“I appreciate your adherence to duty, but—” Syla squirmedagain, wanting her own two feet under her, longing to do her job, not run away when people were in pain, “—I’m a healer. Agods-blessedhealer.” She waved the back of her hand at him, as if he might have forgotten the quarter-moon-shaped birthmark that she and her close relatives had, hereditary gifts that imbued them with the power to help the kingdom when needed. “I can keep people from dying,” she added as Fel dragged her toward a back door.
“There’ll be plenty of people who need that at the bunker.”
Between his arm around her and the smoke and heat in the shop, she felt frustrated and claustrophobic and tried again to free herself. She might as well have been attempting to escape iron shackles.
Fel thrust open the back door and started into an alley but halted abruptly, swearing again.
Thanks to whatever distracted him, Syla twisted free and set her feet on the floor. His arm tightened around her waist, but he didn’t lift her again. Instead, he unhooked his mace from his belt and glowered across the alley toward the rooftop of the building behind theirs. Flames leaped from the gutters of both structures, but Syla saw what he saw.
A green dragon even larger than the first perched atop a chimney, its size dwarfing it and the building underneath. Its scales gleamed, reflecting the dancing flames all around it, but the creature seemed impervious to the heat. As did its rider, an athletic-looking man in black leathers, including fingerless black gloves. He was striking, with bronze skin and wild, windswept black hair framing a lean, angular face. His emerald eyes matched the scales of the dragon. She had no trouble noticing those eyes because the man was staring down at her. Hisdragonlooked toward the castle, and its muscles bunched under its scales, as if it meant to spring into action at any moment, but he… his eyes locked not onto her face but her hand. The moon-mark.
Realizing it would make her a target, Syla tucked her arm behind her back. But it was too late. He’d seen it.
Fel raised his mace and crouched, prepared to defend her, even against a rider and a dragon. Even if there was no chance that he could survive the encounter.
The dragon’s head swung around on its long neck so that it also looked at Syla. Terror gripped her, and she wished she hadn’t slowed Fel down, that they’d already reached the bunker. As he’d pointed out, she wouldn’t be able to heal people if she were dead.
“That’s Captain Vorik Wingborn,” Fel growled, drawing her back through the doorway and under cover, out of the line of sight of their enemies.
She could still see the bottom of the dragon, those talons gripping the chimney.
“Warrior, archer, and storm-possessed bastard,” Fel continued, “whose hobby has been sinking every third cargo or merchant ship that’s sailed beyond the protection of the sky shielders these last ten years.”
Syla doubted they would make it to the bunker. The captain hadn’t yet attacked, but more dragons flew overhead, their roars drowning out the screams of fear and pain coming from all over the city.
Would anyone in the capital survive this?
A war horn blew in the distance, from across the sea. The green dragon shifted on the chimney, as if the call beckoned it, and crouched to spring. Before it did, its great tail lashed out like a whip, long enough to cross the alley and slam down onto the carpentry shop. The roof above Syla and Fel collapsed.
As stone and wood crashed down, Fel sprang atop her, using his body to protect her as the great weight crushed them to the floor and buried them.
2
A hard pieceof rubble jabbed painfully into Syla’s ribs, and Fel’s oppressive and unconscious weight crushed her from above. In the darkness after the building’s collapse, she lay trapped, unable to see anything, barely able to breathe. Tears leaked from her eyes as overwhelming despair crushed her as surely as her bodyguard’s weight.
Her family had been in the castle and fighting back, but Syla worried her mother and her siblings wouldn’t all survive the onslaught of dragons. What if…noneof her family survived? What ifshehad to take her mother’s role as queen and leader of the kingdom?
No, she couldn’t. She wasn’t qualified. She’d even avoided suggestions that she apply for a leadership position in Moon Watch Temple. She didn’t have the aptitude to be in charge of people, certainly not people who had just been devastated by a dragon attack.
And what if more than the capital had been targeted? There were twelve islands in the Garden Kingdom. What if the othershielders, the artifacts that powered the sky shields, had also stopped working?
The question brought her back to the most pertinent one, at least for her at that moment: what had caused the shielder for Castle Island to stop working?
The magic infused in the devices, devices that had been built long ago by the gods themselves, had never failed before. She’d read enough history books to know that for a fact. There’d been an instance in the third century of a spy finding and sabotaging a shielder, which had briefly let dragons in to attack Vineyard Island, but an engineer in the Moonmark family had been able to repair the artifact. None of the shielders had simply stopped working on their own.
Could the one under the castle have been sabotaged? By a spy? Only her own kin could enter the shielder chambers. And of those with the magical moon birthmarks, hardly any had been entrusted with the locations on each island where those chambers were. Those were closely guarded secrets among those in line for the throne. Those like her.
Always before, she’d scoffed at the idea that she might lose her older brothers and sisters and have to worry about inheriting the throne, but now…
“No,” Syla whispered, her hoarse throat coated in dust. “At leastsomeof my siblings have to be okay. I’ll find them and heal them.”
Except, at the moment, she couldn’t move.
Something warm and damp dripped onto the back of her neck. Fel’s blood.
By the eyes of the moon, she had to heal her poor bodyguard first.
Summoning what energy she could, Syla pushed and squirmed. Not only his weight lay atop her but the fallen roof had settled upon them. Grunting, she attempted to shove fromdifferent angles. Her knuckles smashed against wood and brick, but she managed to free one arm, improving her ability to move, to dig.
