Page 114 of Dragon Fight

It only took a couple of bites before I heard a sound that chilled me to the bone.

The noise Lassie had made when she was dispatched had been such a small sound. Really, I should’ve known that if Glimmer was going to be attacked, she would similarly make a helpless little noise of distress. Just a gagging sound the like of which my dragon often made when eating too much, too fast. I looked down with a smile, ready to scoop her up and strike her shoulder blades to dislodge the meat, when I saw it. Blood red foam covered her muzzle.

“Glimmer—!”

I wasn’t sure who it was that shouted out my dragon’s name, just that my body moved without thinking.

Pip—In…

Her mental voice was like a shriek into a hailstorm, lost quickly amidst turbulence. My hands roamed up and down her body, as I checked her scales, her muzzle, her body, to try and convince myself she was alright.

But she wasn’t.

I’d assumed that the queen would try to poisonmebecause I was the least important part of the puzzle. I’d thought that the traditional prohibition against harming dragons, especially queen dragons, would keep Glimmer safe.

But I knew that Beatrice’s unwitting trick this morning had been just a feint. One to put me on my guard, to make me cautious, checking all around me, not against the true threat. Because she had poisoned my dragon, not me.

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“Glimmer’s been poisoned!”

Any strategic impulse to keep this to myself, to hide the strike the queen had made against us, was pushed aside by my panic as I shouted it to the world. But the world did not respond the way I wanted. The kitchen erupted into panic, people screeching and flailing, but no one did what I needed.

Pip—in…

Her mental voice was weakening and her breaths were becoming more laboured, as her whole body worked to suck oxygen in. And then it came. That little cough, then a splatter of blood on the floor. Something I had seen before.

“Poisoned?” Brom looked dumbstruck, his eyes swinging to the others. “What do we—?”

“Nothing,” Soren snapped. “Who’d poison a fucking dragon? I’ve got remedies for the things the stupid beasts ingest on accident, Calamity Jane and the like, but—”

“Someone has to,” Flynn insisted with all of the certainty of a man born to rule, a duke, not a third son standing before us. “Someone must! We’ll take her to Madam Gilly.”

But I knew what would happen if we tried that.Glimmer would splutter out her last breaths as we rushed to the healer’s office and, just like Lassie had before, she’d die in my arms and I’d be left holding her, feeling her body went cool. I shook my head at that.

“Give me the dragonstone.” I held out a hand, snapping my fingers when I didn’t get it quickly enough. It was slapped into my palm and I rubbed my other hand at my nose, pushing at the crust of just-congealed blood so that some of it seeped onto my fingers. I gently swiped my fingers along Glimmer’s muzzle, a cold, hard anger rising inside me as I touched my bloodied fingers to the egg.

Tanis appeared, at least an apparition of her, because I could still see the outside world, and my men standing there as witness.

“How do I heal her?” I snapped. “She healed me—”

For the future to be ensured, the past must be resolved, Tanis began again, as if I’d stepped back to the first moment we’d touched Cynane’s egg and she was ready to thrust me into my memories of my stepfamily’s petty tyrannies.

But I was done with the damn past. Only the future mattered and I would have my answers.

“Glimmer can heal. I can heal.” All of a sudden, it was as though having this desperate need had given me belief in myself, in possibility, in hope. My doubts had been stripped away, burned as if by dragon fire. “I’ll do anything, just tell me what to do!”

She stared directly at me, this time the vision of Tanis actually meeting my eyes, a terrible sadness in them as her mouth moved to say familiar words, nothing new, nothing useful.

Connection is where all power comes from.

There. That.

I stared down at my dragon, saw the blood frothing at her jaws, her tongue lolling out of her open mouth, her eyes growing duller by the second.I needed to do it, so I could. Glimmer had said that with absolute certainty when she had healed me, and I needed to borrow that queen-like energy right now.

I need to heal my dragon, I told the dragonstone, myself, not willing to give an inch to doubt, not now.I need to heal her like she did me.I grasped the egg tighter, our blood smeared across the shining surface as it grew brighter and brighter.

But I was right.

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