by Rachel Aaron
“There,” she growled, tossing the feather back at Bob. “It’s done. Now,” her murderous glare shifted to Amelia. “Unseal me.”
Amelia’s lips curled into a cruel smile, but before she could say any of the cutting, painfully appropriate comebacks that were clearly on the tip of her tongue, Bob beat her to it.
“We’ll leave that for the council to decide,” he said cheerfully. “We just got it! It’d be a shame not to use it.”
“You would have me stay like this?” Bethesda roared, gesturing down at the magical seal which Julius—now that his own seal had been broken—could clearly see shimmering over her magic. “Impossible! You might as well hang a sign on my back that says ‘stab here.’” Her eyes narrowed to glowing slits. “Not that that would be a change of pace after tonight.”
“I’m sorry,” Bob said, rubbing his ear. “I couldn’t hear that last bit over all the times we’ve saved your life tonight.”
Bethesda’s glare turned surly, and Brohomir stopped smiling. “You will be unsealed when the council is complete and decides to do so. You’ll have a vote, but you do not give orders here anymore, Bethesda. This is a new era, and as you once said to me, if we’re going to ensure your full participation, we need as much of your skin in this game as possible.”
Julius had never heard his mother say that specifically, but he knew someone’s words being thrown back in their face when he saw it. But though their mother definitely looked killing mad, she didn’t say anything else. She simply drew herself up like the queen she no longer was and left, her high heels clicking angrily on the cracked stone as she stormed down the dais steps and into her apartments, slamming the door with an echoing bam.
“She’s going to claw her way back to power the first chance she gets,” Chelsie said quietly.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Bob said with a bright smile. “Welcome to the new Heartstriker!”
His sister glared at him, but Bob was too busy nicking his hand on his sword to notice, using the welling blood to sign his own name on the contract as a witness before turning to offer the paper—and the bloody quill—to Julius.
***
After that, it was all over surprisingly quickly. Despite the inherent queasiness involved with signing his first blood contract, Julius managed to get it done without making a fool of himself. They still needed the signature of whichever Heartstriker became the third vote on the council before they could actually do anything, but with Bethesda’s name already down, she was no longer Queen of Heartstriker. It also meant Julius was now officially one of the three voices running the biggest dragon clan in the world, which, now that his siblings had gone to inform the rest of the clan of the new way of things, was actually making him feel a little ill.
“I still can’t believe you talked them into a council,” Katya said, shaking her head. “The other clans will go insane when they hear.”
She was back in human form, cleaned up and wearing a shift dress made of unmelting snow that one of her sisters had conjured for her. They were sitting together on the steps of his mother’s throne, watching the human cleaning staff go to pieces over the wreckage in the throne room. Estella’s body, thankfully, had already been quietly burned while the Heartstrikers had been deciding what to do with their clan, though Julius wasn’t sure if the quick funeral was a family tradition, or if the Daughters of the Three Sisters just couldn’t wait to be rid of her.
“Bethesda’s the one I’m worried about,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the closed door to Bethesda’s private apartments. “She’s… upset.” And almost certainly planning his downfall.
“She’s probably just in there hiding her treasures from the revolutionaries,” Katya said with a shrug. “Old dragons don’t take kindly to change, and tonight has been nothing but.”
With regime changes for two of the most powerful dragon clans in the world and the death of one of the three dragon seers, that was putting it mildly. “She’s not going to roll over on this. Bob forced her into signing today. He’s holding the seal over her head to keep her in line, but we have to unseal her sometime, and there’s no way she’s going to keep playing along after that. The moment we sit down on that council, she’s going to start trying to take over again.”
“Naturally,” Katya said. “You took away her power. Of course she’s going to do everything she can to take it back. You’ll just have to make sure that you and whichever Heartstriker gets the final council spot can work together well enough to stop her.”
That was exactly what Julius was afraid of. “So,” he said, changing the subject to something less terrifying. “Have you found Svena yet?”
“No,” Katya said, her face falling. “We came here hoping to reinstate Svena as clan head. We weren’t actually planning to kill Estella, but when I saw my chance, I took it.”
He arched an eyebrow. “And the whole ‘I am Katya, bow before me!’ part was also spontaneous?”
“If I do the work, I’m not going to refuse the reward,” she said primly. “Who do you think I am? You?”
Julius made a face, and she laughed. “Honestly, though, satisfying as it was to finally see Estella fall, I’m handing this mess off to Svena as soon as possible. I’ve spent my whole life running from my sisters. I have no idea how to lead them. Svena was always the one who did all the work.”
She glanced over at the balcony, where the moon was already rising over the desert. “I’ve already told my sisters I’m abdicating to Svena, and they’re fine with it. I think they’d take anyone sane at this point. But no matter how hard we look, we can’t find our sister anywhere. All our spells turn up nothing. It’s like she and Ian both just vanished.”
Knowing Ian, Julius had his own ideas about that. He didn’t think Katya would find them comforting, though, so he kept his mouth shut. One of her sisters, he couldn’t tell which at this point, was already coming over to ask her more questions anyway, so he wished Katya good luck and made himself scarce. He was about to head downstairs in search of where the staff had stashed Marci when Bob shouted his name.
That was a surprise. The last he’d seen, the seer had taken the contract and his pigeon and vanished into his hoarded warehouse of a room. But apparently he was now back, running across the throne room toward Julius with Black Reach following behind him at a stately pace. “Julius!” he cried, panting. “Good, I found you. You have to meet my guest before he leaves.”
That struck him as a little odd, but it wasn’t every day you got to meet one of the three dragon seers, so Julius put out his hand. “It’s an honor to meet you, Black Reach.”
The dragon peered down at the offered handshake like he wasn’t sure what he was looking at.
“The Black Reach agreed to help us as payment for a favor I’m going to do him in the future,” Bob explained as Julius awkwardly lowered his hand. “He’s about to go home, but he wanted to talk to you first.”
“Sure,” Julius said, trying not to sound as nervous as he felt. “What about?”
“Nothing in particular,” the old dragon replied in his strange, too deep voice. “Just that I am pleased with the path your clan has chosen today. It is nice to finally find a dragon who isn’t bent on repeating the mistakes of the past.” He smiled, which somehow only made him look more intimidating. “I see why my brother helped you.”
In the space of those seven words, Julius’s stomach shrank to the size of a marble. “T-thank you,” he stuttered at last. “I’ll try to keep it that way.”
The Black Reach inclined his head a fraction before turning back to Bob. “We shall meet three more times, Seer of the Heartstrikers. See that you don’t waste them.”
Bob smiled wide like this was a perfectly normal thing to say, waving goodbye and calling out well-wishes as the dragon turned and walked out of the room. Julius, on the other hand, was barely keeping himself together. “Bob,” he whispered as soon as the old seer reached the throne room doors. “Do you know—”<
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“I know,” Bob said through his plastered-on grin. “Shut up. He can still hear you.”
Julius clamped his mouth shut, but that didn’t stop him from fidgeting nervously the whole ten minutes it took the Black Reach to walk down the hallway and into the elevator at the end. When the elevator doors closed, though, he couldn’t hold it any longer. “That’s Dragon Sees Eternity!” he blurted out. “The guardian of the future!”
“I am well aware,” Bob said, dropping his fake smile at last. “Trust me, I didn’t want to involve him, but he was the only thing in the world big enough to scare Estella into wasting her time.”
Julius cringed. “Did she know what he was?”
“Probably,” Bob said with a shrug. “We all figure it out in time. There are only ever three dragon seers alive at any one time: a male, a female, and the Black Reach. That should make things pretty cramped—the future’s not a big place when you’re dealing with competing seers—but whenever we look into what could be, the Black Reach’s hand is nowhere to be seen”
That didn’t make sense to Julius. “So is he not a seer then?”
“Quite the opposite,” Bob replied. “He’s the greatest of us all. It’s taken me centuries just to learn how to spot his movements, and even when I do, I still can’t see why. He’s clearly operating on a completely different level from the rest of us, and once you add in a basic knowledge of dragon history, it’s not that hard to guess the Black Reach isn’t your usual grumpy old dragon.” He fell silent after that, and then, almost like an afterthought, he added. “He’s also the first seer we see.”
“What does that mean?” Julius asked.
“The first vision of the future any seer sees is their own death. As you might imagine, it’s a traumatic experience for a young dragon, definitely not the sort of thing you talk about. But even if you tell no one, the Black Reach always shows up the next day. That’s his test. If you recognize him, that means you’re a true seer.”
Julius frowned. “But why would you recognize him? You’d only had one vision at that point, right?”
Bob’s face grew somber. “Because he’s there. He’s always in that first vision, because the Black Reach is present at the death of every seer. I’ve seen him at my death, so when he says, ‘three more times,’ I tend to take him at his word.”
He sounded so sad by the time he finished, Julius’s heart went out to him. “Is there anything I can do?”
Bob laughed. “Yes,” he said, clapping him on the shoulders. “Keep being yourself. You’ve been an absolutely delightful tool, Julius Heartstriker. Without you as my unlikely hero, none of this would have been possible. But now at last, thanks to you, I’ve broken through Estella’s block. Without her constantly nipping at my heels, the future is wide open for the first time in my life, which means the real game can begin.”
Julius didn’t like the way he said ‘real game,’ but before he could ask what that meant, all the white dragons in the room cried out as one.
“And there it goes,” Bob said. “Right on schedule.”
“Bob!” Julius yelled, running across the room to help Katya, who’d collapsed on the ground. “What happened?” he asked, falling to his knees beside her.
She looked up at him with wide, terrified eyes. “They’re coming,” she whispered. “Oh, Julius, they’re angry.”
“Who’s angry?” he asked, but she’d already curled into a ball, covering her head with her arms like she was bracing for impact. He was trying to get her to at least look at him when he heard it.
OUR STAR!
The magic in the words hit him like a blow across the shoulders, sending him sprawling to the ground beside Katya.
OUR DAUGHTER, TREASURE, GONE! WHO HAS DONE THIS?
Julius reached up frantically, clutching his ears in a desperate attempt to shut out the voice. Voices, he corrected, because though they spoke in perfect unison, there were definitely more than one. It was impossible to say how many exactly, but given the way Katya and her sisters were shaking in terror, Julius’s bet was on three.
“Seems the events of tonight haven’t gone unnoticed,” Bob said, strolling over to squat beside him. “The mommies are awake at last.”
Julius had guessed as much already. “The Three Sisters,” he whispered, his whole body shaking. The three oldest, most magical dragons left alive had finally woken from their thousand-year slumber, and from the sound of it, they were not happy about Estella’s death.
“What should we do?” he asked Bob frantically, scrambling back to his feet. “Aren’t they like gods or something? Should we evacuate?”
“Their anger just knocked us all down from halfway across the world,” Bob reminded him. “I don’t think running a few more feet is going to do us any good.”
“Then what are we supposed to do?” Julius cried.“I didn’t stick my neck out to reorder our entire clan just to lose it thirty minutes later!”
Rather than answer, his brother pulled a phone out of his pocket. Not his usual one, either, but a new, cheap model that looked like it had come from one of those pre-paid airport vending machines. “Don’t worry,” he said at last, turning on the cheap screen. “They’re not coming for us.”
Julius stopped. “They’re not?”
Rather than explain, Bob turned the phone around to show Julius the glaring emergency broadcast alert on his screen. A few seconds later, the message vanished, and a woman’s face appeared.
At first glance, she looked like a handsome older Native American woman in a navy-blue power suit with braided, steel-gray hair and blue eyes. On the second, it became obvious that her features were too regular to be real, and her flat eyes definitely had an Uncanny Valley quality to them. Most telling of all, though, was that her face refused to be still. Even though she wasn’t moving, her image flickered and rippled on the screen, despite the crystal clear video quality of the rest of the shot. But then again, what else could you expect from the public face of the Lady of the Lakes?
“I don’t understand,” Julius said. “Why are we watching Algonquin’s—”
“Shh!” Bob said, waving at him to be quiet as the spirit began to speak.
“This is a message for the newly awakened Three Sisters,” Algonquin said, her voice as musical and light as falling water. “Simultaneously broadcast on all frequencies, all over the world. To the dragons currently disrupting the flow of magic worldwide, I understand you are upset over the loss of your daughter, the infamous Northern Star, and that you are even now searching for her killer. Well, search no longer.”
She lifted her hand up to the camera, showing off a long, white mass of something clutched in her wavering fingers. A few seconds later, Julius realized it was hair. Very familiar, white hair cut to a length that perfectly matched what Estella had been missing earlier this evening.
“That’s right,” Algonquin said proudly, brandishing the tangled hair like a hunting trophy. “I killed Estella the Northern Star, just as I kill any dragon who is found trespassing on my property. If you want to do something about that, I invite you to stop wailing and come to my lakes in the Americas, where we will settle this once and for all.”
As soon as she finished, the shot switched to a live, night skyline feed of the DFZ from across the river. It was a classic postcard angle that showed off both the Upper and Lower cities as well as Algonquin’s white tower lit up like a spotlight in the distance. What Julius didn’t understand, though, was, why.
“What is she doing?” he whispered, glancing at his brother. “Is she trying to get her city burned to the ground?”
“Keep watching,” Bob said, reaching up to pet the pigeon who’d just fluttered down to land on his shoulder. “Here it comes.”
Julius turned back to the screen in time to see the camera shake, and then the whole city rocked as three enormous shapes appeared in the sky above the DFZ with a thunderclap as big as an earthquake. They were so large, Julius didn’t even recognize them as dragons at first. Ev
en with the DFZ’s superscrapers for scale, it was hard to comprehend a living thing that big, let alone three of them. But when spotlights came on all over the city to illuminate the monsters in the sky, he wasn’t surprised at all to see that their scales were white as snow.
YOU WILL PAY, WATER SPRITE, the Three Sisters roared in unison, their voices twined together like a braid as they flew toward Algonquin’s tower in the center of Lake St. Clair. YOU AND YOUR CITY.
White fire was glowing in all three throats by the time they finished. It looked just like Estella’s, but on a city-destroying scale. And then, just as Julius was saying goodbye to the crazy town that had become more of a home to him than anywhere else, a new light appeared in the sky, rising from the darkness that marked Reclamation Land.
It flew up like a firework, sparkling in the night like sunlight on water. For a long heartbeat, it hung there in the air, a silver thread connecting the dark land and the starry sky. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the thread of light exploded outward in a perfect halo, shooting across the sky like a scythe to cut through all three dragons.
The blast was so bright, it whited out the screen. In the split second it took the cameras to adjust and bring the picture back, the enormous dragons were already falling, crashing out of the sky in a cascade of snow-white and shimmering red down into the lake surrounding Algonquin’s Tower. The impact when they hit sent water flying almost to the tower’s peak, and then the cameras cut back to Algonquin’s triumphant smile.
“Mortals of this world,” she said proudly. “You have nothing to fear. We Spirits of the Land have ever been your protectors. You have known my anger once before. Now, you see it again, cutting down the vipers who would enslave you all.”
