Page 76 of Into Ember

And then a hand closes around my bare wrist.

Skin. Not fabric. A stranger’s hot fingers wrapped all the way around my wrist, and everything in me goes white.

“Don’t touch me—” I wrench free and stumble sideways and another hand catches my arm, above the elbow, gripping, and someone’s fingers graze my hair, tugging at a braid Colette spent an hour on, and a palm presses flat against my back and pushes, and they’re saying my queen, my queen, my queen, reverent and hungry at the same time, and the smell of them is everywhere, wine and smoke and too many bodies, and I can’t get a full breath, the dress is a cage, the crowd is a mouth, and I hear a sound come out of me that I have never made before — high and cracked and nothing like words.

Far away, at the end of what used to be the aisle, the wall of my men breaks.

They’re moving. All five, coming off the platform fast, Erik’s face like nothing I’ve ever seen on it, Leif’s mouth forming orders, Gunnar shoving somebody into a column, and I sob out loud with relief because they’re coming, they’re coming — and the crowd surges and closes between us like water. Bodies and bodies and bodies. I can’t see them anymore.

I can’t see them anymore.

Someone pulls the back of my dress hard enough to bend me, and I’m screaming now, really screaming, and the music is still playing, and nobody in this golden room full of a thousand people will look at me like anything is wrong—

A hand closes around mine and yanks.

Hard. Out of the crush, through the wall of bodies, air, space, and relief floods through me so fast my knees nearly give, because they got to me, one of them got to me—

“This way,” says a voice I have never heard in my life.

He’s young. He’s a stranger. Gray sleeves, sweating face, terrified eyes, and his grip on my hand is crushing, and he’s not pulling me toward my men, he’s pulling me away from them, along the wall, fast, behind the columns, and I’m fighting now, really fighting, hauling backward with everything I have, and it’s like hauling against a machine.

“Let go of— help— HELP—”

The music swallows it. The gold swallows it. A panel in the corner of the ballroom stands open where no door was, black as night, and he drags me toward it while I claw at his fingers, and the last thing I get of the light is white fabric — my dress catching on the panel’s edge and tearing, a long piece of it ripping away and staying behind, caught on the corner like a flag.

Then the dark takes the rest of me.

Chapter 30

Brock

I lose her in four seconds.

That’s all it takes. She was right there — white dress in a golden aisle, close enough that I could hear her telling the men grabbing at her excuse me, because she is polite to people who don’t deserve it even when she’s afraid. Then the crowd closed over her, and now I’m shoulder-deep in a thousand bodies and I can’t find her.

We split without discussing it. Leif drove straight up the middle. Gunnar and Rayner took the flanks. Erik was beside me and then Erik wasn’t anywhere, which means Erik is in the shadows between the candlelight, moving faster than any of us can. Good. One of us is already ahead of this. I start pushing.

The crowd doesn’t part. The crowd doesn’t even notice me. Every male in this room is turned toward the place she was like plants toward the sun, pressing inward, climbing over each other politely, formally, in their best clothes, murmuring my queen with their pupils blown wide, and I have spent my whole life understanding people and I understand these men perfectly and it is no comfort at all. They’re not soldiers. They’re not conspirators. They’re bakers and clerks and minor lords who woke up this morning ordinary, and then the only female dragon alive walked through a room soaked in her own fear, and instinct older than the realm stood up in every one of them at once.

Her fear. That’s the part I can’t forgive. Her scent is everywhere in this room and it is not the garden-at-night sweetness I know. It’s sharp and wrong and terrified, and it’s driving them deeper into the crush, and it’s doing the same thing to my dragon, who wants me to stop being polite about the bodies in my way.

I stop being polite about the bodies in my way.

A man goes sideways into his friends. Another one bounces off a column. I’m carving a line through silk and shoulders and I catch Gunnar for half a second through the gap — his fists already bloody, his mouth moving, and whatever he’s shouting has her name in it. Then the crowd closes and he’s gone.

Somebody grabs my jacket. I remove him from it.

Whoever put this ball together invited every male dragon of standing in the realm and put them in one room with her. Thoughtless, and stupid. The arrogance of old institutions never ceases to amaze me. You don’t fill a room with dry timber by accident and then act surprised about the fire.

Rayner surfaces ahead of me, head and shoulders above everyone, dangling a lord one-handed off the ground by his collar, asking him something, once, in a voice I’ve heard exactly twice in all our years, and the man is pointing, and Rayner drops him and moves, and the crowd swallows that too.

Leif’s voice cuts across the room — a command, parade-ground, the kind that stops soldiers mid-step.

Nobody stops. There are no soldiers in this. That was intentional.

She screams.

Somewhere ahead and to the left, high and cracked and unmistakably her, and the sound goes through me and through my dragon at the same time, and I will be hearing it for the rest of my life, and I need height, I need the whole room, because down here I’m one more body in the timber.