The Dragon Kings' Forbidden Witch

The land lifted, a long slope of fescue and wild thyme, rising toward a ridge that cut a hard dark line against the sky. Her thighs ached. Her hands were numb. Her magic hummed up through her palms where they pressed against his hide, a low steady thrum, not the wild flare she had learned to dread but something quiet and contained, like a held note. She did not push it down. She let it hum.

The ridge came up.

Shadowmere took the last of the slope in long climbing bounds and broke over the crest, and there, abruptly, he stopped.

The momentum nearly threw her. She grabbed his mane, rocked forward against the crest of his neck, and sat up gasping. Her legs shook. Her ribs heaved. Her whole body felt rinsed and flayed and strangely clean.

The horse stood with his sides heaving, steaming in the cold air. He shook his head once, and the bit jingled.

She slid off.

Her knees buckled the moment her boots touched the ground. She went down on the grass in a heap, and the earth was cold and solid and wet with dew, she lay on her back with her arms flung out and stared at the sky.

It was enormous. Clouds in long streamers, high and thin and edged with light. A hawk turned lazily above the valley. The wind moved over her face and through her hair, and she lay under it and laughed again, softer now, helplessly, until the laugh ran out and left her breathing.

Something warm and enormous huffed over her.

She turned her head. Shadowmere stood above her, lowering his great black head until his muzzle hung a hand’s breadth from her cheek. He blew out a breath that stirred the hair on her forehead.

”You are terrible,” she told him. ”Do you know that? I could have died.”

He lipped at her plait.

”Garrick’s going to have an apoplexy.”

The horse seemed unmoved by this prospect. He lifted his head, turned it, and looked out across the valley.

Morgana followed his gaze.

The land fell away in a long green sweep, hedges and barley and dark stands of oak, toward a far ridge of blue mountains with their heads in cloud. She had not seen those peaks in weeks. She knew the slope of the nearest. She knew the notch in its shoulder and the way the late light turned its western face to bronze.

Somewhere in its flank, in a cave she had walked into as a child with a stolen candle and the stupidest courage of her life, an old and chained and ancient thing lay awake.

Atheris.

Her breath stopped.

Shadowmere stood with his ears pricked toward the mountain. He did not paw the ground or toss his head. He only looked, in the stillness of a creature who has brought a visitor to a place and is waiting to see what she will do.

”Did you know?” Morgana whispered. ”Is that why?”

The horse said nothing.

She sat up slowly and drew her knees to her chest. The wind was cold on her damp skin. She thought of a voice in a pale room telling her, He tried to hide you for as long as he could. She thought of her mother who is currently in a village on the far side of that very range, and of a promise she had made at the age of eight, in a dark kitchen, with her mother’s hand tight over her own.

”Never show them. Never. Not even if they beg.”

It was hard to remember what she had been so afraid of. It was harder to remember what she had been hiding from. The grass under her palms was alive, and the wind had a smell of snow, and she had just flown across half a county on the back of a horse that nobody could ride. A thing in her chest that had been wound very tight for eighteen years had loosened by half a turn.

She did not know what that meant.

She was not certain she wanted to find out.

”I’ll come,” she said softly, to the mountain. ”I will. Soon. I promise.”

The wind answered with nothing. But a long way off, across the green and the blue, she thought for a moment that she felt something answer back, vast and slow and warm, like a hand laid briefly on her hair.

She put her forehead on her knees and breathed.

***

*DRAEVEN*

Draeven did not remember leaving the study.

He remembered the stairs, a long grey spiral that his feet took two at a time. He remembered the corridor beyond, and the heat rising off his own skin so fiercely that the tapestries on the walls began to curl. He remembered a maid turning the corner with a basket of linens, seeing him, and flattening herself against the stone as though the wall might open for her.

*She is gone.*

”It was the only thought. It beat in him like a second pulse. ”Out the gate. On a horse that nobody can ride. And I cannot find her.”

The great hall opened before him, long and high and echoing. Servants were already crossing it, bearing trays and baskets and bundles of firewood, and all of them stopped.

Nobody spoke.

He walked through them like a man walking through a field of wheat. The air around him shimmered. His shadow, cast long across the floor by the tall windows, was not right. It lengthened as he moved, drawing out behind him in a way no human shadow should, and at its edges something rose that had the outline of a spine.

A page boy dropped a silver tray. It rang on the flagstones and spun. He did not pick it up.

Draeven’s breath came faster. He felt the change begin in his hands first, a deep ache in the joints of the fingers, a pulling at the nail beds. When he looked down the nails had turned black. The skin across his knuckles was darkening, thickening, a faint red-gold sheen climbing up from the wrist like frost in reverse.