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Ruari blushed; his already heat-flushed skin turned a shade darker than the bloody sun. "I sent her back to your house—in a shirt, Pavek. I found another shirt for her and sent her back to the templar quarter."
There was laughter, from the women as well as the men. Ruari's face became dangerously bright.
"What else was I supposed to do?" he demanded.
"Nothing, Ru," Pavek assured him. "You did the right thing." Then he welcomed his friend back from the presumed-dead with a bone-snapping embrace. "What's her name?"
"I don't know, Pavek. But she's beautiful, and I think she loves me," Ruari whispered his answers before they separated. "I think it's forever."
"I'm sure it is." Pavek held Ruari at arm's length; the young man was clearly besotted. But that was hardly surprising. "I'm sure you'll be very happy together."
He saw them together in his mind's eye—Ruari and a beautiful woman and children, also beautiful; one of whom had yellow eyes. Pavek hadn't ever had a vision before; prophecy wasn't at all common among druids... or templars. But he believed what he saw, and it lifted his heart. He hugged Ruari again, then let him go, and walked by himself to the tower's southern balustrade where, with his vision still strong in his mind, he stared at the empty road until he could see both of them together.
A hand fell heavily on his shoulder: Javed, his face deep in a hard, unreadable expression.
"Manu?" the elven commandant asked.
"Yes." Javed's hand left Pavek's shoulder. It made a fist that struck the black breastplate armor over the commandant's heart: a lifetime of unquestioning obedience followed by an eyes-closed sigh.
Pavek nodded. "Hope," he agreed.
But not for long. While both men watched, a second sun began to rise where the southern road met the horizon. It was as bright as the eastern sun and the same bloody color.
"Whim of the lion," one of the sergeants swore; the rest of them had lost their voices.
The templars lost more a few moments later when every medalLion-wearing man and woman collapsed. Pavek wrapped his arms around his head, lest his skull burst from the fire within. He beat his forehead on the rough planks of the watchtower floor. That helped, countering pain with pain. Someone stood behind him and broke his medallion's golden chain; that helped more.
But by then, it wasn't the physical pain that kept him on his knees with his face to the floor. It was the certain knowledge that the Lion-King, the Unseen presence in his life since he'd turned fifteen and received his first crude, ceramic medallion, had released him,
had abandoned him, rather than destroy him.
Slowly, Pavek straightened and sat back on his heels. Javed was in front of him; his lips were bleeding where he'd bitten them. There were no words for what they felt as they steadied themselves against the balustrade and stood up. They turned away from each other and looked south, where the second sun had vanished behind—or within—a towering pillar of dust and light.
One of the lesser-ranked templars in the gate tower began a cheer. It died unfinished in her throat. No mortal could celebrate what was happening in the south once the sounds of death and sorcery reached the Urik walls.
The cloud-pillar grew until it could grow no higher—as high and mighty as the towering plumes that heralded an eruption of the Smoking Crown volcano to the northwest. Then, like those sooty plumes, the pillar began to flatten and spread out at its top. Lightning arcs connected the outer edge of the spreading cloud with the ground. The lightning danced wildly; it persisted longer than the blue bolts of a Tyr-storm.
Pavek knew—they all knew, though none of them was a weather witch—that the bolts sprang up from the ground, not down from the cloud.
The templars of Nibenay, Gulg, and Giustenal were not as fortunate as their Urikite peers. Their kings had sacrificed them and the rest of the three enemy armies to the dragon taking shape within the seething pillar.
Without warning, the cloud disintegrated before their awestruck eyes. A deep, rumbling roar struck the tower a few heartbeats later. Like a mighty fist—a dragon's fist—it drove each and every one of them backward. The tower shuddered and swayed; strong men and women fell to their knees and screamed in abject terror. Behind them, within Urik itself, roofs and walls collapsed, their lesser tumult subsumed in the ongoing echo of the southern blast. An echo that seemed, to Pavek, to last forever.
"We're next!" he shouted. He felt his words in his lungs and on his tongue, but his voice never penetrated his deafened ears.
But one voice did: Behold! The Dragon of Urik!
And another voice, immediately after the first: Now, Pavek.
He crawled to the balustrade. The blast-weakened rail crumbled in his hand when he clutched it. Pavek stood carefully, looked south. Everything was quiet beneath the light and heat of a single sun. The cloud was gone—as if it had never been. The three dark sprawls where the three enemy armies had camped were gone, too. The places where they'd been were as pale and dazzling as bleached bones in the morning light.
But the dark line of Urik's army still circled the still-green fields. They'd survived. They'd all survived. Their king was, indeed, stronger than the nature Rajaat and the other champions had given him.
Now, Pavek. Now, or never!
There was a black dot on the southern road, moving toward them. Far smaller than the monstrous creature Pavek had seen within the cloud, he didn't, at first, comprehend the words echoing in his thoughts. He didn't comprehend that they had not come from a frantic Quraite druid, but from the moving dot, the dragon, racing toward Urik's walls.
There were no mnemonics or patterns in Pavek's mind when he evoked the city's essence, just need—burning, desperate need.
