Page 56 of Water Dragon
Then Sir Patrick moved forward, closing the distance between them as he moved his sword with a graceful flick of his wrist, arching it at her and forcing her to parry the blow. And it was a blow. It reverberated through her arm, into her shoulder, and she almost took a knee at the force of it.
Sir Patrick stepped away, letting her collect herself.
He wasn’t toying with her; there was no smile on his face, only grim resolution. She was standing in the way of his future, whatever it was he thought he could buy himself with the mound of gold he would be receiving if the conspirators were successful in their quest.
“You are no knight,” she said coldly.
“No,” he agreed. “I am not.”
He raised his sword again, and she parried, but this time she was more ready for the power of his arm and met it with the power she possessed along with the skills she had learned. To use his momentum against him once he attacked by standing her ground rather than meeting it head on. It worked, and she thrust her sword forward, making him have to parry and step out of the way of its tip. His eyebrows rose. Even though he’d seen her fight, he must have thought Malcolm had been humoring her.
She smiled then, unable to keep the satisfaction down.
Sir Patrick looked as though he was recalibrating his offensive strategy, looking at her in a new light, realizing this wasn’t going to be quite as easy as he had expected it would be.
Good.
She attacked this time, making him parry before he launched into a counterattack that made both their swords sing. Sweat was breaking out on her brow, her arm feeling each hit, muscles straining at them and the weight of her blade. She ducked out of the way of a vicious swing, swirled around and put her elbow in Sir Patrick’s stomach. He lost his breath, but when she swirled the opposite way to deliver a second blow to his lower back, he was faster, and his arm caught her around the neck.
She screamed in fury, but then she felt the tip of his sword against her side and stilled. Out of breath she clung with both hands to the arm holding her in place.
“No!” Malcolm exclaimed, her eyes finding his where he stood, one hand held out, his face a mask of protest. “Please,” he added. “Whatever you want you can have it? I’ll do anything.”
“You know what we want,” Sir Patrick said. “An end to everything. And a beginning to everything that will follow.”
And before anyone had time to make any further arguments, any further pleas or protests, Iona felt the sword bite into her side and sink into the very center of her.
She made a strangled noise, surprised there was such little pain.
All she could feel was the shock, and an overwhelming grief that she had gotten so few moments with Malcolm’s arms around her. She should have spent her lifetime in his embrace. If she could do it all over again, that would be her only desire.
She tried to tell him she was sorry that she had failed him, but before she could finish, she was on the floor. The vaulted ceiling above her head looked impossibly far away, making her feel small.
She was bleeding. Her hands, pressed against the exit wound in her abdomen, were slick with blood. But there was still no pain.
She didn’t want to close her eyes.
She wasn’t ready to go.
She wasn’t ready.
Chapter 15 - Malcolm
The shock was like something white and blinding hovering in the center of his vision. He thought he was screaming but couldn’t hear any sound. All he could hear was the growl of his inner dragon, deep and resounding. Iona was on the flagstones in a heap of flesh and bone, but her eyes were still open, her head moving as her gaze searched for him. She was alive still. And her blood…
He closed his eyes.
Water.
Her blood was water.
He concentrated his entire being, stilled himself as though he was the darkest pool in the deepest forest in the center of the kingdom. There was no wind, there was no fire, there was no earth, there was only the coolness of his waters. There was no blue of the sky, there was no black of unreachable depths. There was only stillness and below, far below, beneath the ground where tendrils of his waters would seek themselves, there was the river.
The river.
He’d felt it move for him earlier, he’d almost found the connection again, had collected droplets to his feet but it had been a strain. Almost unbearable. He had forced it, every second of it, the fear still there. Of failure, of not truly wanting it.
Now his head filled with the noise of the river flowing, distant for only a moment and then loud as though he was dunking his head beneath its rushing stream.
