One Good Dragon Deserves Another

by Rachel Aaron

  But though it was hard to do anything but panic when a dragon five times your size had you pinned to the floor, the next few minutes were too precious to waste on fear. Outside the balcony, the sun was already touching the horizon. Soon, it would vanish altogether. Julius just had to make it until then, and so he took a deep breath and lay back, exposing his throat in surrender.

  “I’m not trying to take your victory,” he said softly. “I know you’re angry and cornered. There’s no other reason you’d trade your entire future just to beat my clan. But what good is victory that you won’t be around to enjoy and that doesn’t make life better for those who will?”

  “What would you know of that?” Estella growled, pressing her superior weight down on him until he could barely breathe. “You’re just a failure whose only skill in life is convincing better dragons that you deserve to keep living. But I’m not a sentimental fool like Katya, and I have no patience for nice. The only reason I haven’t sliced you open yet is because you’re Brohomir’s little puppet. I know he put you up to this. Now,” her claws dug into his feathered throat, “tell me what your chain does, or I’ll pop your head off and we’ll see what happens from there.”

  “If I tell you,” Julius choked out. “Will you not kill me?”

  Estella growled deep in her throat. Not the answer Julius was hoping for, but his chain had kept him alive against all odds this far. There was no reason not to think it wouldn’t last a little longer.

  “Fine,” he said, lifting his head to look at her. “I bought you a future.”

  Estella’s sea-ice blue eyes narrowed in confusion. “What?”

  “I bought you a future,” Julius said again. “I met Dragon Sees the Beginning. I know you paid everything you had to buy what happened tonight. I also know that all of that was only enough to buy you control until sunset tonight, after which all your futures will run out, and you will cease to exist.”

  “I know what I paid,” the dragon growled. “But what does that matter to you?”

  “Because I wanted to stop you,” Julius said. “But buying a future that could counteract yours would have cost me far too much. So, instead, I bought the five minutes that comes after your sunset deadline. In those five minutes, you and me and Marci and Bethesda and all the rest of my family are all still alive. So you see, I didn’t have to buy a future stronger than yours. I just had to look further ahead.”

  By the time he finished, Estella was staring at him like the world had just stopped making sense, and then she turned away with a sneer. “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true,” Julius said. “How else do you think I could have survived this long against Chelsie? I mean—”

  “I don’t care about your personal problems,” she snapped. “And I don’t believe that’s the future you bought because it makes no sense. Your own survival I could see, but why would you buy mine? My fate is already fixed. If you know enough to buy the future in the first place, why not just let me die?”

  “Because I don’t do that,” Julius said.

  “He really doesn’t,” Marci piped in. “He can’t even bring himself to kill a—”

  Estella whipped her tail, whacking Marci across the room. Julius tried to go after her, but the seer still had him pinned, and all he managed was a truncated wiggle. All he could do was keep reminding himself that he’d already guaranteed that they’d get out of this alive as he watched her land hard on the stone floor. That was cold comfort when she didn’t get up, but Estella had already grabbed his head, forcing his attention back to her.

  “You wasted your future,” she growled. “I still have five minutes before the sun sets, and nothing is going to stop me. I don’t know what you did to freeze all my Heartstrikers, but that just makes them easier to kill. You, however, will die first. A fitting punishment for the whelp who spoiled my final victory.”

  Her claws dug tighter into his throat with every word. By the time she finished, spots were dancing across Julius’s vision, but no matter how he struggled, he couldn’t push her off. She was simply too big, too old, too strong. He was starting to think that Dragon Sees the Beginning had lied to him about being able to put chains together despite not being a seer when an enormous crash echoed through the throne room.

  Estella’s head snapped up and swiveled toward the throne room’s front doors. “No,” she snarled. “Not yet. It doesn’t happen yet.”

  But whatever “it” she was talking about didn’t seem to be listening, because another crash came right on the heels of the first, echoing through the throne room like a thunder clap. Estella’s grip on Julius’s throat had loosened when she’d looked up, letting him gasp air back into his lungs. When his vision cleared again, he saw why she was upset.

  Something was banging into the massive wooden doors of the throne room like a battering ram. Each hit sent waves of magic crackling over the ward Julius could now see super-imposed like a glowing box over the throne room’s interior, making Amelia jerk against whatever force it was that kept her frozen. But just as Julius was starting to get really worried about his sister, the throne room doors exploded open with enough force to blow Estella off him completely. She was still rolling back to her feet when a tall figure walked out of the rapidly clearing smoke, strolling into the ruined throne room like he owned it.

  “Beating up whelps, Estella?” said a familiar voice. “That’s not very sporting.”

  Julius sagged into the floor. The relief he felt at hearing Bob’s voice was so strong it was painful. From Estella’s glare, she felt the same, though not from relief. “Well, well,” she growled. “The puppet master graces us with his presence at—”

  Her voice cut off with a hiss as she recoiled, dropping defensively to her haunches. Considering Bob was still in his human form, Julius had no idea what could have scared Estella into such a threatened position, and then he saw the second figure step out of the blasted doorway behind his brother.

  That cheered Julius up enormously. Backup, finally! But his excitement quickly turned to confusion, because the figure who walked up to join Bob wasn’t one of Bethesda’s security team. He wasn’t even a Heartstriker. He was, however, most definitely a dragon.

  His clothing and features in his human guise suggested one of the Chinese clans. That didn’t exactly narrow it down—there were a lot of Chinese dragons—but he didn’t smell like any of the families Julius had met. He was handsome, of course, like all dragons, but there was something about him that didn’t quite fit. After a thousand years of being forced to live in them, most dragons wore their human bodies like a second skin, but this dragon’s moved like a puppet, standing unnaturally still and stiff beside Bob like he was a statue someone had just now breathed life into. But strange as all that was, none of it explained how his presence could spook a dragon seer as old and dangerous as Estella. But while she was clearly trying to hide it, there was no disguising that Estella was, in fact, terrified, her eyes locked on the new dragon like he was death himself.

  There were few things in the world more dangerous than a terrified, trapped dragon. As such, Estella should have been Bob’s first concern, but after his initial greeting, he didn’t even acknowledge her. Instead, the seer turned to Julius, looking him up and down with a radiant smile. “Look at you!” he cried. “All grown up! You actually look like a dragon now. If I didn’t know better, I might be afraid.”

  He paused there, obviously waiting for an answer, but Julius didn’t know what to say.

  “How rude of me,” Bob said, turning to the strange dragon beside him, the one who had yet to look away from Estella. “Allow me to introduce the Black Reach. Estella already knows him, of course since he was…how did she phrase it? Oh yes, ‘orchestrating the downfall of empires before her mothers were even born.’” He finished with a wide smile, but it wasn’t a pleasant one when he finally turned to face Estella. “See? I warned you that gloating only leads to ironic quotation.”

  Julius curled into a protective crouch.
It seemed suicidally stupid to taunt Estella in her current condition, but even though Bob was openly mocking her, the white dragon didn’t seem to hear him. She was still staring at the Black Reach, and the longer she stared, the more betrayed she look.

  “Him,” she said at last. “Of all dragons, you come to me with him?”

  “I do not play favorites, Northern Star,” the Black Reach replied in a voice that sounded far too deep for his human body. “And I already warned you what would happen when we met again.”

  “You think I care?” Estella snarled, showing a wall of sharp, white teeth. “I knew what was coming, and I chose to die here in victory rather than wither away in eternal defeat. I have paid the price for my own future, and even you won’t stop me.”

  “I don’t have to stop you,” the Black Reach said sadly, nodding toward the balcony. “You’ve already done that yourself.”

  Estella’s head whipped around, and her blue eyes went wide. “No.”

  Outside, the last sliver of the sun was disappearing below the horizon. As the light vanished, Chelsie, Amelia, and Conrad all began to move again, looking at the throne room like they had no idea how they’d gotten there. Only Bethesda remained frozen, but Julius didn’t have time to think about why that was. His eyes were glued to Estella as the ancient seer finally broke.

  “NO!” she wailed, clawing her way across the throne room until she was hanging off the balcony’s sheer edge, staring at the place where the sun had been like she could make it rise again through will alone. “It was not for nothing. It cannot be for nothing!”

  “It was not for nothing,” the Black Reach said, pointing at Julius. “He bought back the future you threw away, Estella. In this moment, thanks to him, you are still alive, which means you still have a choice. You are a seer. You know better than any that the future is never set. It’s not yet too late to let go.”

  “It’s far too late,” she growled, smoke pouring from her mouth as she turned back around. “My fate was sealed the moment I picked up the Kosmolabe, but if it’s my time to go,” her blue eyes flicked to Bob, who was still standing beside Julius, “he’s going with me.”

  The words were still echoing when Estella opened her mouth, whiting out the whole room with her fire. Like all of her magic, it was freezing cold, an icy flame that consumed everything it touched, including Bob, who was standing right at its center, and Julius who’d gotten caught in the blast behind him. But then, just when Julius was certain he was dead and just hadn’t realized it yet, he noticed that, despite the blinding white fire blazing all around him, he wasn’t actually in pain. Likewise, Bob was still there, whole and unburned, standing in front of him with a pigeon on his shoulder and a Fang of the Heartstriker in his hands.

  For the rest of his life, Julius was never able to say where Bob’s sword came from. His blade was even bigger than Justin’s, a massive wall of curving, bone-colored power. Even accounting for the fact that Fangs of the Heartstriker had a flexible relationship with physical reality—changing shape and size seemingly at will—there was still a limit, and Bob definitely hadn’t been carrying a sword when he’d walked in. For all Julius knew, the pigeon had coughed it up. Wherever it had come from, though, the sword was in Bob’s hands now, and he was using it to split Estella’s fire like a rock against the tide until, after what had to be a solid minute, Estella’s fire finally sputtered out.

  She collapsed on the balcony, panting and glaring in pure hatred as Bob lowered his sword. “Always a trick,” she spat, forcing herself back to her feet. “Always a way out.”

  “Of course,” Bob replied, stabbing his sword into the stone floor and leaning on it like the Fang of his grandfather was a hitching post. “That’s what clever dragons do, Estella. We keep finding ways to win even when older, wiser dragons tell us winning is impossible.”

  “You can’t be clever forever,” she snapped. “I’ll never stop, Brohomir, and now, thanks to your soft whelp of a brother, I don’t have to.” She sat up with a smirk. “He bought me a new future. He actually gave up his future to buy back what I’d traded away to crush you. Now, thanks to his soft-hearted idiocy, I don’t have to stop. I am free to hunt you until the end of time, until the moment finally comes when your cleverness isn’t enough. And then, Great Seer of the Heartstrikers, I’ll see you fall at last.”

  She finished with a snap of her teeth, but Bob just heaved a sad sigh. “Flattering as it is to be the target of such unwavering obsession, I’m afraid that won’t happen, Estella.”

  He pushed himself up off his sword, walking toward the exhausted white dragon. “You’re right. My uncommonly kind brother did, in fact, buy back a portion of the future you squandered. In doing so, however, he actually bought far more than he knows. You see, by spending his own future to buy your survival, he created a paradox, a five-minute fragment within which you both cannot and must exist. But in these five minutes which you were never supposed to have, your decisions have sparked a whole new spectrum of possibilities, creating new potential and possibility.” He spread his arms wide. “The river of your future is literally being reborn as I speak. That is a miracle, Estella, and the greatest tragedy of tonight is that you’ve already squandered it.”

  “How?” Estella scoffed. “By refusing to abandon my fight and gracefully accept my decline?”

  “No,” Bob said, shaking his head. “Though refusing to even acknowledge your second chance is very sad, the particular misstep I was referring to is tactical, not philosophical.”

  Estella rolled her eyes. “This is why we could never get along. There’s nothing worse than a clever dragon who doesn’t know when to shut up.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion,” Bob said, his voice turning hard as he stepped sideways, motioning behind his back for Julius to move with him. “Personally, though, I think it’s far worse to be an old dragon who lets someone else’s talking distract her while she’s sitting in enemy territory.”

  The superior look fell off Estella’s face. She whirled around, her head snapping up to search the sky above the mountain, but before she could even finish turning, something large and white shot through the open balcony and crashed into her like a rocket. It moved so fast, Julius couldn’t make out more than a vaguely dragon-shaped streak before both it and Estella went flying, tumbling into the throne room in a ball of white fire and flashing claws that rolled right past where Bob and Julius had been standing.

  In the chaos of the rolling fight, neither opponent seemed to have the advantage. When they crashed into the far wall, though, the new dragon ended up on top, and she used it to her full advantage, darting down to wrap her jaws around Estella’s neck before the seer could even lift her head.

  Exhausted from the fire she’d used on Brohomir and taken completely by surprise, Estella never had a chance. It didn’t matter if you were older or stronger or even if you could see the future, when a dragon’s fangs closed around your exposed throat, there was nothing you could do. She didn’t even seem to have fully realized what was happening before the dragon bit down, snapping her jaws shut like a trap.

  The crunch that followed was a sound Julius knew he’d hear in his nightmares forever. Estella jerked in pain, her whole body spasming, but the white dragon on top of her just bit down harder, clamping down on the seer’s neck with her jaws until, at last, Estella fell still, her blue eyes fading. Only when it was obvious that the seer wasn’t ever getting up again did the dragon unlock her jaw and let Estella’s head fall to the ground.

  Until this point, Julius had actually had a hard time figuring out who the new dragon was. She was obviously a daughter of the Three Sisters—no other dragon clan had those pure white scales—but figuring out which daughter was impossible while she and Estella were tangled on the floor. Given the ferocity of the sneak attack, his money was on Svena. She certainly had every right to be murderously angry after what Estella had done. But when the dragoness finally untangled herself from the dead seer, the bloody face that tur
ned toward the gaping Heartstrikers wasn’t Svena’s.

  It was Katya’s.

  “Hear me!” she roared, spreading her frosted wings wide. “To save our clan and to preserve what remains of our good relations with Heartstriker, I have killed Estella the Northern Star! Now, by right of combat, I claim her place as head of the Daughters of the Three Sisters.”

  Her voice boomed through the stunned silence of the throne room. But while Julius was extremely impressed, he didn’t understand why Katya was saying all of this to them. As the echo of her announcement faded, though, he became aware of a new sound behind him. It sounded like wings. Lots of them.

  He turned around in a rush, eyes going wide. In the time between Katya’s sneak attack on Estella and now, an entire flight of snow-white dragons had appeared in the air outside his mother’s balcony. One of them landed as he watched, transforming instantly into a severe woman whose hair—which was an even paler blond than Svena’s—fell all the way to the floor, covering her naked body like a waterfall. From the way she held herself, though, she might as well have been wearing full armor as she marched stiffly across the throne room to Estella’s body, leaning down to close the seer’s dull eyes with a business-like brush of her fingers.

  “It is over,” she announced, rising back to her feet. “I, Ysolde the Frost Caller, Fifth Born, stand as witness that Estella the Northern Star, Seer of the Three Sisters, First Born of us all, is dead. By right of combat, I now recognize Katya, Last Born, as head of the Daughters of the Three Sisters. Any who would challenge her, challenge me.”

  Up until that last part, she spoke with the calm, formal cadence of ritual. By the end, though, Ysolde the Frost Caller was growling, her teeth bared in anticipation. But while she looked more than ready to make good on that threat, none of the other white dragons seemed to want to take her up on it. Every one of them instantly bowed their heads in submission, lowering their eyes before Katya, who looked prouder than Julius had ever seen.