Page 50 of Crown of the Dunes

A memory of the three of us riding together flickered through my mind. I was small, sitting between my father’s arm in front of him as a horse moved beneath us. My mother had reached over and ruffled my hair as I smiled up at her. It was in the few years of my life I remembered before the night terrors and wild outbursts had descended, and the only expression I remembered on the queen’s face as she looked at me was a frown. In that memory she wore a plain brown tunic, her hair flowing loose around her face.

Now, she had been dressed in a silver gown that flowed and dripped off the funeral pyre like water. Her hair was braided in a crown around her head, intertwined with golden larrea blooms. She looked every inch the queen to me, but the look in my father’s eyes told me he saw something else entirely. Maybe he saw the same young woman I remembered.

He lifted his head to the sky and shouted the time-honored words:

“The desert gives, and it takes.”

I found myself echoing the words back to him with the rest of the assembled crowd.

“The desert gives and it takes.”

He lowered the torch to the pyre. It caught instantly, the fire consuming the dried wood hungrily. As Queen Ginevra’s body was lost from view, engulfed in the flames, my father dropped the torch and fell to his knees with his head bowed. Aderyn walked forward, crouching beside him and putting an arm over his shoulders. She stayed there with him for long minutes, kneeling in the sand.

I knew I should do something—say something that could comfort him as his shoulders shook—but my feet had become rooted to the ground. I doubted an embrace from a son in chains would do much to alleviate his pain, anyway. I could only watch as the smoke billowed into the sky, turning the harsh, pure sunlight hazy and red.

I squinted at it, and my brow furrowed. Leaning toward Keera, I opened my mouth to speak, although words felt lodged in my throat.

A distant booming filled the air before I could speak. Dread pooled in my belly as I looked up toward the sky. It came again, closer this time, and my frown deepened.

This wasn’t the crack of wings that signaled a gravehawk’s arrival, drawn by the burning flesh. This thunderous noise seemed to come from the earth itself. Tiny vibrations started to travel up from the soles of my boots.

Keera beside me whirled around, her gaze snapping toward the mountains. She shook her head, as if she could stop what was happening.

“The crops can’t withstand another earthquake,” she murmured under her breath, her voice laced with despair.

The boom came again, and the ground heaved under my feet. I tried to reach out for Keera, forgetting my hands were bound, and nearly overbalanced myself. The ground didn’t continue to shake and roll though, as it would in an earthquake.

Instead, the baked earth beside the area where we stood heaved again, a distinct bulge forming as if…

Sands…

As if something were trying to break free of the ground.

“Run!” I shouted.

People were already beginning to scatter in fear, and Keera echoed my order.

“Run! Back to the city!” She had fallen to her knees as the ground started to move, but a young man with windswept hair who I didn’t recognize helped her to her feet. She nodded in thanks before beginning to herd the mourners back toward the city.

The manacles on my wrists cut into the exposed skin above my gloves as my guard started to retreat, yanking my bound hands forward. I planted my feet, resisting so hard that his head snapped back as he was halted. I paid his shout of protest no heed as I whipped around, looking for my father and Aderyn.

They stumbled to their feet, the tilting of the ground fighting them as they tried to flee toward the city walls. Before I could move to help them, an explosion of sand erupted between me and them.

The ground burst upward and the first thing I saw was black, glistening armor and wicked pincers as long as my torso. The pincers shot forward before I could process what I was seeing, and a strangled scream split the air, cut off by a wet crunch.

A sudden weight pulling on my wrists dragged me to my knees. From my position on the ground, I stared up as a scorpion easily twice the size of a stallion pulled its back end from the hole in the ground, revealing three curled tails, each tipped with a deadly stinger. Its segmented body twitched as it freed itself from the sand, its eight legs flexing menacingly.

A tricrith—another terrible beast of legend rose from the pages of a bestiary to punish the desert.

I wrenched at my wrists, trying to get to my feet, only to find that the chain was now attached to the broken body of my guard, crushed by the scorpion’s massive pincer and tossed aside. Fighting against my bound hands, I scrambled through the sand toward the dead guard, searching for a way to free myself.

A horrible clacking noise marked the skittering of armored legs as the tricrith advanced. A cry and a metallic clang sounded behind me; Keera had drawn her saber. Even as she distracted the monster, I knew I couldn’t let her face the tricrith alone.

Not after what happened with the lava wyrm.

My hands scrabbled at the dead guard’s belt, finding his dirk and pulling it free with both hands. I stared back and forth between my manacles and the thick metal chain joining them to the cuff around his wrist. He might have had a key, but I didn’t have time to search.

With a grimace, I lifted the blade and slashed down at his forearm. Blood splattered across my clothes and the sand below. As the earth was stained crimson and the grating sensation of sawing through bone traveled up my arm, the whispers in my mind grew into the chant of battle, threatening to overtake all rational thought.