Page 79 of Heart's Escape

“Here we go,” someone whispers, and I’m not sure if it was Phaedron’s father or Rowan who spoke.

And the night explodes.

The illusion magic contained in the silver wires collapses with a soft sort of whoosh. Torches burst into existence all along the ridge as the magic that kept them hidden disappears. Everyone screams; humans, dragons, and then a round of massive crossbow bolts that streak across the night sky like black lightning.

A dragon bursts into the air beside the pine grove, shaking the trees with its frantic wingbeats, as an enormous crossbow bolt clatters to the ground beside me. It’s so close I can see thin golden glimmers of reflected torchlight winking off its wicked, serrated blade.

Reflected torchlight, and something else. Something blue.

My gut pulls tight, again expecting pain, and some part of me does not want to turn around and discover the source of that strange blue light. It’s the part of me that wants to fall to the ground, to pull my hands over my head and drag whatever magic I can out of the air to form a shell around my weak, trembling body.

But Phaedron is behind me. And if this is some new torture of his fathers, then stars damn it, it’s going to make an excellent distraction. I wrap my fingers around the scrap of cloth protecting the trapped sleep magic I forced into the gold coin, and then I turn slowly through air that has suddenly filled with smoke and screams and the scent of blood.

And there is Varitan, smiling at me. Smiling at all of us, a wide, wicked grin beneath his outstretched hands, the threat in those empty palms as thick as the smoke billowing down from the ridgeline. The blue fire isn’t coming from him.

I twist, moving almost against my will, and oh sweet singing stars above, it’s Rowan. It’s coming from his head, or rather, his eyes. Twin plumes of blue flame pour from Rowan’s remaining eye and his empty socket to rise hungrily into the darkness above us. I shiver, trying to summon whatever courage I have to not turn and run blindly away from the terrifying man Phaedron was so desperate to rescue.

Another cry splits the air. I turn to see a dragon with gleaming indigo scales climbing frantically into the night sky. Blood pours down its side from a ragged slice along its left wing, and a small golden dragon flies beside it, hissing and snarling at the humans below.

Then the indigo dragon opens its mouth, and the sky fills with fire.

Howls echo from the ridgeline. I don’t want to watch, don’t want to see what’s happening to the human army that was massed along the ridge, the men we walked past last night, but even when I turn to stare at the ground beneath my feet I can still hear the screams, can still smell smoke thick with blood and the scent of charred meat. The whole world is on fire, and I swear even the mountain beneath my feet trembles.

A booming roar crashes over the granite cirque, followed by a blinding white flash of light. I jump, twisting toward the sky again, and stare. Something massive rises from the emptiness behind the cliffs to drown out the stars.

You’ll know Rensivar, Rowan said last night.He’s the big one.

A shiver traces a path down my spine to sink into the stone mountain beneath me. The big one. Stars help me, I had no idea. Rensivar the Wicked was supposed to be dead. The monster dragon who used his magic to trap the Kingdom of the Fall in the Lands Below was supposed to be a myth. My legs shake, the world shifts, and for one sickening moment I think I’m going to pass out.

“Now,” Phaedron’s father hisses.

The massive black dragon rises slowly through the air. The beat of his wings makes the pine branches hiss and snap above my head. His maw spreads open, and a jet of white-hot flame rips through the night. I swear I feel the heat of those flames on my cheeks.

“Rowan,” Varitan growls. “Now!”

I turn back to Rowan, with his entire body wrapped in chains and blue flames pouring from his eye and empty socket. Varitan scowls. Rowan’s mouth spreads into a grin. Blood drips down his chin from his split lip.

A distraction, some still rational part of my mind whispers. I drop my fingers to the gold coin, careful to keep a layer of cloth between my skin and the angry magic trapped inside the metal. I step out from under the trees, moving closer to Varitan and to the naked skin on the back of his neck, the one place his uniform doesn’t cover.

Rowan opens his mouth. But whatever he might have said is swallowed by a tremendous roar from the sky. I flinch as the nightmare dragon Rensivar the Wicked, the one I always believed was a story invented to scare children or to cover King Grathgore’s war crimes, screams like he’s going to shake the very stars from the sky.

“If you want your brother and the woman to survive,” Varitan growls at Rowan when the dragon falls silent, “do it now, damn it!”

Nothing happens. My heart freezes inside my ribcage. Varitan hesitates, his gaze sliding from Rowan to Phaedron with a twist to his lips that’s as sharp as a blade, and I realize just how desperately I do not want to die. Not here. Not now. And not at this man’s hand.

And then the mountain shivers beneath me.

Everyone cries out at once. I stagger forward. The air fills with the hiss of wings and the clatter of scales as dragons explode into the night sky. I watch them rise, their wings frantic against the darkness, beating away from the rocky cirque and the ridgeline that just became a battlefield.

No.

Beating away from something else, something that’s just appeared on that stone slope. I stare as a boulder the size of King Grathgore’s royal carriage tips, then tumbles into a pool of black nothingness that has just yawned open on the side of the mountain.

No, not black. The hole in reality that just swallowed a boulder glows with a strange amethyst light, a dull shade of purple that winks off the claws and wings of the fleeing dragons. It looks almost like a mirage, this jagged rip in reality, like the delirious haze that rises from a sunbaked road, or perhaps like the bloody wound that ends a sword fight. Columns of thick, black smoke rise slowly from the split in the mountainside, twisting against the wind like the tendrils of some massive monster.

It can’t possibly be real. Nothing that sudden, that enormous, could be real. This has to be some sort of complicated magical illusion, just like the invisibility shield Varitan made to hide the human army. I pull in a trembling breath and try to tell myself this magic isn’t so different from the magic I’ve already seen.

And then the hole in reality swells up the mountainside and swallows the first line of human soldiers.

---