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Elyon turns to me, and there’s a strange, hard edge to his expression that I can’t quite unravel. Perhaps he thinks I’m going to be upset that he didn’t somehow procure someone to personally sneak me into the Iron Mountains?
“The queen’s soul gem will have been extinguished,” Elyon continues.
Grief twists like a blade between my ribs, and for a moment I feel like the air has been sucked from my lungs. Of course. The room of crystals hidden deep beneath the Iron Mountains, that magical representation of every dragon in our world. My mother’s crystal had been red, I remember. A deep, luminous crimson, the kind you could never imagine flickering or fading. Or going out.
“In a matter of hours,” Elyon says, “the first of the dragons from the Iron Mountains will be arriving to pay their respects, and to transport the remains to their resting place.”
I swallow hard as my vision blurs. This is all normal protocol; any time a dragon dies, their remains are brought back to the Iron Mountains, lest they be scavenged by humans or other unsavory treasure hunters. I know all of this. So why does it sound like such a surprise? Why do I feel like I’ve just been punched in the chest?
“If you still wish to travel to the Iron Mountains, and discreetly,” Elyon whispers, with a slight nod of his head toward Rayne, who is now carrying two empty buckets through the still-smoking ruins of my entire life, “then I would recommend that you leave before the convoy from the Iron Mountains arrives.”
Of course. My throat feels tight, but my chest is strangely empty, as though it’s been cracked open and everything inside has drained out. Of course I need to leave Cairncliff. If I stay, I’ll be answering questions about who killed my mother with a dragonsbane-laced blade for hours, or possibly days. And, judging from a lifetime’s experience with the dragons of the Iron Mountains, I’ll probably be the first suspect.
But it’s more than that. I knew I had to leave Cairncliff the moment Rayne arrived. Or, if I’m being honest with myself, I’ve known I need to leave this town since my mother and I escaped from Valgros.
Because Rensivar is back. And the queen is dead. And somehow, I need to find a way to warn the dragons of the Iron Mountains. I need to make the dragons who have never taken me seriously listen to a warning that’s going to sound like the rantings of a lunatic.
I bite back the sigh rising in my chest, run my fingers through my hair and turn back to Elyon.
“How much time do I have?” I whisper in Draconic. “When is the Queensmoot?”
Elyon, to his credit, looks only mildly alarmed at my gaping lack of knowledge about the my mother apparently ruled.
“Four days,” he replies.
I blink. I feel like he’s just tossed a bucket of ice water on me. Four days? That’s it? Great Mothers above, how had I lost track of time? Elyon wanders off, nodding benevolently at the crowd of exhausted firefighters while my eyes skate across the wreckage of my home and over the bluff to the wreckage of my business.
In four days, all the dragons of the Iron Mountains will be gathered in one place. Rensivar knows where that place is. He’s gathering an army, and he’s just murdered my mother. I feel like I’m sinking into the stone beneath my feet.
“Shit,” I mutter, through gritted teeth. “At least things can’t get any worse.”
“Whoa,” a man’s voice booms from across the lawn. “What in the nine holy hells happened to my shop?”
Oh. Mothers. I turn around very slowly and see a huge bearded man wearing a black scarf around his head stomp across what’s left of my grass.
“Hey,” I say, trying to force my lips to smile. “Dad.”
Chapter18
Rayne
Ican’t stop watching the sky.
Fear skitters across my skin on its icy little feet, and once again I turn to look up, peering through the billowing columns of smoke drifting almost lazily up from the remains of Doshir’s house and into the bottomless cerulean sky. I’m so convinced I’m going to see a bolt of dragonfire, or black wings blotting out the sun, that it takes a moment for my mind to identify what’s actually in the sky. Dark smoke, not wings. The jagged outline of the Knife’s Edge Mountains, not the silhouette of a dragon’s spine.
I try to swallow the panicky feeling inside my chest and lift another bucket. No one in this crowd seems surprised that I’m wearing still-smoking remains of a dress and walking barefoot through the embers. Maybe that’s normal for Cairncliff, or maybe everyone here is too exhausted to be surprised by anything. So I hand a gruff older man my empty bucket and take the full one from his hands. Then I walk back into the destruction that I still can’t quite think of as Doshir’s beautiful home, looking for flames to drown.
As I walk, my eyes trace the outline of the murdered dragon lying in the heart of all the devastation. Rensivar’s sword hilt winks from just below her wing like it’s mocking me. Kings, I want to pull it out. It’s bad enough that she’s just lying here, her wings spread out behind her like a rumpled bedspread. Leaving the sword in her feels like an insult.
The scent of mint hits my nostrils, and my stomach clenches. I grit my teeth, tear my eyes away from the cruel glint of the blade’s ornate hilt, and turn back to the remains of the fire. When I find orange wisps of flame licking the edge of what was probably once a rafter, I turn the bucket over on their many golden heads, then grind them out with my soot-streaked heel.
My chest clenches again as I walk past Doshir’s mother with my empty bucket. I found her in Ensyvir’s prison, and by all the many kings above, I had wanted so badly to save her. The thought mixes with another memory burning deep inside my chest. My own mother, her crimson scales streaked with blood, ashes and charred bones beneath her claws, her massive head sinking to the hard granite of the Knife’s Edge Mountains. The way her breath rattled inside her chest, and the way her nostrils flared when she spoke. How her heat bled out of her scales as she died.
I turn away. I’m gripping the bucket so tightly my knuckles have gone white beneath the streaks of ash and soot, and the ripples of scar tissue around my left hand and wrist are little more than thin pink streaks. I’d wanted to save my own mother too, but Ensyvir had killed her just the same. Ensyvir or Rensivar, whatever he called himself, he’d sent me to Cairncliff to murder a dragon but hadn’t specified which dragon. And then he’d sent another regiment after me, just in case I didn’t finish the job.
Careless. The word hisses through my mind like a cold wind. He’s careless with his tools, the monster that called himself Ensyvir. He wanted Doshir dead, but what did it matter if King Donovan’s men murdered my mother instead? What did it matter if they sunk a blade into Eadberh’s leg, knocked me unconscious, set fire to the forest, and then left us both to die alone?
I glance up at the sky again, fear and rage tumbling over themselves inside my chest, once again expecting to see black wings above me, black talons reaching out for me.
