In the distance she heard screaming. Armor clacked and ground together as men rushed about and women shouted to know what was happening.
She willed the last tile reset, turned her gaze from the floor to the streets before her.
The silence that had surrounded her, the muffled sounds of the world, shattered at the pointing finger of a child at where she knelt.
Ven looked over her shoulder at the gate newly risen from out of the citadel’s sandstone walls.
She knew the face of the dragon who stared out at the city.
Guards streamed from the Citadel, gold-plated armor glinting in the newly risen sun, clanking where they came to form a ring around her where she sprawled outside the temple, not ruins, for she’d destroyed nothing, simply repurposed, as it were.
They moved from watching her, to staring at the dragon, and back again.
Ven blinked.
How had she gotten outside?
She’d been in her room and had cut her hand. She remembered the dragon, the way he’d breathed fire—
No.
She’d flinched, expecting fire, but he’d puffed steam at her, laughed at her, her stammering.
The sand beneath her palms scratched at her abraded flesh, at the slash of the cut across her hand.
There had been confusion in the dragon’s gaze when she raised her hands to ward him off.
Confusion had morphed to terror.
She remembered that as well.
The ground shook in time to the chills racing over her skin. It bucked beneath her when her stomach heaved and what little food and water she’d been provided found its way back to the surface of the world.
Her guards stepped back.
She forced a deep breath, to find her center, calm.
The tremors around her slowed.
“Is that an oasis?” “There’s a pool back there!” “The dragon’s brought back the water!” “She’s a djinn! The djinn brought back the dragon!”
The whispered words of the few people on the street this early in the morning reached her ears, their voices gaining strength as they stepped closer, no longer afraid, in too much awe to fear in the face of the water waiting before them.
Ven looked up at the ring of men with swords and shields around her. They kept looking from her to what was behind her to the crowd gathering around them.
Her gaze turned to the stucco walls, shutters opening, heads peeking out.
Men and women inched their way from their homes, drawn by the call of water, knowing that the hope of the same was likely false. Hands rose to cover mouths opened in shock. People pointed.
Feet pounded down old steps, doors flung wide to release the masses into the street.
The guards around her broke rank, formed a line before the opening to the once Qhoal, shielding the oasis from the masses gathering to stare at it in wonder.
The turn was slow.
The whispers that went from the water to the dragon to the woman kneeling on the warm sands before the same.
“Do we protect the witch?” The soldier in front of her tipped his face towards her, his voice low so it wouldn’t carry to the crowds as he addressed his fellows. “Do we safeguard the temple?”
A warm wind blew up a gust of golden sands, the fine particles swirling around in a mini-cyclone that whipped Ven’s hair into further disarray, made those gathered in the street draw back.
“The water!” “The sands will pollute it!” “We will lose it all!”
Ven’s eyes widened at the horror in their voices, the panic and the loss.
The populace started forward and the guards raised their shields and swords before them like the few men held any chance of holding back the crowd.
“The water will be wasted!” “Let us pass!”
She’d opened the gates to the temple as a means to save the people. She hadn’t measured the need to keep the water locked away considering the climate around them.
Ven’s lips parted, not knowing what words she would offer to calm their fear.
Not knowing what she could do to calm it.
Her fingers clenched, and the wind that blew around her shifted, fell back, hesitated to draw near and ruffle her hair, sting her skin.
Beneath her fingertips, like a current sparking inside of her, a flame waiting to burst into a blaze, she could feel energy coiling, waiting to be shaped, to be used. She tasted the salty brine of sea water on her tongue. Her hands cracked, scales ghosting over her arms, rippling in a way that mortal flesh didn’t move, before the hard plates returned to supple skin.
In her head, she could hear the dragon roaring.
Not the dragon, his power, like a living, breathing thing, akin and other to the beast himself at the same time.
She could see the building of great storms in her mind’s eye.
Tempests. Hurricanes.
The world cracked, and a bolt of light struck the ground with a boom, turned the yellow sands to clear glass in the heat of its passing.
Lightning storms were as much myth as the beast who once called them into being.
Destructive energy…
Waiting to be reshaped, given form.
The world came into focus around her, men and women hunching back, creeping away as the sandstorm began to gust and scream.
Ven spread her arms wide.
There, inside her being, where the sapphire-white energy of the dragon’s power flowed, she found a spark of crimson standing strong against the onslaught, waiting to battle it out, thread itself through the blue.
Blood-djinn, they called her.
Her blood heated in her veins, burned as she forced that crimson shard buried deep in her gut against the dragon’s power surging through her, braided her power through his, made a net of the bound strength, a shield.
Somewhere, Ven was aware of her body moving without conscious thought from her part.
She rose from where she knelt on the sands, stood in front of the dragon’s maw, arms upraised, seeing one side of the world, the world of the Khanastani, the people of the city, looking at her from out the storm, and a side of the world that was overlaid in lines of power, in magic, strings and threads waiting for her to craft something from.
A gate that the people could pass through, but the winds would not.
A veil through which the sands would never enter, but that offered a welcome shelter from the beating sun and harsh storms of the desert.
She took a breath, and drew forth the memory of the lightning striking the sand, the glass pillars that had formed with its impact, the fire of a dragon’s breath heating the fine grains into workable strands that she willed into delicate rods arching and connecting in imagined wings before the entrance to the pool, gossamer strands of magic that made the gauzy curtained membranes to hold the bones together and block out the dust of the city.
Her heart stuttered a beat that hurt within her breast, ached with exhaustion of too much energy spent.
Not her heart alone.
Another’s organ fighting too hard to maintain life in a body bereft of its power.
Without blood, without the scale from the dragon’s hide, her mind managed a moment of touch with the creature, the luminous scales she’d seen in her vision of him pale and breaking despite the waters of his home. Only a few bubbles escaped the monstrosity of his mouth, his maw wide with each struggle for air. The vibrancy of his life, the magic of his being, stripped away, held within her hands, used, and abused and all done unknowingly.
The gates settled into place beneath the dragon arch before the temple pool.
She heard the shocked gasp of awe of the crowd from where she stood rooted to the ocean floor before the creature dying by the magic she’d stolen.
Ven reached out a hand.
She touched the beast’s jaw, hissed at the jagged edge that reopened the wound across her palm.
The red of her blood magic untangled from the blue flame of his.
She willed the strength she�
��d stolen from him, that had sustained her, given her command of the sands and the winds, of the earth itself, from her veins, back to where she’d taken it, back into his being.
“Forgive me.”
She fell to her knees before him, exhaustion weighing against her soul.
His breath stilled.
Her eyes closed.
Chapter Twelve
He felt her before him, her small, tender hand, displacing the water that surrounded his face, the deepest parts of the ocean that caged him, impassible to human form, yet she was there.
The woman who was killing him had come to watch his last breath.
Poetic, in a sense.
Her grandmother might have locked him beneath the waves, but he’d never thought she’d kill him outright.
Ouros had always thought one day she might relent, he might take his vengeance.
And now the daughter would be his end.
He didn’t even have the energy to blow out his breath in a steam cloud, not enough oxygen in his lungs to manage the feat regardless.
The slit of his eye turned towards her, watched as she reached out to him.
Her soft flesh would cause him no wounds, perhaps even be a comfort in his final moments.
The shark had taken a hunk of meat from his tail, Ouros unable to withdraw the appendage before the animal had its teeth sunk into it. What little fire he’d managed to conjure in his chest had done no more than scare the creature away, its dark shadow a distant threat waiting until Ouros weakened further before attacking again.
It would feast off his dead flesh like he’d eaten the creatures of the sea over all the years.
In the end, he was no better than any other creature.
Live. Die.
Become the food that others nourished themselves on, and then nothing.
Her hand grazed his scales, a ghost image in the water that had physical presence to him.
He felt the thickness of her blood, so different than the sea, slide down his cheek where she cut herself against his armor.
She didn’t draw back as she had the first two times they’d met.
His eye slid closed, not wanting to see the shark approaching at the scent of her in the waves.
“Forgive me.”
Almost, he thought he heard the sound of her words echoing in his ears as well as the thought she forced towards him.
The thought came on a painful surge of energy, the power she’d stolen from him returned in a deluge, his body catching fire as he reabsorbed what had been taken from him, was remade by her will, given new life.
His mouth opened.
The shark could not halt its approach, its spine not agile enough to turn away from Ouros’ teeth.
The girl vanished when his fire ripped through the waters, heralding the dragon rising from his near grave.
He shook his head, brushed his cheek against his arm to wipe her blood away. Her blood, that was as real as she, but far distant from where he lay. His chains rattled against his wrists.
Neither free nor dead.
It would have been better had she killed him.
Chapter Thirteen
Havence woke in a room she didn’t recognize, chains encircling her wrists bound above her head to the posts of the bed.
Guards surrounded her.
Their swords were drawn, crossed over their chests, eyes firmly fixed upon her, some standing straighter when they realized her eyes were open too and she stared back at them.
The one farthest from her, standing near her feet, her ankles similarly chained like her wrists, made a small motion with his hand which was followed by a clatter and the opening of a door to the left, the light of the hallway it opened onto casting her cell into shadows for only a moment before it closed and she was surrounded by darkness but for the single torch in the room.
Stone walls.
Not the sandstone that she was used to in the citadel.
No.
These walls were dark and gray and held none of the heat of the sun from above.
For the first time in her life, Ven felt truly cold.
More than the cold of the coming winter or that of the storms that sucked the heat from the land out to sea. This cold reached into her viscera, stole the breath from her lungs until she panted with fear.
Instinct made her yank against the chains on her right wrist.
She pulled, but the only change was that of the skin on her arm chafed against the metal cuff.
A guard shifted forward, his sword tipped towards her.
She screamed.
Ven screamed and thrashed and if she’d thought the man meant to attack before, now he stood with his sword raised over her neck, one knee on the bed at her side, ready to bring his blade to bear against her flesh as she panicked and tried to move away, nowhere to go bound as she was.
“Be silent or I will silence you myself.”
She had been so focused on the guard to her right that she had not seen the one at her feet move.
Everything stilled.
She sucked in her stomach, trying to pull into herself, away from the naked blade the soldier had placed against her belly and hips. If he moved even an inch, just a mite, she had no doubt that his sword was sharp enough to part her flesh like butter. Already the tunic she wore was parted around the edge. She could feel the smarting sting of where her movements had slit her own skin before his threat brought her back to herself.
He raised the blade enough that she could not feel the strength of the steel against her.
Her breath rasped in, sounding far too much like a sob to her ears.
The guard replaced his sword against his shoulder, and she shuddered at the glint of red – real or imagined, she couldn’t tell in the dim light of the cell – along its edge.
Her chains rattled along time to her chills.
Time ticked by, each second one closer to that blade coming down on her again.
What had she been thinking to open a pathway to the bathing pools of the citadel?
To willingly seek communication with the dragon she was supposed to fear above all else?
The door to her cell opened and torch-bearers filed into the room, ruthlessly bringing light into the space so that she turned her head into her arm, hoping to shield herself from the brightness after so long in the dark.
“Almost, your mother had me convinced my priest was seeing things when he said the water had lifted you in the baths, that you held magic in you, unseen in generations. Almost it was easier to believe than the truth – that a witch of true strength was returned to Alaluat.”
She squinted against the torch light to watch the khan approach her bed.
The guards around her did not part to let him through. Instead, they shifted, their swords coming to rest against her flesh surrounding the king so that if she moved, she would feel the bite of their weapons, and so their lord was protected.
Quloe Hereen.
She’d not seen his face in the throne room before her branding.
The deeply tanned skin, dark as walnut, was tinted red along his forehead and cheekbones, the sun merciless even to the people living beneath its rays.
His black eyes moved over her, narrowed at her throat, the place where her tunic split open, the hint of the burn just visible between the seams. He clicked his tongue and the soldier’s blade nearest her throat rose so that the khan had an unimpeded approach to her skin.
His fingers were hot against her chest, warm in this place of cold.
She found no comfort in his touch.
He pulled back her shirt, examined the dragon branded into her left breast. He trailed a nail over the edge, and despite the burn’s nearly healed state, she flinched at the hint of pain only a little more pressure would cause.
She should have fought to remain still, unaffected.
The swords at her stomach and calves cut across her flesh with her movement.
The guards drew back enough not to cut deeper when she twis
ted to get away from their touch.
“Be still, witch.”
Ven’s fingers clenched, but she obeyed.
“Your mother said you were nothing special, and,” his fingers pinched at her chin, forced her head back against the bedding until her neck was exposed, whatever he was searching for, unknown to her, “looking at you, I would agree. You are unlike us. Not one of the Khanastani.” He pressed against her pulse, scratched at her skin.
She barely managed not to try and pull away.
“Not worthy of being called kin.”
The khan shifted back, his guards replacing their swords above her flesh while he moved into the shadows, the flickers of the light hiding him in the swathes of darkness surrounding her bed.
“And yet you opened the temple with an outflinging of your arms. You called a dragon into being from sand and stone to guard the secrets you revealed with his wings of glass.”
When he pressed his hands to her cheeks, leaned over her shoulder, his lips against her ear, she could not help but attempt to escape, the slither of his tongue like the rasp of an asp seeking to strike.
“That is something more than the nothing your mother would have me believe, blood djinn.”
The shudder that tore through her brought more slices against her flesh. Better the kiss of steel than another taste from the khan’s tongue against her cheek.
Tasting fear. Tasting despair.
Could he taste the dragon that she’d touched? That she’d called to her?
Did he know of the scale waiting her return? Hopefully hidden? Unearthed?
“What more can nothing do, I wonder?”
The cold that seeped through her bones had nothing to do with the depth of the cell beneath the earth they kept her in, nothing to do with the damp chill of this room that held no heat of the passing sun, wherever it was, a place as outcast to her world of heat and sand as she was to the desert people she called her own but was alienated from.
Her guards, the khan’s guards, raised their swords back to their shoulders, blades crossed over their chests.
The torchlight grew closer.
A servant with trembling hands worked at the locks on her ankles, dropped his key when he moved to her wrists and caught her panicked stare.
The Dragon's Storm Page 6
