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My eyes fly open. Nyrgin’s body snakes around the stones like a great silver river, and his massive snout rests on his front claws. He’s staring at the ridge line, where a pair of delicate white butterflies rise in the air, their bodies drifting together and then apart in the steps of some intricate dance whose meaning is completely lost on me.
Nyrgin does not appear to be joking. Still, I stare at him, my mind screaming that this must be some sort of trap. Finally, he turns to face me, his lips stretching into a wide grin.
“Really,” he says. “I supported you, and I wasn’t the only one. The Council needed more dragons like you. Needs it even more now.”
He falls silent. The two white butterflies are joined by a third. Nyrgin watches them rise and fall, their little wings beating against the wind.
“You would have gotten the seat on your second application,” he finally says. He lifts a claw to scratch delicately between his nostrils. “But I figure that wasn’t what you really wanted.”
I blink, my gaze shifting between the massive silver dragon and the tiny dancing butterflies. It occurs to me that I may be having a very long, very strange, and very intense hallucination. Nyrgin shakes his massive head, scattering the butterflies to the wind.
“It’s a shame,” he sighs. “Dragons like you tend to leave the Iron Mountains, and they’re weaker alone.”
My mouth opens, ready to make some sort of snide remark about how dragons aren’t weak, together or otherwise. But then my mind drifts back to the cave in the Knife’s Edge Mountains where Mad Scarlett had been murdered by a dozen humans from Valgros. Rensivar sent those humans. Perhaps he’d assumed no one from the Iron Mountains would notice, or even care, if a lone dragon vanished.
Like the Historian, who was murdered somewhere on the southern continent. A shiver rattles my scales, and briefly, the cave under the Iron Mountains flickers through my mind. How many soul gems have gone dark down there, hidden beneath stone and darkness? How many lone dragons left the Iron Mountains and then just disappeared?
Nyrgin snorts, then scratches at his neck. The sound of claws on scales fills the air with a hollow rattling. His leg falls still, and he exhales in a long sigh, twin plumes of white smoke drifting from his nostrils.
“Besides, it leaves us stuck with idiots like Greimbyss,” he rumbles. “We should have the best of us serving the Throne of Claws. Not the glory-seekers.”
Whatever I was planning on saying comes out as a weak sort of cough. Nyrgin’s massive head settles to the sun-warmed stones. His eyes close. His breathing evens, and the butterflies return to dance around the shining scales of his snout. I stare at him for a long time, my own claws folded beneath my body.
That wasn’t what you really wanted, he had said. And perhaps he was right. Perhaps a seat on the Council wasn’t what I’d wanted. Perhaps a life with Wendolyn wasn’t what I’d wanted either. Perhaps I’d just been looking for an excuse to leave the claustrophobic halls of the Iron Mountains, with their whispering and gossip and social maneuvering, and find the sort of freedom my father seemed to flaunt every time he came to visit.
And perhaps I’d needed to tell myself that I’d fled the Iron Mountains. Perhaps it was easier to tell myself that I wasn’t wanted than to admit I’d never felt comfortable in my mother’s long shadow, or even in Wendolyn’s opulent chambers.
Maybe it was easier to be a failed dragon than a failed son.
I sigh, shifting on the stones. The sun beats down on my scales, and I feel the weight of every heartbeat that’s passed since Rayne pulled me from the flames consuming my shop. They’re heavy, these past few days. I lower my head to the stones, and some part of me wishes I could keep sinking, down and down, until the cold darkness beneath the mountains swallowed me whole.
But I can’t leave Rayne. The memory of her tugs at something deep in my chest, buried beneath scales and bones. Her smile, her scowl. The way she hadn’t quite looked at me when she’d asked who Wendolyn was. Rayne, the fierce, glorious, beautiful dragon who crashed straight into the middle of my neatly-organized life and made me remember that I do, in fact, have a heart. Wendolyn doesn’t trust her, and I find I can’t blame my one-time lover for that.
But I trust Rayne. I take a deep breath, pressing my scales into the mountainside. Sure, it sounds suspicious that a dragon raised by Valgros vanished by the Tarn of the Maiden on the eve of the Queensmoot. And yes, I would be a good target for a beautiful woman looking to seduce someone for information. In fact, that’s exactly what I was on the night we met.
But it’s more than that now. Somewhere between the first bottle of frost wine and the last night we spent tangled up together in our bedrolls by the fire on the slopes of the Knife’s Edge Mountains, this spark between us has grown into something more. I can’t explain it, not to myself and certainly not to Wendolyn, but I know I can trust Rayne.
Which means something else must have happened to her. My chest tightens as a swirl of gory images spin through my mind. Rayne’s beautiful human body, dashed against the rocks. Her gleaming dragon body, wrapped in chains and hidden in the forest. Blood on her crimson scales, tears on the delicate curve of her human cheek.
I lift my head; my claws scrape across the stone. Nyrgin’s eyes are closed, and his breath is deep and steady. He looks for all the world like a dragon in deep sleep. Perhaps he trusts me, or perhaps he has a somewhat casual attitude toward guard duty. Either way, it seems like I could slip away quite unnoticed.
I shift, rising to my feet. A low rumbling washes over me, so deep and thick it seems to be rising from the stones. It takes me a minute to place the sound, and then to swing my neck over to where Nyrgin lays sprawled across the mountainside with one open eye fixed on me.
“Easy, Doshir,” Nyrgin says. “The Queensmoot will be here before you know it.”
For the span of a breath, I contemplate my chances. Nyrgin is ancient, far larger, stronger, and presumably faster than I am. He’s made it clear that he has no particular argument with me, but he’s also apparently not going to just roll over and let me leave. If I push the issue, I’m certain he’ll stop me.
And if he has to stop me, I’ll probably end up clicking my claws against the walls of a prison cell beneath the Iron Mountains, at least until I can explain my actions to the Council. All of which would keep me away from Rayne, wherever she may be.
With a sigh, I let my body clatter back to the ground. I twist my neck to peer at the ridge behind us, the mountainside that shelters the Tarn of the Maiden.
“Rayne,” I whisper under my breath. “Hold on. I’m coming.”
Chapter30
Rayne
“Dragons are coming,” the guard whispers.
