we, stared. Past the riders, ignoring the scream building in my throat, to the bellies of the dragons.

“A handle…” I barely rasped that out, then repeated myself more clearly to ensure the riders now heard me. When my hands moved, hers did as well, mimicking the grip the dragons had on their deadly burdens. “A handle, and… something.” I frowned, eyes burning with the effort of keeping them trained on the dragons. “Something round that links the handle to the pot. It moves… but the pot does not?”

It wasn’t perfectly still, but there was considerably less movement. Whatever connected the handle to the pot compensated for the sweep of the dragon’s wings, the sway of their body. It kept each dragon from being blasted from the sky by their own burden.

But it didn’t save them.

I had what I needed. I could talk about what I saw with the other riders, discover how our ancestors had gotten around this issue, but by forcing the woman to watch the destruction of her home, she in turn made sure I stuck around to witness it again.

I knew how this story ended, in blood, in screams, and perhaps that’s why my throat tightened. Breath was sucked in as my eyes went wide and unseeing, only able to watch this again.

“No…” My protest was pitiful. This was history. I could not go back and change it. “No…”

“Either dragon and human,” another voice said, rich and melodious, I knew who it was as soon as I heard it. “Or no dragons, no humans.”

“Tanis?” I asked in a thin voice, sounding like a child begging for her mother.

“Pippin?” That voice was wrong, too male, too insistent to be ignored. “Pippin!”

“Dragon and human.” Tanis appeared before me at first as just a long stream of golden scales, blocking the massacre beyond. The dragon was too immense for me to take in this close, but she took pity on me, pulling back and staring down at me with eyes just as golden as her scales. “Dragonandhuman, Pippin. We fled the continent, thinking that our survival depended on isolation from humankind, but instead came to realise that it is only in collaboration with humans that we’ll survive. Dragons can lay waste to the land, burning and scouring it until there is nothing more than raw earth. Humans take that raw earth and make marvels from it, but…”

I knew what she was going to say before she did so, having seen the evidence of it.

“They are capable of great destruction as well. We keep each other in check, but problems arise when that fragile balance tips too far to one side or the other.”

“Pippin!” I came back to the world with a snap. Draven’s hands were on my shoulders, shaking me, even as Brom stepped forward and wrenched the egg from my palm. “Are you well?”

Draven’s hands went to my cheeks, tracing the shape of my face and reminding me I had one, that I existed here, now. I blinked and looked over his shoulder, seeing how pale Brom was right now.

“I…” How did I answer him? How did I form sentences to explain? I couldn’t, I quickly decided, but then my eyes landed on the pile of pots. The queen’s dragons, their deaths, their unwitting sacrifice was what preoccupied me right now. I needed to save our dragons, the ones we had and the ones we’d lost, and that’s why I spoke. “The dragons transported the explosives with a device that compensated for their movement. Their claws were wrapped around a bar, a handle of sorts.”

“We heard that much,” Draven growled, “but I think that’s enough for today. We can send that information to the keep engineers and?—”

“You saw the queen’s dragons drop the explosives, Highness?” Rex asked, pushing forward, his eyes dropping down to Draven’s hand. “You can see the past in dragonstone?”

“I—”

“Need to rest.” Draven whirled around, putting himself between me and the general. “My queen has been through much and?—”

“Yes.” I said finally and that’s when everyone went quiet. “It’s not as simple as pulling a book from a shelf and flipping through the pages, but… yes. I saw a mission one of the queen’s sent her dragons on.” I stepped clear of Draven and regarded the crowd. “One they didn’t survive. Stefan has it right. Dragonfire is a double-edged sword that’s just as likely to kill you as your enemy.”

Draven’s cousin nodded, seemingly gratified that I would confirm his judgement.

“What I saw…” I swallowed, feeling it, seeing it, hearing the screams of dragons and humans if I didn’t focus on what was happening right now. Dragons and humans, the echo of Tanis’ voice in my head got me back on track. “The queen’s riders had mechanisms for transporting dragonfire. There was this round… thing.” I let out a frustrated huff as my words failed me, so I gestured with my hands. “Below the handle. It moved but the pot didn’t.”

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