The Dragon Kings' Forbidden Witch

Not yet. Not inside.

He had forced it back through every ceremony, every audience, every long night in the council chamber. He had kept INFERNUS locked under his sternum for two hundred years, and his dragon had learned the sound of his refusal.

He did not refuse it now.

The terrace doors were open. He crossed the last yards at a run, and stone gave way to open air, to a wide balcony of pale limestone that hung over the lower courtyard. Wind hit his face. The sky was a white bowl above him.

The heat broke.

It tore through him all at once, like a dam bursting. The fabric of his coat flared and curled to ash, his tunic, his boots, a flash of orange and then nothing, burning away in a single exhalation and carried off on the wind. His body bowed. Bone cracked, a sound like green timber snapping, and his spine began to lengthen, the vertebrae sliding apart and pulling outward in a long ripple of pain and pleasure. His shoulders broadened and split. Muscle swelled and rolled. His jaw thrust forward and kept going.

Scales burst across his skin.

They came in a wave, spreading from his hands and chest in a rolling cascade of deep crimson, each one edged with gold and bright as polished copper. They rippled over his shoulders and down his flanks like a lit fuse racing along a wick. His hands curved inward and hardened into talons the length of daggers. Wings unfolded behind him from between the shoulder blades, wet and crumpled at first, then snapping open with a crack like a sail catching wind.

They spanned the terrace.

They spanned the courtyard.

Far below, a stable cart overturned. A man screamed. The great red shape that rose where the king had stood blotted out half the sky.

INFERNUS lifted his head.

He was vast. He was the color of a forge at full heat, a deep dark red banded with molten gold along the throat and the underside of the wings. His horns swept back from his brow in two long curved blades. His eyes, each as wide as a shield, burned with an inner fire that turned the pupils to thin black slits. When he opened his jaws, the heat poured out in a shimmering wave, and the air above the terrace bent like water.

He roared.

The sound went through the palace like a hammerstroke. Windows rattled in their frames. Every bell in the east wing shivered. A flock of rooks burst from the roof in a black cloud and scattered. Down in the stable yard, horses screamed in their stalls and tried to bolt.

Servants threw themselves flat on the ground.

INFERNUS did not look at them. He turned his huge head to the east, to the road that ran out of the lower gate, and drew in a breath that made the whole terrace creak.

He bent his legs and sprang.

The limestone cracked where his claws had been. Wind exploded outward from the wingbeat in a blast of grit and torn leaves, and then he was in the air, rising, a great red shadow carving the white sky. His wings cut downward again, and again, and the palace dropped away. Towers shrank. Roofs flattened. The tiny figures in the courtyard became specks, and then dots, and then nothing, and the whole world opened beneath him like a map unrolled.

He banked east, and the land came rushing toward him.

Seen from above, the valley was an arrangement of heat.

Draeven read it the way he had read battlefields two centuries before, with his whole body. Green fields exhaled slow warmth into the cold air. A herd of cattle stood out as a cluster of dim pulses. A farmer’s cottage burned like a coal, with the thin bright thread of a chimney. Above him the thermals rose in great invisible columns, and he rode them, wings spread, sweeping in long arcs.

He was looking for a single small heat among the thousand.

Where.

The road lay below him like a pale scar. He followed it east, past the gate and the lower village and the toll house, and the wind roared over his scales. He saw the place where it had happened, a patch of churned ground at the verge where something large had left the track and cut across country. A line of crushed grass led away from it, silver on green.

He dropped lower.

The trail was easy to follow from the air. It ran straight across the fields, jumped a ditch, wound through a stand of willows, and plunged into the river. On the far bank he saw the wet prints of a horse’s hooves leading up the slope.

Alive.

The thought struck him with a force that nearly folded his wings. He had not allowed himself to examine it until now. A mad horse, a stranger’s land, a river in flood. If it had gone another way, if the stallion had thrown her at the ditch, if she lay at the bottom of some ravine with her neck broken and no one to hear her cry out....

His wings beat harder.

The wind became a scream. The ground below blurred. He was flying faster than he had flown in years, faster than the breath of his own body could sustain, and he did not care. Heat boiled in his chest. INFERNUS surged and snarled, a creature of pure instinct that wanted to rip the horizon open and find her.

Find her. Find her. Find her.

He reached for her.

He had done it in the study, and the blankness had been like touching a dead wall. He did it now with all his strength, flinging out through the dragon the way a man casts a net, searching for the thread GLACIUS held and NOCTYS hummed with, the thread that his brothers had spun between themselves and her and that he had never spun at all.

Nothing.

He roared in frustration, a ragged sound that scattered a flock of geese from a pond.