The Dragon's Storm

by Andi Lawrencovna

  “Your kind always covers themselves. Why?”

  “Propriety.”

  It was not a word he was familiar with.

  Her blush deepened, but she didn’t explain further.

  He linked his fingers over his stomach, blinked.

  “Do you mind if we share the bed? The chair is not the most comfortable of places, and it has been,” she hesitated, and Ouros wondered what it was she was thinking that caused her to pause. “It has been a long couple of days.”

  “I do not mind.”

  Her cheeks pinkened further. “Gratitude.”

  She settled on her side and he waited for her to turn away from him.

  Found himself enamored of her blue gaze, so very real, so very close now in her world, a thing he could see and touch and enfold himself in as he hadn’t beneath the seas. He wanted to touch her, to brush his fingertips across her cheeks, to feel the rush of blood his actions would bring.

  “Goodnight, Havence.”

  She closed her eyes. “Goodnight, Ouros.”

  He woke with her body wrapped around him, her arm flung over his chest, a leg intertwined with one of his. The rasp of her gown irritated his skin. He preferred the feel of her flesh against his, though her grandmother had insisted on being clothed like the granddaughter.

  His leg throbbed where it was wrapped, but even though it ached, the wound was not as painful as it had been when he rose from the waters.

  Funny, he would not have given it thought had he remained beneath the seas, but the salt would have cleaned it after a time, where the sands above ground served only as an irritant.

  He ran his fingers along the arm draped over his chest.

  She shifted in her sleep, moved closer to his side, held him tighter, as though that would stop him.

  It brought her lips against his collarbone, the rasp of her breath along his scales there making the delicate plates shudder. In this form, they were no threat to her, as sensitive as the human flesh he inhabited.

  He shivered, and her hand soothed over his shoulder in unconscious comfort.

  He would have kept this form, forgone his wings, the feel of the wind against his scales, the strength of the dragon, to have stayed at Amece’s side. All that he had been, he would have forgone for the witch, to remain with her, to know the comfort of her touch for a lifetime.

  That had been his intent, the night he met her at the temple her people had built in his honor, perhaps in their fear of him.

  He’d come to her as a human.

  He’d come to her with a ring, as was her people’s tradition.

  Amece had wiped tears from her eyes, had pulled him into her embrace, had betrayed him.

  Three days it had taken them to bring him to the seashore.

  Three days of blood and suffering, and she’d ridden a horse before the cart they carried him in, never looked back as they boarded him on a ship, sailed it out into the ocean.

  Ouros would not fall prey to the same magics again.

  He withdrew his hand from the granddaughter’s arm, slipped from the bed while she slept on.

  His fingers unworked the knot she’d tied to keep her bandaging against his thigh. The wrap fell to the floor, and he stared at the new flesh that not even his abilities to heal as a dragon would have reformed as quickly.

  A gifted healer with her poultices.

  Channeling magic that wasn’t his to call. She was far more than her grandmother had ever been, and far more dangerous in her lack of knowing the same.

  It was folly to stay.

  He owed her nothing, had already gifted her the life he was justified in taking.

  Her brow furrowed when her fingers clenched into the bedding he’d vacated. She grumbled, but didn’t wake, and he looked away.

  He had his freedom…

  Why should he stay?

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  She woke to an empty cabin.

  Sunlight gleamed through the window, as bright as any other day in the desert. The room was hot, stiflingly so, and Ven buried her face in the pillow, even the terrors of her dream, of fleeing the khan and his son, of the prince’s attack and the release of the dragon, was better than waking to the reality of an unchanged world.

  She needed to dig out the well.

  Her mother would be back from the citadel soon enough and they had no water stored.

  What supplies she had were running low. She’d have to travel into the far mountains to see if anything managed to cling to life in their higher climbs. She never relished her journey there, something about the place unsettled her, made her hurry, made her want to flee.

  Better to do it in the daylight, in the morning when her courage was still strong, then wait or put it off for another day.

  The dragon could have flown her there and back before the sun passed an hour in the sky.

  Dragons were a myth of the sea, a fairytale she’d pinned her hopes and dreams on for years.

  There was a glass bowl on the table beside the chair. A clear glass bowl, so smooth and pristine that she’d never seen the like before, filled with glorious fresh water.

  And a bloom, a flower of a hundred petals or more.

  Pink petals. Red petals. Orange with yellow at the tips. Green leaves so bright that they almost hurt to look at.

  She rose unsteadily from the bed, one hand outstretched though she was far too distant to touch the bright bloom.

  It had been a dream.

  Surely the dragon was a dream.

  He wouldn’t have left her, please, if he hadn’t been a dream.

  A horn sounded.

  Ven turned her gaze from the flower, looked at the door, the knotted lock of the rope handle untied.

  The ground shook.

  She stepped out onto her mother’s porch, no time to breathe in the scent of moisture in the air, the fragrant buds on the long thought dead shrubs untended in the ground before her cabin. The horizon was blacked by a phalanx of soldiers; men on horses come to find her, to kill her or return her to the city, she couldn’t say.

  There was no dust to rise up behind them, the ground saturated with the rain from the night before.

  From where she stood, the men looked rested, well-watered.

  She raised a hand to her throat, to the brand burned into her skin, the dragon who was free and who was gone, and she was alone to face the horde for letting him go.

  There was no spear for her to will to her defense with a drop of her blood.

  She couldn’t have done the same again even if there was.

  The roar that split the heavens was deafening. Even with her hands covering her ears, the sound still throbbed in her skull, the sands bouncing as though struck by heavy winds.

  Before her, the dragon landed, wings outstretched as they had been in her vision of him in the desert.

  He was still bigger than she’d imagined.

  Ouros reared up on his back legs, his arms opened wide as his chest expanded.

  The patterned blues and teals of his scales darkened, reddened.

  He opened his jaws, eyes blazing, and if she had thought the desert was hot on the warmest day of the year, it was nothing as compared to the fire that spewed from his lips, licking over the land, a molten storm that left a sea of glass as clear as the bowl he’d left for her in its path.

  Ven held onto the porch post, fought not to fall to her knees in the silence that followed.

  The fire had not reached the men and their horses racing towards her. The flame had not stretched that far.

  She needn’t have worried.

  The black clad soldiers scrambled upon the dune, horses having reared and knocked them from their seats, some still in the saddle though their mounts danced and bucked and whinnied in fear.

  Ouros sank to the ground, forelegs braced before him, wings folding along his back.

  He turned his head to her.

  She forced herself to release the rail holding her upright.

  Her knees trembled
as she stepped into the dried dirt that was now her front yard. The ground hot beneath her feet, hotter than sun-warmed sands and she’d run barefoot over the same for many years before her mother brought her shoes to pretend she was a lady.

  If her voice shook, she pretended it was not from fear of the dragon before her. “I thought you’d left me.”

  Ouros lowered his head until his eye was level with her face. It meant that his chin pressed to the ground, and still she had to look up to meet his stare. “I did.”

  “But you came back.”

  His wings ruffled, the membranous appendages, snapping like the sails on a ship, unlike the few birds she’d seen in her life.

  Even if he was not a beast of the sea, he looked more kin to one of the unknown creatures than to any she’d encountered on land.

  It was a shrug.

  He didn’t answer her with words, and the way he cast his stare behind her, looked over her head after bending down to her level, hinted at nerves she had not expected in the giant.

  She was close enough to touch him.

  In her visions, he never felt like the scale he’d sent her, he was gossamer steel.

  She pressed her hand to the ridge over his snout, a line of bony protrusions that had been raised when he roared and lay flattened now against his cheek.

  Rough.

  Abrasive.

  Armor in truth.

  “Thank you.”

  The great red eye before her blinked, both sets of eyelids moving independent of the other, first one then the next. “They will come back. They will not stay away for long.”

  “They won’t return so long as you’re here.”

  “I cannot stay here, Havence.”

  Neither could she.

  He did not offer for her to come with him.

  Chapter Thirty

  His ears twitched.

  Horses galloping over the ground, more horses than had first appeared.

  The army was two days away, but he could hear them coming, enough that even his fire might not burn bright enough to kill them all before they could maim him, or at least certainly hurt the girl.

  She stood there, her shoulders stooped, resignation in every line of her form.

  If he left her here, she would not protest.

  There was little between them, and yet there was far too much. Something about her called to him, even more so than the pull he’d felt to Amece.

  But to risk betrayal again…

  He opened his hand, large enough to snatch up a horse if he wanted to, certainly big enough to hold and carry a female.

  His gaze met hers, and he waited.

  Ven’s fingers clenched in the white of her gown, uncertainty and fear making sweat bead upon her brow. To go with him was to give up all that she’d known, all that she’d endured, for a fate even more uncertain than the one laid before her. Those that she called her kind would shun her for choosing the dragon, but she was shunned in equal measure by them.

  The way her throat worked fascinated him when she swallowed, the muscles contracting, so very distinct beneath her skin. Not hesitation, per se, but something else.

  It wasn’t going with him that she paused at, and the realization made him frown because he didn’t understand how she could trust him as much as she did.

  She shouldn’t trust him at all.

  She’d kept her vows so far, as had he.

  “I need to fetch something first, if that’s all right?”

  He inclined his head in answer, watched her move away to a bush that had been a husk but now flowered with red blooms.

  She knelt in the ground before it, touched the petals of the plant in awe, shook her head, and began to dig.

  Intriguing.

  He remembered the few creatures of the forest who would bury their treasures beneath the earth. They would burrow deep into the ground, creating for themselves homes hidden below where everyone else trod.

  Snakes too hid in deep holes.

  A thought that made the scales on the back of his neck rise with a rustle she didn’t hear.

  The sand that should have been easy to dig up was muddied and wet now, heavy, and he watched her work at revealing whatever it was she’d hidden away.

  Where her house was old and better suited to being firewood than actual structure, this chest was of newer stock. Old still, to be certain, but with an amount of love and care taken in its preservation. Leather belts held strong to the lid and the side, the buckles on them sturdy, without rust like something left untended would have suffered.

  She had to work at getting it free, and seeing her struggle, Ouros reached over her and plucked the cask from the earth.

  It weighed nothing in his hand, less even than her slight weight that he’d carried from the sea.

  “Please!”

  His brows drew close when he looked at her, set the trunk back on the ground away from where she’d dug, on a patch of land relatively dry considering the rains of the night before.

  Her face suggested that whatever was in the cask was even more precious than the water she’d begged for. And where she might not fear him, the injuring of whatever it was he carried meant a great deal to her.

  Ouros moved aside.

  It should have occurred to him that whatever she protected might be something that would harm him, but the thought fled quickly when she dropped to her knees with an aborted sob and worked at the wet bindings to get the casket open.

  He watched her struggle, would have offered to slit the leather with his claws for her, but something about the way she leaned over the box, was trying to protect it, made him think that there was more to this than simple treasure.

  The plea that kept slipping from her mouth was no longer directed at him.

  Begging…that the contents of the box were safe?

  He couldn’t say.

  She managed the first buckle, began working on the second.

  He could smell wet cloth and paper in the crack that opened along the side of the trunk.

  The rain from the night before had managed to seep into her chest, and whatever was inside, he did not think it had survived unscathed from the storm. A life taken, and he didn’t even know what it was, only that it would be missed.

  He reached out and closed his fingers around the trunk before she could open it.

  “What are you doing?”

  Her treasures were before her, ready to be reclaimed, and he was blocking her from what she wanted. No longer begging, she was prepared to attack.

  So he lied. “The soldiers are preparing to return. We are out of time.”

  “I’m not leaving him behind again.”

  What him?

  And why did the knowledge of this human male’s importance to her make Ouros want to growl?

  “I’ll take it with us. But we must go now.”

  She hesitated, and he opened his hand for her to climb into his palm, his fingers closing around her, not to cage, but to safe keep.

  He closed her trunk in his other hand.

  He jumped, wings snapping wide to catch the wind, and if his fingers trembled, wanting to release the chest in his grip and let it fall to the ground as he flew, he restrained himself, and kept precious her hoard even knowing it would cause only regret when they reached whatever remained of his sanctuary.

  He flew towards the mountains

  The high peaks that had once been overwhelmed with lush trees and rich vegetation were barren and black. Stumps remained, and even with the rains he had brought with his rising from the sea, no hint of green peaked out from the rockface.

  He pulled his arms in tight to his chest, not wanting to touch the bleak surroundings that had once teamed with life.

  The girl in his arms gasped and he loosened his grip, unable to apologize with the wind whipping his words away.

  She was right.

  His refuge was gone.

  Still, he flew onwards, flew higher, unable to stop, unable to believe what his eyes told him. T
here was no scent of flowers on the wind. The crisp fragrance of deer crossed grass did not linger in the air.

  Before his capture, he used to be deafened by the roar of the waterfall crashing over rocks and falling into a clear pool below.

  Now he heard only silence.

  His wings stuttered, hid body dropping through the air when his heart missed a beat in sorrow.

  Clouds formed in the sky.

  Soon they would leak and flood over the landscape.

  He slipped closer to the ground.

  In his hand, the warm bundle of woman he carried reached out, stroked over his palm, her touch so soft he barely felt it against his scales. Even the pads of his fingers were covered in heavy plate metal, but he felt her brush against him, an offer of comfort he didn’t understand.

  She would not know the cause of his pain. She couldn’t understand it.

  Yet she offered all the same.

  He landed on the highest rise, toes curling around the edge of the cliff face.

  The wind whistled around him and he bowed his head, lowered his hand so that she could move from his grip and stand on her own beside him.

  She didn’t move far and the expression on her face did not match the devastation in his heart.

  “By all the,” her words trailed off, her gaze moving from the nothing before them, to his face and back. “This is the sanctuary you built yourself? Dragon’s Blood, Ouros…it’s breathtaking.”

  For one who had seen only sands her entire life, perhaps the shell of a world once flourishing and green was enough to be astonishing to her.

  For him, looking out on the bleak shell of what had been his home was tragedy incarnate.

  He shook his head, turned his gaze to the sky so he did need to see the husks of dead trees before him. “It is nothing now. Everything is gone.”

  “What are you talking about? Ouros,” she placed her hand on his arm, the motion so slight that he could have shaken her free with ease. One movement, and she would slip and fall and be just another dead thing dotting the landscape. Her eyes searched over his face, the ridges of her forehead furrowing when she met his stare. “You can’t see it.”

  Ouros didn’t think she realized that she used his thumb to climb onto the back of his hand, to reach high enough to touch his jaw, stretching on her toes to account for the differences in their sizes.