Page 61

Then, the sky split open.

Dragon fire roared over the amphitheater in a blinding, crimson wave that turned the freezing air to pure furnace heat.

The heat hit my back like a physical blow, singeing the edges of my hair as I threw myself through the grinding ironwood gates. Behind us, a candidate’s scream was cut off in a wet, sickening pop as the dive-bombing beast struck stone.

I didn’t look back. I ran.

My boots slammed against the razor-sharp obsidian grit of the canyon floor, every stride a brutal shock to muscles already ruined by thirty-six hours on a sea-drake. Beside me, the sprint was sheer, unadulterated madness. Candidates scattering into the black gloom like rats from a burning barn, leaping over steaming fissures and dodging jagged outcrops of volcanic glass.

A shadow slammed over the canyon, blocking out the pale light of the moons.

I looked up just in time to see a massive, emerald-scaled dragon sweep low between the basalt cliffs, its leathery wings generating a gust of wind so violent it nearly threw me off my feet. Its slitted green eyes locked onto a male ten paces ahead of me—a high-born lord from the southern tiers. The beast didn’t even drop to land; its massive, webbed talons snatched the male by the torso, lifting him screaming into the sky before snapping its jaws shut around his center.

Blood rained down into the volcanic ash.

A massive hand clamped around my upper arm, yanking me sideways into the narrow shadows of an overhang just as another jet of white-hot fire scorched the open path where I had been standing a second before.

I hit the stone wall hard, my daggers drawn, my heart hammering a frantic, violent rhythm against my ribs.

Caspian was over me instantly. His broad frame blocked the mouth of the narrow fissure, his dark leathers smelling of ash and bitter cold. His eyes were dilated, sweeping over my face, my neck, and the bleeding cut on my left palm in a swift, frantic inventory.

“Are you hit?” he growled, his gravelly voice rough and unhinged over the booming roars echoing down the caldera.

“I’m fine,” I panted, my lungs burning as I pressed my back against the volcanic glass. “I’m fine, Cas.”

Dax slid into the fissure right behind us, his back hitting the stone as he let out a harsh, wheezing breath, his hands resting on his knees. “Well,” Dax spat, wiping ash from his eyes, “that was a remarkably cheerful welcome committee.”

Through the narrow opening of our rock shelter, the nightmare of Isath Nalore unfolded in chaotic, terrifying color. The sky above the canyon was crisscrossed by towering silhouettes, at least a dozen massive beasts circling the thermals rising from the active vents, their roars shaking loose avalanches of gravel from the peaks. The night was lit by bursts of gold, crimson, and violet flame as the dragons claimed the weak and forced the rest into the deep interior.

Caspian didn’t look at the sky. He kept his body pinned between me and the canyon, his gaze locked strictly onto my face.

“The basin,” Caspian said, his low voice cutting straight through the thunder above. “Your blood didn’t just ignite the stone, Tauriel. It cracked the altar.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“I don’t care about the stone,” Caspian interrupted, his fingers tightening on my leather-clad shoulder, his thumb brushing dangerously close to the pulsing silver brand beneath my collar. “Every priestess, every guard, and every candidate saw it. You didn’t just summon solar fire. You pulled the void itself into that bowl.”

“They were going to find out eventually,” I muttered, my chin lifting as my defensive walls snapped back into place. “Malakai knew. You knew. Soren knew. Now the rest of the keep knows I’m not an empty placeholder.”

“It makes you a target!” Caspian snapped, leaning down until his dark, honeyed-blonde hair brushed my temple, his sapphire eyes burning with a dark, suffocating intensity. “The high houses came here to watch a half-breed fail. Now they know you carry eclipse magic—ancient and extinct. Dellyn’s faction won’t wait for your death on the first day of spring. They will try to slit your throat in these canyons before you ever find a beast.”

“Then they can line up behind the dragons,” I shot back, my green eyes flashing as I held his stare. “Because I’m not dying in this ditch.”

A sharp, familiar laugh cut through the dark of the fissure. Dax leaned his head back against the stone, a wild, dangerous spark dancing in his green eyes despite the soot staining his skin. “She’s got a point, Cas. Besides, if Kaelor or any of those provincial bastards try to corner her, they have to go through us first.”

Caspian’s jaw set into a rigid block of stone. He didn’t offer a dry joke or a courtly deflection. He simply looked down at me, his gaze dropping to the fresh, bleeding cut on my palm. Without a word, he pulled a strip of clean linen from his belt kit, took my wrist in his calloused hand, and began wrapping the wound with a firm, practiced gentleness that completely contradicted the war raging outside.

“We move deep into the iron-thorn thickets,” Caspian commanded flatly, tying off the bandage with a sharp tug. “The larger beasts can’t drop their wings into the narrow canopy, and the ground heat will keep us from freezing while the solstice magic drains from the atmosphere.”

“What about the rest of the canidates?” I asked, looking out toward the main canyon where the screams were finally beginning to die down into a heavy, sulfur-choked quiet.

“The weak are already dead,” Caspian said, stepping back to scan the open trail before turning his head to meet my eyes one last time. “And the ones who survived the gates are hunting. Keep your daggers cleared, Trouble. The island is only getting darker.”

He turned and led the way out of the fissure, his broad frame dissolving into the black mist of the volcanic pass, with Dax and me falling into step right behind him—stepping deeper into the home of the monsters.

THIRTY

The air didn’t just burn; it tore.