I stood on the outer wall, watching the battle for the citadel unfold before me, feeling as though I was looking at one of those vast oil paintings that Bower had in his crumbling mansion, only this one moved.
The dragons swooped back and forth in front of the walls, and from the guard towers their burst cannon smoke and arrows. With a sudden thrill of excitement, I watched as one of the dragons fired a jet of her molten dragon fire, straight at the gates. The metal glowed a deep red, and wood smoked.
“We’ll get them yet!” the captain shouted. “Look! Reinforcements! The Iron Guard!”
I could see the same dark shadow of the metal men as the wall defenders could, jogging closer and closer.
I bet you could stop them if you wanted to, a voice inside my head said. It was a nasty, snide little voice—the one which I associated with my Maddox magic. I even raised my hand, feeling the tide of fury leap up through my belly to answer it easily. The voice continued, I bet you could crush them all, just like the tower. One by one, perhaps?
And then I realized King Enric’s trick. I could see my hand. There, straight in front of me—it was no longer invisible. As soon as I had taken my mind off what I was doing and almost allowed myself to be seduced by the desire to attack the guards, my cloak of invisibility had faded. But there was no room for such errors. I had to do this. No time for revenge. I concentrated again on hiding, and the edges of my body once again shimmered into nothingness with an odd tingling sensation.
Making my way down from the ramparts was easy. In fact, everything was easier now that the magic seemed eager to flow through me as quick as thought. I kept what Dol Agur had said in my mind, about being focused and being clear, and found that there was a space, almost like the space I shared with Jaydra, where I was balanced between being in control and out of control. If I could just stay calm and keep the emotions from overwhelming me, then I could maintain that space, even though the lure of the power flowing down through my mind was very great indeed. I flew through the lower tiers of the city at the height of the rooftops, carefully avoiding the streets packed with people cowering behind walls attempting to hide from the dragons and soldiers, while others were fleeing the fires in panic. Some even fell to their knees and appeared to be praying, despite the cacophony of screams, dragons, cannons, soldiers, and death all around, though whether they beseeched the dragons themselves, or their tyrant king I couldn’t tell.
As I drew closer to the palace, the streets became quieter and almost deserted, and I dropped my cloak of invisibility and devoted my magic to allowing me to move even faster as I flew. I was alone up here, and there was nothing that could stop me now anyway, why bother with the invisibility? Up here the scars of battle had only rarely touched the rich and fine houses, estates, gates and walls. Until finally, the gleaming white walls of the Palace of Torvald itself rose before me, and their encircling iron gates came into view.
“What… What is that?” Voices were shouting. “Is it flying? Halt!” A voice shouted, and I saw that a line of four human guards stood in front of the gate, their crossbows levelled as they looked at me, the flying girl, in fear and amazement. I felt another tidal wave of anger. How could they stand there and protect the evil tyrant? After all the pain Enric has inflicted on his own city?
“Get out of my way.” I raised my hand, feeling the power ripple out of me and send them scattering like children’s toys. Using my power felt good.
Now, all that stood before me are the gates of the palace itself. I summoned my anger and rage, ready to hurl it at them in a bolt of devastating power, but to my surprise they swung open instead, at the same time as a voice in my head said:
Come, Saffron Maddox. Come home. Come to me.
Come to me, Saffrom Maddox. The voice repeated, again and again, over and over in my head until I couldn’t even tell if it was my voice or the king’s. It was the very first time the king had used the same internal telepathy the dragons did, and I wondered if he had learned it from me.
I floated through the open gates and over white, crushed-gravel paths, barely aware I was using my magic at all.
Come to me, Saffron Maddox. The front doors of the palace itself were open, and I flew over the polished mosaic of tiles on the floor, beneath the candle-filled chandeliers, and up one of the grand twin curved staircases, their bannisters inlaid with gold.
Come to me. King Enric’s voice carried on, drawing me deeper into the palace, across a long gallery lined with statues. Once, the king had told me just who they were—all those dead Maddox heroes, martyrs, and kings. I went across the gallery, towards a set of doors inlaid with a colored glass scene of mountains and lightning bolts that silently swung open as I approached, my feet still not even touching the floor.
Concentrate. Think. Find the balance. I tried to remind myself, but the power rushed towards me like a rising tide. It was too great, flooding my limbs and my mind like water. I tried to remember who I was and why I was here, but I felt curiously distant and numb. Was this power? I wondered. Confidence?
“This is strength,” a smooth, cultured voice answered as I glided through the open doors to find myself on a high balcony, overlooking a long and almost blindingly white hall tiled in marble. The balcony extended all of the way around the room, with different doorways coming into it, and I realized it must be somewhere near the center of the palace itself.
There, in the middle of the hall, hovering a few feet from the floor, just as I was, stood the handsome young King Enric Maddox, my great-uncle.
“Child,” he opened his hands paternally to me, affectionately, even though he appeared young enough to be my suitor, not my elder. His hair was lustrous and dark, swept back from a high and noble forehead. Strong cheekbones and a chin which could cut ice, but his eyes were so wide and so dark that I felt I might vanish into their gloom if I stared for too long…
“Stop it,” I said, my voice echoing strangely in the room, and sounding not quite like myself. There was something like the rumble of thunder and the crash of waves in the timbre of my voice. As soon as I spoke, there was a flicker over the king’s form, and instead of the young and handsome prince hovering there, I saw instead an ancient, wizened body with barely enough flesh on it to hold it together. Only the cruelly dark, glittering eyes like sharpened flints were the same.
“Ah, child,” the king said again, his form flickering as he sought to reassert the illusion, and only this time his young face appeared pasty white and strange, like a pale mask that sat on top of another. It sighed, sadly. “You could have had it all, you know, this entire kingdom, the world. All you had to do was to stand at my side.”
I looked at him; the disgusting old man, the one who had been such a torment to me and my family, and then I knew what real hatred was. My blood turned not red-hot, but instead, chilled. Frozen, I rejected everything that he was offering me.
“What would I want from you?” I demanded in my new, strange voice.
“Good girl, there’s that Maddox anger,” King Enric chuckled, his voice sounding drier and coarser than it had before. “Why not show me a little more of it? You know by allying with that sop of a boy Bower, you will always be second-rate. Just a girl. Just someone he looks down on.”
“That’s a lie!” I said, what did he know about Bower, anyway? My heart wavered. The Chief Vere and his cronies had seen me as just a weak girl, not fit to lead, not fit to ride a dragon. How many of the others felt the same way?
“What I know, child, is that you are a Maddox,” the king answered my thoughts. “And I know the minds of kings, and the minds of lesser men. We Maddoxes are designed for much greater things. Much bigger things. We are given the entire world, and you would squander it. What a waste of such a fine temper!”
Before I could argue, the king’s form flickered and he was at my side, as fast as thought, as fast as lightning. Just as suddenly, his hands were squeezing around my throat, and a terrible, putrid rotting grave smell surrounded me. It was coming from
him, from his hands crushing my windpipe.
“I am tired, Saffron Maddox,” Enric said, his voice losing any last vestige of its youthful tone and instead becoming the crackly and hoarse sound of a dying old man. “I have had enough of this little game of hide and seek you have played with me.” As he spoke, the illusion of his smooth and firm skin began wrinkling and stretching, his shoulders slumped, his tendons and bones pressed through his papery-thin flesh. Every disguise had fallen away, leaving me in the hands of a still-moving corpse.
“You will submit to me now, or you will give me your power!” He snapped broken and yellowing teeth, throwing me with a strength that he should not even be able to possess.
I felt my body whirl, the marble floor trade places with the ceiling, and a crack of pain as my body was thrown through the doors, and against the statues of dead Maddoxes in the gallery beyond.
“Agh!” Pain blossomed through me like a building catching fire. When I could open my eyes, and stop seeing stars, I saw that around me was scattered a layer of marble and stone, and the shattered limbs of statues. But one of my legs didn’t feel right, and I looked down to see it folded at an obscene angle.
“Oh, my dear Saffron,” the mortuary voice of the King said, and I watched as he hovered through the open door and towards me. His clothes hung from his twisted and mummified limbs, and he looked like some sort of monstrous bat. “Such a shame. I had such high hopes for you, once. But it seems you cannot even withstand a little pain!” His voice croaked and purred, as he flicked a claw like hand and I was sent spiraling across the gallery to smash into the next statue.
“Argh!” More pain shooting through my leg. The pain was making it hard to think, to concentrate on keeping that balance in my mind between the magic and myself. Everything felt like a rising tide of agony and anger as the king took his time in killing me.
“Maybe it is for the best, you know, for you to just give up. Just to die like all of the rest.” Enric said, this time gesturing with both hands to lift me in the air and push me over the edge of the statue gallery.
“No…” I scrabbled at the edge, holding onto the half-broken body of a statue, ignoring the pain coming from the lower half of my body. Tears sprang into my eyes. Maybe the King was right. What was I thinking, that I could beat this centuries-old Methuselah?
“That’s right, Saffron, just give up. Submit your power to me… All of this pain can go away…” Enric hovered closer to me, reaching out one grotesque claw of a hand to tenderly wipe away a lock of my hair from my face. I shivered in disgust at his touch.
I felt, something dark and leech-like tugging at my mind. Just as I was connected with Jaydra, so I was also connected with him, King Enric Maddox, and through that mental connection he drew on my magic and my soul, devouring it, his body slowly filling with my power and my very life.
“No…” I gurgled, pain shooting up through my limbs as he stole my life. Before my very eyes his decaying and skeletal body flushed anew with vigor: the skin thickening, the muscles rounding. It was like watching a leech fill up with blood.
No. I would rather die than give him the satisfaction of stealing my power and ruling for another hundred years.
I swiped at the King’s face, letting go of the statue that I was holding onto to do so. I felt my nails connect with dry, papery flesh.
“Ach!” The connection between me and the King broke, and his grasp that was holding my body wavered, and I plummeted to the floor below. I was going to die.
…Den-sister…? A whisper of a reptilian voice, terrified, and savagely angry in my mind.
Jaydra! I managed to throw my magic around my body just in time, cushioning my fall and destroying the mosaic of the floor as I did so. My leg still felt terrible, and the rest of me felt weaker and fatigued, but I wasn’t dead. The thought of Jaydra’s mourning had stopped me from certain death.
Fight, Den-Sister! I could hear Jaydra within my heart, and I could feel her launching her body, and Bower on her, at the thickest knot of attackers between her and me. My sister was coming.
“Look at me, Saffron!” Enric was screeching from the broken statue gallery above me, not hovering anymore but standing on the sagging stones, one hand clutched to the side of his skull-like head. He peeled his hand away to reveal ragged tears down his forehead, a gaping hole where one of his eyes should be and his ancient nose crushed beyond any normal repair. “Look at what you did to my face!” He screeched again, but his screech turned into a cackle, and then into a laugh.
I wasn’t sure I even could kill him.
“But maybe I can hurt you.” I snarled, throwing my hands up to release a ball of energy to the underside of the gallery, watching the stones shake and crack, before propelling myself on magic winds down the nearest hallway.
There was a sound as of an avalanche of stone behind me as the gallery collapsed, but I didn’t think for a moment that the tyrant was dead, not yet. I could feel the dark shape of his soul somewhere still nearby, still hungry as I fled through the Palace.
I was propelling myself through a long hallway with dainty wooden furniture and wall-sized crystal windows, pain dogging my every step. I had to do something about my broken leg or else I wouldn’t get very far.
Another rumble from behind me as stones were broken and thrown. Was that the King fighting his way out? Searching for me?
My magic. Could I heal the leg? I lowered a hand to touch the strange-looking knee joint, and screamed as agony shot through me. “I can do this, I can do this…” I started to send magic through my hands, down into my leg. Willing it to be better, to be whole, to be young again.
“Oh, Saffron…” Enric was free. The doorframe to the hallway I was in exploded into splinters. “What a very bad girl you are being!” I heard his voice shout, as the pain and terror spiked within me, I felt a disgusting clunk of bones repositioning themselves, and the pain vanished. My leg was back in the place that it should have been. I had healed myself!
“There you are,” before I could revel in my power, every piece of gold-inlaid desk and chair exploded, and the windows blew out in a sudden wave of dark energy. Enric entered the hallway, raising his arms to break more of my bones.
Moving and thinking quicker now I didn’t have the agony of my leg clouding my mind, I flung my hands up to the ceiling above the King, saw the plasterwork ripple and bubble for a fraction of a moment, before the ceiling and the room above collapsed.
My magic propelled me forward through the nearest door as stone and wood fell all around me. I was in some sort of dining hall, crystal chandeliers over my head and wooden tables in the middle of the room, beyond that I could see more doors, more windows. Which way to go?
“SAFFRON!” An angered roar from the rubble behind me, and cracks in the walls and floors were following me into the dining hall. Not wanting to have this room fall on me, I jumped through the glass of the windows to find myself in a small courtyard, open to the sky above, with a bare, dry stone fountain. A second later, the chandelier’s and the tables exploded as Enric’s anger flooded out of him.
The stone fountain burst into shrapnel of stone fragments, filling the air and peppering my body.
“Ach!” I managed to throw those fragments to one side with my magic, but more sharp darts were pouring towards me, this time from the dining hall. Shattered pieces of crystal from the chandelier, flakes of stone, marble, quartz, all flew towards me in a storm of sharp objects which would tear the flesh from my bones.
Den-Sister… Jaydra’s voice beside me, as she must have felt a shadow of the terror that I was feeling.
I threw my hands up to create a sphere of protective magic all around me, watching as crystal and glass, stone and wood struck it and shattered, but kept on coming. The King was throwing the Palace at me, using his powers to destroy the building to rain it down against my magic.
I couldn’t keep it out for long, the sphere contracted suddenly as my mind wavered with fear, I could feel the pressure of a t
housand objects hitting it, thrown with all of the malevolence of the living dead.
“Just submit to me Saffron. Submit and it will all stop,” the King was saying, his voice of thunder and ice breaking through the roaring storm of detritus attacking me, even though I couldn’t see him.
KREAACK! Something large outside of my small ball of magic was broken. I could feel the reverberations along the ground as Enric tore the Palace down around my ears.
And suddenly the storm of stone cleared and fell as one to a pile of rubble at my feet. I was standing in the shell of the Palace, in the middle of a mound of broken things. The evil tyrant Enric was opposite me in the broken rooms, remnants of walls behind him, his hands in the air and a look of perverse glee in his face.
KREEEAK! The sound shook the floor once more, as a shadow fell across me from high above.
“Jaydra?” I whispered in hope.
But it wasn’t Jaydra. It was one of the Palace’s towers, falling straight down on top of where I stood. I could see in obscene detail, the blocks of its walls starting to break apart as it fell.
“NO!” I screamed, thrusting both hands into the sky to try and seize the tower in place, and together. In the night air above my heads, I felt my magic clamp onto the tower’s body, holding it diagonally across the sky. I had never felt so powerful as I did now, sucking up the magic from the stones in the earth and all of the hatred in my heart to hold the building in place.
It’s too much. I cannot hold it for long.
“Ah, child,” Enric said, as his feet crunched over the rubble towards me. “You see how strong you really could be, if you had tried? If you had given yourself to me?”
His words only spiked my disgust, powering my strength to hold the creaking, groaning tower at bay.
The tyrant stood opposite me, and I wondered if I could let the tower fall on us both. Surely it would be enough to finally kill him? But I would have to draw him closer first.
Dragons of Dark (Upon Dragons Breath Trilogy Book 3) Page 20
