Page 27 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Scales erupted across his forearms and his pupils narrowed to dragonsight, his beastblood responding first.

His mind flew to Farine—that she’d woken, that she was yanking him back to her rooms.

Leaves shivered overhead, though no wind crossed the courtyard. A long exhale moved through the arches, damp and earthen, and the ground began to part.

A massive head lifted from the ivy.

Fungus and lichen sheathed the creature’s skull, crusted thick over obsidian scales. Moss draped the ridges above its brow, and its neck bowed beneath the weight of itself, dragging its snout toward the soil.

A tail uncoiled through the underbrush like a fallen pillar. At its end, root-fused bone knotted into a brutal club made to shatter stone. Viridian wings lay furled tight against its flanks, their edges stiff with thorns.

Eyes glittered in the moonlight, crystalline and unblinking.

Like Rimeclaw’s.

A dragon shackled by a Heart of Stars.

Jassyn’s breath stalled in his chest. The beastblood that had plated him with scales now locked every muscle, pinning him like prey before a predator still deciding whether to strike. His instincts supplied one certainty about the dragon.

Her.

Silence settled between them as she watched.

Some primal part of Jassyn recognized her stillness, the obedience trained into her posture. He’d worn it himself in Farine’s courtyard, kneeling on marble with his jaw forced open for figs he couldn’t refuse.

The dragon tracked him with a patience that made his wings pull tight against his spine. The truth assembled in pieces as he took in the breadth of her body, the way the garden seemed to curve around her bulk, roots and ivy arranged like a second cage.

A Bramblemaw, forged to tunnel through root and stone.

She dwarfed Skylash, but carried none of the Stormstrike’s sleek menace. This creature hunched low to the ground, squat and massive, shaped for earth rather than flight.

A dragon at the Vallende estate.

What better vault for a weapon than the grounds of the realm’s most powerful family? Buried beneath ivy. Forgotten until needed. Maintained the way they maintained everything else—with the certainty that what they possessed would never leave.

Smoke curled faintly from the scales at her neck, rising from a crescent-shaped wound carved deep into the base of her skull. The flesh had blistered and split, still burning under the raw seam. Sap-thick blood wept down her jaw, gleaming dark in the moonlight.

Jassyn stepped forward and held his hands low and open where she could see them.

The same offering of peace he’d given Daeryn’s people in the druid jungle, though none of them had been a dragon with jaws wide enough to swallow him whole.

“I could mend your wound,” he said.

Her crystalline stare never left him.

Jassyn ignited Essence at his fingertips.

A snarl tore from the dragon’s throat, and the garden heaved. Vines erupted from the soil, thorns splitting along their lengths, every tendril poised to strike.

The dragon lunged.

CHAPTER 6

JASSYN

The Bramblemaw skidded to a halt before Jassyn, talons gouging trenches through the soil. Her jaws gaped wide enough to swallow his torso, close enough that the scent of loam crowded his lungs.

Her fangs drove toward him.