Page 5 of The Fires of Longest Night
He recoils, but the ever-sharp blade carves a slender line of budding scarlet along his jawline.
Joy shoots through her. His hand, clad in soaked leather gloves, reaches up to touch the cut and his face gets ugly with fury.
She almost crows inside. Anger is usually the end of any decent fighting from menfolk. They forget technique is vital to a win.
Beside her, Isiridion is stepping towards the red dragon, forcing it to decide between retreating into the water or shifting to the attack. It dips its head, growling again. It bellows fire, a long golden stream which Isiridion dodges easily. Fortunately, the fog has made the forest too damp to catch easily, though next time they may not be so lucky.
The enemy swordsman spins, his blade flashing high, then low, and Ria dodges back, then forward again to cut towards his side. She misses but twists her axe to catch his blade as she pulls back.
With most opponents, this would yank the weapon free of their hands and the fight would be over. But he moves, graceful and languid, and his sword is free.
She swings again.
He parries easily and then slides beyond her guard again to carve a swift, shallow line just below her collarbones. She hisses in pain just as he hooks his blade against the straps keeping her pauldrons in place. She jerks back against the pull, and it’s enough to make the blade cut through the leather, and she stumbles backwards before sprawling to the ground.
Ria!
He leaps towards her, blade outstretched. Ria swears as he jabs his sword towards her lower belly. It slides across her armor and stabs into her hip. Isiridion spins fast, bellowing fire at him, making him stumble backwards into the sucking mud, then turning its head back to keep the red dragon at bay.
We need to get out of here.
Ria swears, hauling herself to her feet.They’re nothing. Scratches! He’s taken just as bad.
We don’t even know who they are! And the Warlord needs to know they’re out here.
She knows the dragon is right, so she reaches out and Isiridion slips rapidly under her hand until she can grip the saddle horn. She jerks herself up and into the saddle, unable to keep back a bellow of pain as the wound in her hip pulls, and Isiridion pelts along the bank before lurching upward into the fog.
That seems clumsier than usual, dragon,Ria says, shoving her axe awkwardly into its holder on her back.Are you hurt?
I’m fine. We just need to get you out of here.
I was fine!
You were cut in three places—
So was he!
Ria swears aloud, a long series of curses.Isiridion! Is this because the revivification won’t work anymore? You can’t just pull us out of fights because you’re scared I’m going to die!
I can and I will, if it will keep you alive,Isiridion retorts, soaring higher still.
Fury boils over in Ria’s gut, and she thumps her fist down against Isiridion’s shoulder, knowing the dragon will barely feel the touch.I am a warrior! I can fight! Stop treating me like a child you need to coddle.
And if you’re back to having one fucking life, then what?Isiridion rarely swears, unlike its rider, and it takes Ria aback.You want some random attack by the waterfall to be the end of everything?! Of us? Of you and Nissa? Of the clan, mostlike, without you? Of… of me?The last is hesitant, like it’s a thought Isiridion can’t quite bring itself to fully form.
Ria swallows hard.
No one quite understands the mechanism, but dragons who are unbonded—especially those who lose their blood-bonded—are increasingly dangerous. There are stories about them destroying entire cities—just bellowing down blue fire across a battlefield, then turning on the townsfolk and burning them up as well.
Bonded dragons said they couldn’t get sense out of these dragons, and Ria can’t tell if this is better or worse. In one sense, perhaps it’s better that these unbonded dragons are incomprehensible to the bonded dragons, but it also means that what’s causing the dragons to utterly devastate the continent remains utterly beyond anyone’s reckoning, human or dragon.
There is, in other words, nothing that anyone can do about it.
Isiridion is not the only bonded dragon fearing that they are one human loss away from losing their minds completely. Ria sends the dragon a gentle sense of query, and Isiridion seems to sigh, resigned, and releases a wave of worry and a bundle of interconnected thoughts, too rapid for Ria to be able to parse them in words.
There’s fear in there, a lot of fear, a sense of lonely confusion, and through it all, a thought like a spear:should I be making plans to be killed, if you die? I don’t want to be responsible for…And Isiridion sends a bleak vision of a city, charred, smoking and empty.
Tears prick at Ria’s eyes, but the wind is far too intense for them to linger.Oh Isi,she says in a soft, heartsore thought.I’m sorry. I wish we understood what is going on.
