The Dragon Kings' Forbidden Witch

For a heartbeat there was no reaction.

”She’s doing what?”

”She went to the stables. She asked to ride the black stallion. The horse has bolted.” Draeven’s voice did not rise. ”She is somewhere on the east road. We do not know where.”

The color drained from Kaelen’s face.

”Shadowmere,” he said. ”The black. The one that broke Brannock’s boy’s back?”

”Yes.”

”The one that’s killed two grooms?”

”One. The other lived.”

”Draeven....” Kaelen called and Draeven could hear the fear in his brother;s voice.

Draeven opened his hand.

Corin dropped.

He hit the floor in a heap, gasping, retching, one hand at his throat. He curled onto his side and dragged in air with a sound like a saw through wet wood. The heat in the room dipped. The steaming glass cracked down the middle and went still.

Draeven stepped over him.

He walked to the door without a word, his stride long and straight, and Kaelen moved aside. At the threshold Draeven stopped and looked at his brother, and for a moment the gold in his eyes was not the normal gold Kaelen was familiar with. It was something rawer.

”Get him a physician,” he said. ”He is not to be punished further. The fault is mine.”

”I’m coming with you.”

Kaelen turned to follow.

”No.”

It was a single word, Kaelen stopped as though he had walked into a wall.

”Do not follow me, brother.”

”Draeven....”

”Let me take care of this.” Draeven said.

Kaelen stared at him.

GLACIUS was snarling in his chest, wanting to run, to tear the gates off their hinges, to take to the sky. His hands were fists. The frost on the doorframe had crept to the ceiling. He felt the scales rise along his jaw and forced them back, and every muscle in his body strained against the order.

But he looked at his brother’s face.

He saw, beneath the iron, the thing Draeven had not said. ”I cannot feel her. I am the only one of us who cannot.”

Kaelen’s fists loosened slowly.

For a long moment the two of them stood in the cracked and steaming ruin of the east study, two of three, with the third still somewhere out in the white morning.

Then Kaelen nodded once.

Draeven walked out of the room.

***

*MORGANA’S RIDE*

The world had become a smear of green and grey, and the only fixed thing in it was the black neck under her face.

Morgana did not scream. She had screamed once at the gate, a short, shocked sound that the wind tore out of her mouth and flung away behind her, and after that she had no breath for it. She lay along Shadowmere’s back with her fists knotted in his mane and her knees clamped to his ribs. Every stride slammed up through her spine and rattled her teeth.

The road fell away beneath them. The hedgerows streamed past in long dark ribbons. Somewhere behind her a voice was still shouting her name, thin and torn, and then it was gone, and there was nothing but hoofbeats.

”I am going to die,” she thought, ”I am going to die on a horse, and Rowan will pinch my corpse.”

The absurdity of it nearly made her laugh. It was the wrong time, and the laugh caught in her throat like a bone.

Shadowmere left the road.

He did it without slowing. One moment the packed earth was ringing under his hooves, and the next he had swung hard to the left and the road was gone, and there was only open grass sloping away toward a line of willows. She felt the great haunches gather beneath her. A ditch yawned ahead, wide and black, with water glinting at the bottom.

”No,” she whispered. ”No, no, no....”

He jumped.

For one long heartbeat there was nothing under her at all. The cold air rushed up under her ribs. She felt the whole animal stretch out beneath her like a drawn bow, neck and back and flank, and then the far bank came up and struck and the stride closed again without a stumble.

Morgana opened her eyes.

The grass was flowing past, bright and silver with morning wet. The willows rushed toward her, and Shadowmere went through them in a long curving run, threading between the trunks so cleanly that the branches only brushed her sleeve. He was not wild. She saw it the way you see a thing you have been staring at without understanding. He was choosing. Every turn was deliberate. He had taken the ditch at its narrowest point and swung wide of the boggy ground. His head was low and steady and his ears were pointed forward.

He was running toward something.

The knowledge settled into her slowly, and with it her fingers loosened a little in the mane.

”Where are you taking me?” she said.

The wind took the words.

Ahead, the land dipped. A river lay across it, wide and brown, with a stony ford marked by a line of pale rocks. Shadowmere did not slow. He plunged in, and the water burst up around them in sheets of white. Cold drops struck her face and neck. She shrieked, and this time it was not terror. It was something closer to outrage, and then the horse lunged up the far bank, water streaming from his flanks, and she was laughing.

It came up out of her all at once. She could not stop it. She was soaked to the knees and her plait had come half undone, and she was tearing across a stranger’s meadow on the back of a horse that had killed grooms. She had never been so frightened in her life, and underneath the fear, bright and furious, something in her had woken up and was singing.

”You bastard,” she gasped, and laughed until it hurt. ”You absolute....oh, you beautiful bastard....”

His ears flicked back at her, and he put on speed.

She lay down along his neck and let him go.