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“You fool,” someone growls, and it takes me a moment to realize the silver dragon beside Doshir is the one who’s spoken.
Someone on the mountainside shouts, but I can’t make out their words. Rensivar’s wings beat again, sending the faint acrid scent of the pines up to me. The trees whisper as Rensivar, the dragon who controls the throne and the army of Valgros, settles onto the hill behind the tarn. I step off the rocks and into the shade of the pines.
“Rensivar,” Greimbyss announces. “He defeated the of the Fall. He locked those wicked elves in the Lands Below for eternity! And now, he just used that same magic to protect us. To defend the Iron Mountains against the humans!”
“And we defeated him,” the silver dragon barks as he glares at Rensivar. “We beat you once, you motherless son of a lizard, and we’ll beat you again!”
I slide between the trees, following the thread of the silver wire as it loops into the shadows. The dark bulk of Rensivar’s body looms above the little pine grove. He shakes his head, and the rattling of his scales sounds like stones falling down the mountain.
“Ah, Nyrgin,” Rensivar says, in a voice that sounds like rumbling beneath the earth. “You never could see the bigger picture.”
Rensivar crosses the hill behind the tarn like a shadow swallowing the stars. I freeze, holding my breath as his head swings toward the trees.
“I see you, dragons,” Rensivar booms as the massive, sharp tip of his tail ticks from side to side. “I see you fighting over scraps in the Iron Mountains. I see you here, on the eve of your precious Queensmoot, attacked. By humans!”
He makes the word sound like a slap in the face.
“And yet I see no one,” Rensivar continues, “who would dare to challenge me for this throne.”
With that, Rensivar spreads his wings, steps forward, and places his foot on the Throne of Claws. He opens his mouth. Starlight winks off his many serrated teeth; hissed and snarled objections pour from the mountainside, and the air fills with the throb of wings beating against the night. I turn away, tracing the progress of the silver wire.
Which vanishes. I blink, then step back. The wire runs from the cliffside to the forest, over fallen pine needles and between sparse tree trucks, and then—
It cuts off in mid-air.
“Queens have warmed this throne with their scales for long enough,” Rensivar announces. “It’s time the dragons had a king!”
Hisses and snarls, and not a few cheers, echo through the night air. I try to ignore them as I narrow my eyes at the gap between the trees where the silver wire vanishes.Anything inside that wire, Anslo said,the bastards can’t see. The entire Valgros army was invisible. The dragons could smell it, maybe even hear it, but they couldn’t see it.
I creep forward, moving as silently as I can through the shadows beneath the trees.
“We need a leader who can defend us,” Greimbyss snarls. “A leader with the kind of magic that can defeat an entire army—”
Someone shouts. A jet of fire licks the night sky from the far end of the ridge. Rensivar looms over the tops of the trees, his black scales gleaming in the starlight. His mouth is open, his lips pulled back over the rows of dagger-shaped teeth in his jaws, and for a heartbeat I wonder how I could ever have mistaken him for anything but a dragon. Even in his human form, swooping around the castle with his massive black cape, wasn’t there always something draconic about him? Rensivar hisses, and there’s a rumble of voices from the ridge above me—
And something else. I freeze, holding my breath, my heart twitching in my chest. The sound comes again, thin and weak, like the first wisp of smoke rising from a fire.
The sound of breathing. I turn slowly toward the empty space where the silver wire hangs suspended in midair, there and then suddenly not there. Toward the sound of someone, or something, breathing under the trees.
Fear tugs at the skin on the back of my neck.The General has an elf, Anslo said. Doshir laughed at my stories of elves eating human children to feed their magic or using human bones to build their homes; still, my heart beats faster every time I see an elf.
But I am a weapon. I am the weapon that will destroy whatever it is Rensivar is trying to hide. I suck in a breath as my hands ball into fists, and then I spin into the emptiness between the trees, forcing my body past the place where the severed silver wire hangs in midair.
Piercing blue light washes over me. It’s nearly blinding after navigating the ridge in the darkness. I wince as the world swims before me, bathed in bright blue light that was invisible before I pushed through the magic of the silver wire but now bleaches the entire grove.
And I see people. One? No, two. Two men stand before the strange chain-wrapped column topped with blue fire. I raise my fists and blink at the light. Both of the men stare at me; the smaller one reaches for something at his waist. There’s something familiar about him, something that scratches at the back of my mind like a burr buried in warm skin.
Kings above, he’s wearing the uniform of the Valgros army! The General, my mind hisses. There’s a gasp, and then the larger man swings forward. I brace myself to fend off his attack, but he turns past me. He’s spinning toward the General with his arm raised. I hardly have time to feel shock; whoever this man is, he’s about to drive his fist through the General’s face.
Then, suddenly, his arm stops in midair. The man’s face contorts, twisting in anger, then fear. Someone chuckles, low and cruel, and fear wraps around me like a cloak made of ice.
“Always so predictable,” the General whispers.
Varitan. Kings above, that man is Rensivar’s assistant Varitan, the one who’d turned me into a dragon. Varitan stands before me, wearing the uniform of His Majesty’s Royal Army, snarling up at the man who’d just tried to punch him in the face.
No. Not a man. He’s too tall to be a man, this creature who raised his fist at Varitan, and his long, tapering ears give him away. My gaze twists from the man to Varitan the General, whom I’d never seen without a strange twist of cloth around his head.
Realization hits me like a bucket of ice water. The man with the fist, Varitan, the disquieting resemblance between them. Their sharp facial features, their long ears. The General has an elf, Anslo had said.
