Small tufts of black and white clouds burst simultaneously from each of the guards’ towers.
“Cannons!” one of our dragon captains shouted, as the iron missiles tore into our swarm, faster than any crossbow or arrow could. We were still a good way from the walls, but dragons screamed as some of the cannonballs found their mark.
“Flight, scatter!” I called, my voice echoed by Saffron, and then Jaydra inside my mind. It was one of the tactics described in the old training manuals from the Dragon Academy, and I had asked Saffron to teach it to the dragons and riders.
In response, the great wing of our attack broke apart into pre-arranged flights of three to ten dragons. Each flight had a captain who was the most experienced human and dragon team, and they peeled off in all directions. The air became a maelstrom of dragon flights, soaring past each other in deadly arcs towards the city itself. For a moment, before the next cannon blast, Saffron beamed in pride at how expertly the dragons performed this dizzying move.
The king’s onslaught still came, but now his cannoneers were having a harder time hitting any target and I could see small ant-like figures running to the walls, blowing horns, and raising crossbows.
From where she sat in front of me, Saffron waved, trying to grab my attention. “Whirlwind?” she called, making a twirling motion with her hand.
“That’s a great idea!” I shouted, as Saffron called to the nearest Dragon Riders, and from there the message spread: Whirlwind! Whirlwind!
As I watched, the individual dragon flights changed their chaotic directions to fly in looping circles above the citadel itself, each flight maintaining its distance from the other, and the sky thundered and cracked with the sound of their wings.
The king has to see how powerful we are and surrender, surely! I had hoped that with the main body of his armies still many miles away at the river, we might be able to surprise the king undefended, and force him to accept defeat, but I should have known better from the sorcerous King Enric. Something was happening below us, as the tallest guard towers of the palace began to shake, their domed ceilings falling apart like the petals of strange, mechanical flowers.
“What is that? What are those things?” I called, as around us dragons screamed, cannons roared, and flights of crossbow bolts shot up to pierce wing and shatter scale. But I couldn’t pay any attention to those dangers, as I watched in horror as the towers of the palace opened to reveal wooden structures, laced with pulleys, each one with a long arm that extended and unfolded until it was longer than most houses were wide.
What the…? I thought, as the first fired, and I instantly saw what it was.
Catapults.
A small cloud of material spun from the weapon and into the air above the city. From this height and distance it didn’t look dangerous, but as the cloud scattered amongst the nearest Dragon Riders, I suddenly saw how deadly they really were.
25
Saffron, Together
I watched as the island blue, one of Jaydra’s sisters called Ferala plummeted out of the sky as the curved blades shot from the catapult tore through her wings, making them useless. Unable to control her trajectory, Ferala flailed and fumbled in her flight before finally ploughing through a line of terraced stone houses, her once-beautiful body now broken. I doubted greatly if the rider who had been on her back had survived. In the wake of her fall, there swelled up a great billows of rock smoke and dust, and, I realized, screams.
“No!” someone was screeching, and I realized that it was me. The world had gone quiet around me, only a strange ringing in my ears as my hand rose, and I reached towards the tower-catapult that had killed Ferala, my brood-sister.
I closed my hand into a fist, somehow feeling the resistance of stone and metal and mortar under my fingers. I could feel the rightfulness of my anger. I will crush the thing that killed my sister, my mind was saying, my voice was repeating. I will destroy all of it. All of them.
Ahead of me, the catapult fired again, nearly breaking my concentration as another deadly shower of the silver star-swords flew into another dragon-friend. But I heard Dol Agur’s advice echo in my ears and as if in response to my renewed focus, the tower began to shake under my magical pressure. Smaller bits of rock and mortar fell as my anger fueled the magical attack that stabbed at the tower, enfolding the construction like a vice.
There was a screeching sound of tearing metal, one of the metal braces bent suddenly upwards, and wooden planks splintered. I heard screams from the human operators, as bits of metal and wood flew in an unexplained explosion, leaving the catapult hanging limply from one side of the war-tower. Still, I wasn’t satisfied.
You think you could attack us, do you? I squeezed my fists even tighter, and the first of the tower’s rocks shook free from the top, falling the forty or fifty feet or more to land with a thud below. I felt drunk with power, a rising dark tide of hate poured from me, aimed at crushing every stone, cracking every tooth, and breaking every bone before me.
Saffron-sister! Jaydra cried, as hands fell onto my shoulders in a vigorous shake.
“Saffron, enough!” It was Bower, and the combination of his touch and my sisters’ voice was enough to break the hate which had threatened to consume me entirely. I shook my head, looking at the destruction I had wrought, past the first partly dismantled tower to the street Bower pointed at below. “Look!” Bower shouted, pointing below us, at the streets that flashed past, full of terrified people.
Below us, everywhere, people churned in panic, young and the old alike. Men, women, and children raced through the streets, their hands held over their heads, screaming or sobbing uncontrollably at the storm of dragons right above them.
“The people of the city shouldn’t fear us,” I murmured. We were coming to save them after all, to deliver them from an evil tyrant who had made their lives a misery.
But as I watched the top of a house exploded, showering the fleeing citizens and the street with tiles and stone. I couldn’t tell whether the roof had been split by one of the king’s own missiles or by the careless thrash of a dragon’s tail, and as one of the wild mountain dragons undulated along the top of one of the ramparts, its claws flashing as it swiped a line of archers to fall to their death below. Blood was everywhere on the streets of Torvald, and not all of it from soldiers, and not all of it from the dragons either. I understood now the citizens’ panic—in the chaos of the battle it was impossible to tell the difference.
One of the island dragons screamed as one of its wings was punctured by the catapult towers, and it barely managed to fly away. Its neck swelled characteristically with the signs that it was about to produce its molten-hot dragon flame in retaliation.
“No flame!” Bower shouted, waving both arms and using his dragon ability at the same time, so that his voice echoed in my head.
“Jaydra! Tell Ysix’s daughter not to use her fire!” I called, hoping that Jaydra could make her sister listen, if she chose not to heed Bower’s command.
I don’t see why she shouldn’t, Jaydra replied tartly, but she let out a sharp, shrieking hawk-like call and the island dragon instead angled her flame upwards, over the rooftops of the city, which unfortunately did little to calm the people below.
Most of the other palace towers had ‘unfurled’ now, and they did not all conceal deadly catapults. Two of them fired jets of liquid upwards at the nearest dragons, coating them in a mist of something which smelled acrid and bitter.
“Oh no,” Bower moaned, as a singular flaming arrow lanced up from the city walls, and one of the wild mountain dragons erupted into a ball of flames, curling and dancing the air in jibbers of agony, before hitting the lowest tier of the city in a fireball. Any hopes Bower might have had of saving the city and avoiding setting it ablaze were dashed.
“The king doesn’t care!” I shouted at him, as Bower watched, appalled by the wreckage and terror of the battle for Torvald. “The king is firing those things at us, but he doesn’t care if they hit the city as well.
He’s mad!” It was just how, when the Maddox magic filled me from inside, all I cared about was hatred—all I cared about was hurting those who had caused me pain, regardless of the consequences.
“We have to take the battle outside the city,” Bower said. “We have to fight them at the walls, and only at the walls. I cannot have more of my people die like this.”
It was then, in that moment, I saw how much Bower was truly meant to be king. He would rather fight the battle with a huge disadvantage then lose the faith of the people who were going to be his citizens.
Family, Jaydra corrected. He wants them to be his family, just like a queen for her brood.
“Set me down,” I said quickly, on the spur of the moment.
“What?” Bower yelled. “Are you mad? We fight together!”
Together, Jaydra repeated.
“I know how we can lure the armies out of the city,” I shouted, as Jaydra suddenly lurched to one side to avoid an incoming cannonball. “We take our forces to the walls, and I revel myself to the king. He knows I am here anyway, and so he will want to kill me or capture me, but before he can, I’ll use my magic to sneak inside the city, as invisible as I was the first time, and kill him.”
“And with King Enric dead, the armies will surrender.” Bower nodded, holding onto the scales of Jaydra as we avoided still more projectiles. All around us the dragons sliced through the narrow city streets, ducking under the rain of deadly missiles. “But…but I don’t like you facing him alone,” Bower said. “No, we cannot…”
“We have to, Bower,” I said. “I can defeat him, I can feel it,” I added, pounding my hand to my heart, as I realized the truth of it. I was stronger than King Enric. That was why he wanted me. I had seen him cause pain and project his will and curse, but he had never summoned the very earth to his defense, or commanded storms, or broken apart towers. This terrible power I had, Enric would not hesitate to use if he could. He would never have waited so long to crush all of the dragons in their sleep, or smother us with rocks in our beds.
It made sense now, I thought. King Enric is old, and I am young. I am stronger in magic than he is—and that means I can beat him.
“Set us down,” I said once more, and this time my voice was a command.
26
Bower, Between Wall & Sword
Reluctantly—very reluctantly—I agreed with Saffron, though I had no intention of honoring her plan. We would fly back to the outer walls of the city, and there we would attempt to attract the king and his most terrible of forces, that much I could agree to, but I was not going to let Saffron go to the palace and face the king alone.
Together, Jaydra said inside my head, and I agreed, realizing she had repeated the word just for me and for me alone. Jaydra and I would do everything we could to protect Saffron.
“Dragons and riders,” I called, my mind opening to connect with every dragon and dragon-friend near me. “To the walls. Follow me!”
In response, Jaydra wheeled to show the others where to go. Most of the island dragons seemed only too happy to comply, eager to be further away from the palace war-towers and the archers who seemed to inhabit every marketplace and every open space.
As the dragons rose above the smoking city, with wails, screams, and bells rising into the air in the wake of their flight. They flew over the thin, wooden-built houses in the poor sector and the carefully cultivated parks of the wealthy districts, following Jaydra back towards the front gates of the city. Above it all, I shouted, “Converge!”
Saffron and Jaydra echoed my command, each in their own voice to either human or dragons. It was a maneuver designed to bring together disparate flying dragons, swirling and spiraling to one central point. This time, the point was going to be me, Saffron, and Jaydra. We raced toward the closed front gates, dragons flocking around us.
“Bower, look!” Saffron pointed to the open land just outside the citadel gates, which, when I was living here had been a space for the traveling traders to park their caravans and wagons. Now it was just a barren heath, churned into mud by the passage of thousands of soldiers, every tree and paddock destroyed.
But that grim sight wasn’t what Saffron was pointing at. It was the gathering haze there, on the horizon.
“What is that?” Saffron called, and I had to admit I didn’t know, until Jaydra informed us what it was.
Metal men. It is the hollow metal men, marching towards us, she said with clear disgust for the Iron Guard. So, the king had summoned the Iron Guard back, probably as soon as we had flown past them, and with their tireless legs and ceaseless strides they had ran back here, through towns, rivers, fields, and any other obstacle in their way.
“But they are still a long way off yet, surely!” I said. “We still have time—kill the king, and they will fall to rust.” I hope.
“Yes,” Saffron nodded, as Jaydra settled into a steady wing-beat, lowering her body in line with the front gates of the citadel. Soldiers atop the ramparts furiously pumped the winches to turn the wall cannons in our direction, as behind us a hundred dragons copied our example.
“Whatever you are going to do, Saffron, you had better do it quick!” I cried, as my friend closed her eyes, and raised her hands in front of her. For a second, nothing happened at all, and then the hairs on the back of my neck rose. From the queasiness in my stomach, I knew something terribly, terribly wrong was going on.
Saffron’s eyes had rolled back, until all I could see were the whites of them as she mumbled strange syllables and sounds I couldn’t make out though they still made me feel sick.
A deep and guttural groan rumbled its way out of the earth below, growing louder and louder. It was a thousand Iron Guard voices, still miles away, all echoing the exact same refrain, the growl matching their marching, thundering feet.
And then I realized, it wasn’t a groan, it was a name. The Iron Guard behind us were all hollering one thing: “Enric.” A thousand metal voices carried the name of their king on the wind to the city of the tyrant. And then I heard the name from somewhere closer.
No. It couldn’t be. But it was. Saffron’s mouth moved in time with the repeated distant Iron Guard refrain. “Enric!” She was commanding their hollow voices, in the same way that the sorcerous king had when he tried to threaten Saffron from many miles away.
Is Saffron really that powerful? I wondered, as her face drained of color, and the call went on.
“Enric. Enric. Enric! Surrender,” the call repeated, like a loop. “Enric. Surrender. Surrender. Enric!”
I do not like this, I heard Jaydra’s voice in my head.
“Neither do I,” I murmured. I could only hope the king would take the bait, and that it would be possible to break Saffron out of her enchantment. I was worried that she, just like before, would be trapped into the rising hatred which always came when she used her Maddox magic. The answer to both of my concerns came sooner than I had anticipated, as a single long horn call emerged from the palace. The city fell silent, and miraculously, when I looked back at Saffron, I found I was looking at the clear and calm expression of my friend smiling back at me.
“It’s time, Bower,” she said, as if she had done nothing out of the ordinary. “We should set the dragons down.” She looked calculatingly at the walls. “Or I could fly… I really think I have control over my magic now…”
“No! Wait!” I was worried with how calm she appeared. “We should talk about what you just did. You controlled the Iron Guard. You made them speak as King Enric makes them speak!”
Saffron was already unclipping her harness, and I could feel a shiver of unease pass through the dragon underneath me. “It’s nothing, just a trick,” Saffron said, frowning at the gap between us and the wall. It would mean flying many dragon lengths, something she had never managed to do without severe stress.
“No, Saffron, I’m coming with you,” I said desperately, reaching for my own harness. “You cannot face the king alone!”
“Stop.” Saffron said, her voi
ce echoing large and laced with eldritch forces. I found my hand frozen on the buckle of the harness, looking at Saffron as she smiled sadly, and shook her head. “Not this time, Bower. You keep the armies busy. You lead the dragons. I need you to be a king.” I remained frozen as a mournful echo came from Jaydra beneath us, and Saffron hushed her sister by placing a hand on her side for just a moment. Then she flung herself off of Jaydra’s back, and into the air.
As soon as she had left the dragon, my body unfroze and both I and the dragon screamed, “Saffron!” as she, quite literally, disappeared from view. Her body, arms and legs splayed out like a star, seemed to shimmer as if we might be seeing her through water, and faded into nothing.
She’s turned herself invisible, I thought, to better sneak up on the king.
My astonishment and fear couldn’t keep me still for long, as a cannon blast broke the silence between the dragons and the citadel, as the wall cannons let loose another volley. This time, however, away from the citizens, we could use our dragon flames to defeat the walls of the most ancient citadel in the known world. With that done, we could turn to keeping the approaching Iron Guard at bay, as Saffron made her way through the citadel, in search of the evil king.
27
Saffron, What is Thicker
Than Water?
Using my magic to fly was easier than I would have expected just a few weeks ago. Was it just being near the citadel once more? Being near Dragon Mountain? Or being near Enric? Whatever the answer, the power thrumming through me was so much stronger somehow.
“More archers to the walls!” one of Enric’s captains, a tall, rangy looking man with hair held back in a loose ponytail, shouted. He strode toward where I had touched down on the ramparts, but I knew he couldn’t see me. My magic had made me invisible to human and dragon eye.
Dragons of Dark (Upon Dragons Breath Trilogy Book 3) Page 19
