The Dragon Kings' Forbidden Witch

Nothing. She is not there. She has never been there. I have not touched her and I cannot find her.

He flew on, and the dragon turned over and over, savage and bereft, and he did not know how to handle the fact that he had waited too long. That he had been wise and careful and sure, and the cost of that wisdom was a hole in him the shape of a girl he had never held.

”If she is dead....”

The thought did not finish.

Something answered.

It was so faint he almost missed it. A sound too small to be called a sound, the barest pressure, as though a single warm fingertip had been laid against the inside of his ribs. It came and went. It was there, and then it was not.

INFERNUS went still.

For one long moment, he hung motionless in the air, wings spread, the wind streaming past. He felt it again. A pull. A thread, so thin and fine it might have been a hair, stretched from somewhere ahead of him to the center of his chest, and it tugged.

He turned toward it.

East and a little north. A long green hill with a hard ridge at its summit, and beyond that the blue shadows of the mountains. He saw it now, the high bare line of the crest, the scattering of rock, and standing against the sky at the top of it a black shape with its head raised.

A horse.

There.

He folded his wings and dove.

The wind changed first.

Morgana felt it on her face before she understood it. A shift, a rush of warm air from behind, as though a door had been opened onto a furnace. The grass bent flat. Shadowmere’s head came up. He swung round with his ears pinned forward and his nostrils flared, but he did not flinch.

A shadow crossed the meadow.

It was enormous. It slid across the hillside in a single dark sweep, from the lower slope and up over the crest, and the ground under it seemed to dim for an instant. It came and went, and she looked up and her heart stopped.

The dragon was beautiful.

She had thought she knew what a dragon was. She had ridden the sky with Glacius, wrapped in the cold white magnificence of ice and wind. She had seen the Sanctum’s ancient wings and the vast and silent bodies lying in the dark. But she had never seen one fall.

He came out of the sun, red and gold and blazing, wings half folded, plunging toward her like a meteor. His scales caught the light and threw it back in sheets of copper and flame. For one wild breath she thought he would strike the hill. Then his wings flared open, huge and glistening, and the downdraft hit her like a fist. The grass flattened in a ring around her, and he swept over her head so low that she felt the heat of his belly, and wheeled, and came to ground in the meadow below the ridge with a thud she felt in her teeth.

The earth shuddered.

Dust rolled out around him in a slow gold cloud. He stood with his wings half raised, head lifted, a creature the height of a barn, and his great burning eyes turned up the slope and found her.

Neither of them moved.

Morgana stood very still. Her hands were open at her sides. She was shaking, but not, she realized, from fear. It was something else, something that started in her stomach and spread. She had stood on a mountain once and watched a storm come across a valley, and had felt then the same shuddering awe at a thing too large and too beautiful to be real.

Draeven.

The dragon lowered his head until it almost touched the ground. Then he turned away from her. He folded his wings and stepped behind a rock outcrop at the foot of the slope, and the sunlight went red and gold around him in a brief flare of heat.

The sound was low, like logs shifting in a hearth. There was a crackle of embers. A rushing hum.

She heard footsteps.

A man came around the rock.

He was dressed. A dark coat, black trousers, boots that gleamed. It was as though the cloth had woven itself from the red-gold sparks drifting down around him, settling over his shoulders and chest and arms in the shape of the clothes he had burned. His dark hair was tousled by the wind. His face was pale and set, and the gold in his eyes burned so fiercely that she could see it from forty paces off.

He started up the slope.

He did not hurry. He walked, one step at a time, with the rigid control of a man holding something unbearable under his ribs. She watched him come, and she saw the muscle jump in his jaw and the pulse beating hard in the side of his throat and the way his hands, held loose at his sides, were slightly curled.

Shadowmere stood between them.

The stallion flattened his ears for a moment. Draeven stopped ten paces off and met the animal’s dark eye. For a long moment, the First King of the realm and the black horse regarded one another.

Then Shadowmere snorted and stepped aside.

Draeven came on.

He stopped an arm’s length from her. Up close, she could see that his hands were trembling. It was slight, a tremor, quickly suppressed, but she saw it.

She sat down.

She had not meant to. Her legs simply gave way, and she folded gently into the grass with her knees drawn up. She looked up at him from the ground, windblown, her plait half unraveled, her skirt soaked to the thigh and streaked with mud.

”Hello,” she said.

It was possibly the stupidest thing she had ever said.

He stared at her.

For a moment she thought he might shout. His mouth opened. A muscle moved in his throat. She braced for it, for the cold fury of a king whose order had been broken.