King's Dragon (Crown of Stars 1)

A figure turned, staring, a male figure, armed with a bronze breastplate and silver-tipped lance. “Liathano,” he said.

ika pounded at the Dragons, axes chopped down again and again on the teardrop shields, red serpents pressed against dragons, shoving them by sheer weight of numbers back and back up the steps to the doors.

There! Sanglant, limping and bloody, striking at either hand as he retreated step by step, the last man in the wedge, taking the brunt of the onslaught. At his right hand, the scarred-face woman, ragged Dragon’s banner draped around her shoulders, her spear working, jabbing, wrenching free; at his left, Sturm, blue eyes grim as he cut down first one Eika then, when that one fell, the next. Manfred stood half inside the cathedral doors, staring; seeing, as was his duty.

But one by one, Dragons fell, Gent burned, and the streets were deserted except for Eika, prowling and sniffing in doorways and looting. Except for the dead. Except for the feeding dogs.

A wagon had been brought into the square fronting the cathedral and from atop this, surrounded by his howling troops and by a pack of slavering dogs, Bloodheart surveyed the ruins and the last stand of the Dragons. He leaped down and hefted a spear in his huge hands, ran with it to the steps and took them two at a time. Behind him came his soldiers, their mouths open in shrieks and howls Liath could only see, not hear. Only the naked old Eika male remained behind in the wagon, but even he grinned, jewel-studded teeth winking in the reflected glare of flame.

Bloodheart’s charge hit the last Dragons like a hammer. So few, and already wounded and exhausted, half of them went down, crushed beneath the assault. Sturm vanished in a hail of ax blows. The scarred-face woman was torn away, the weight of huge dogs bearing her down. Dragons shouted their prince’s name, but they were all separated now, a few at the door, a few swarmed and surrounded and harried down to the base of the steps, and Sanglant in the center—the eye of the storm—striking on either side like a madman as he hacked his way toward Bloodheart.

The blow that took him came from behind.

Surrounded, flanked, engulfed. A screaming Eika had leaped into the gap that opened behind the prince. The creature swung. Sanglant jerked and then collapsed, that fast, like a rock let drop. His body landed hard, sprawling, at the feet of Bloodheart.

The Dragons were gone, vanished, as if they had never existed. Bloodheart stared down at the prince. He bent and wrenched the helmet from Sanglant’s head to reveal the lax face. He twisted a hand under the gold torque and yanked it off, his white claws cutting the prince’s face and neck. Blood seeped, slowed, stopped.

Bloodheart raised the gold torque up like a trophy, threw back his head, and howled with triumph.

Liath shuddered. She could not hear it, yet she could—as if borne miles on the wind, as if carried through the ranks of the refugees who fled through the tunnel, as if cutting straight to her heart.

But she could not look away.

Bloodheart lowered the torque but only because he had to beat back the dogs. He hit hard around himself, using both haft and head of his spear, and he growled and cursed at the dogs, driving them back from his prize: Sanglant. The dogs cowered finally and sat back on their haunches, eyes burning yellow with rage, tongues hanging out, muzzles rimed with saliva and blood. The biggest of them snarled, baring its fangs at the Eika chieftain, and he struck it hard on the head with his bare hand; his own claws—a bristling growth at his knuckles—sliced its cheek open. It whined and groveled before him. The others slewed their ugly heads round and stared hungrily at the prince’s body, but they didn’t move in. Yet.

Soon. Soon he would be theirs.

Liath leaned in toward the fire as if she could reach and drag the corpse to safety, spare it this desecration. The heat burned away her tears, but it could not burn away her pain. It could not change what she saw and so witnessed.

Bloodheart shook himself and whirled once, spinning as if he felt the breath of an enemy on his spine. His gaze lifted to the middle distance. Everything shifted; the fire flared before her. She blinked, and he was looking at her.

“Who are you?” Bloodheart demanded, gaze impossibly fixed on her through the fire. “You trouble me with your spying. Be gone!”

He spit. She flinched back and was staring at fire, roaring and crackling and consuming, burning, buildings of stone consumed by the dull red of heat and the white-blue searing of flame, smoke thick and oily in her nostrils. She heard the pound of horses galloping past, a haze of distant shouting, a faint horn caught on the wind. But these were no buildings she had ever seen before. These were not the buildings of Gent.

A figure turned, staring, a male figure, armed with a bronze breastplate and silver-tipped lance. “Liathano,” he said.

But through him a gateway, his shade itself is the gateway, like stars seen through a gauze of fine linen. A drum sounds like a heartbeat, and a flute draws its music over the air like the rising and falling of waves. She sees through flames, staring out through a fire but a different fire, not her own.

There on a flat stone sits a man—not a man, perhaps, for his features are exotic and unlike those of any man Liath has seen except there is a passing resemblance to Sanglant, that bronze-tinged skin, the high, broad cheekbones, the beardless face. He is dressed strangely in a long, beaded loincloth so cunningly worked that the pattern of beads describes birds and leaves woven into a tight embrace. Leather sheaths encase his forearms and his calves, covered with gold and green feathers and tiny shells and gold beads and polished stones strung together. A cloak trimmed with white shells and clasped with a jade brooch at his right shoulder drapes to his waist. He twists lengths of fiber—flax, perhaps—along his bare thigh, binding them into rope.

He looks up, startled, and stares at her but without truly marking her. Behind him, a figure moves, too far away to be plainly seen.

“Liath.”

She jumped back and found herself, face singed from heat, staring at the hearth fire and at Wolfhere, across from her. Tears stood on his cheeks, but only a few. He stared into the flames and finally drew his gaze away as if from down a long distance and murmured, so soft she barely heard him:

“Aoi.”

She blinked, bewildered. Who had spoken her name, there at the end, wrenching her out of that final vision?

“Those were the Lost Ones, Liath.”

“Who were?” But she could not make sense of the world, of her fingers on her hands, of the snap of fire or the brush of wind on her face.

Ai, Lady. Sanglant was dead.

Wolfhere shook himself all over, like a dog—or a wolf—and stood abruptly. “This mystery must be solved later,” he said. “Come, Liath. Our first duty is to the king, and he must have word of this.”