Chapter 22
As they cleared the wall ahead of True Gate, Tyber’s breath caught in his throat. The smoke rose from the outer city to the right of the gate. A ring of fire blazed through the shantytown off True Road. The column of smoke that rose out of the ring obscured everything behind it and hid how far back the fire stretched. Tyber’s feet twitched with the knowledge Dragoneer Chanson had taught him. How he wanted to scrape his heels across Rius’ shoulders and urge her onward, around the column of smoke to the other side. He wanted to know the breadth of the fire, the danger posed to his family.
Rius shifted beneath him and leveled out her wings. As she dropped down in the V formation led by Merilyss, Tyber held his breath. It was unsettling to be on the back of a dragon at night, hardly able to see where the next one was ahead of him, or behind him. He could only hear the rush of wings through the air over the distant roar of the fire and people shouting and screaming.
Dragoneer Chanson set the horde down in the broad road, yelling at people to move aside as he landed. To Tyber’s relief, Rius took the ground without landing atop anyone or anything. As soon as her claws were on the pavers, he ripped off his restraints, undid the ties on the buckets, and tossed them to the ground.
“Ask around for the nearest well,” Dragoneer Chanson called back.
“I know where it’s at!” Tyber yelled back. “This is my home. My neighborhood.”
In the faint light of the fire, Chanson nodded back, and then Tyber hit the ground, collecting buckets. “This way!” he yelled at his classmates. “Follow me!”
He ran into the crowd, past people hurrying this way and that, bumping into him. More than once, he was nearly sent sprawling to the ground. He bounced off shoulders, careened and spun, fell to a knee once as a bucket twisted from his hand and bounced away.
“Tyber!” Weiss shouted at him.
“Over there!” Tyber shouted back. He waved toward a line of people that could barely be made out behind all the other people rushing about.
“Over here!” Weiss called back, running to the bucket brigade. “This way!” Several recruits followed him.
Tyber struggled to his feet in the loose dirt and stone. Ahead of him, smoke roiled into the sky. The column shifted as if brushed along the side with giant, invisible fingers, and then a red dragon reeled around the edge, flying low. She beat her wings twice and the smoke danced and curled around her, as if irritated and preparing to swat the great beast and her rider from the sky.
It was Ander and Listico.
Tyber looked back to the dark ground before him. He lurched forward, searching for the missing bucket. The toes of his boot snapped it, sent it skittering off a few feet more. He found it again and plucked it off the ground. As he stood, his attention snagged on the whips of flame as they danced between two low buildings. Bright orange flames wavered and flailed. They were far more violent and vicious than anything he’d seen in the fire pits or hearths around. These flames appeared to be hunting.
As Tyber turned in the direction of the bucket brigade, he thought he heard a cry. He paused, held his breath, and prayed to the gods above that his ears were playing tricks on him.
And there it was again. A cry for help.
Tyber looked back to the narrow alley, to the flames whipping and rioting on the other side.
“Weiss!” Tyber hollered in the direction of the well. “Weiss! Ren! Anyone!”
The cry came again, louder now as if it were getting closer to him, seeking him out.
Tyber glanced up to the surging cloud of smoke above. It was orange and black and angry as if the frustration, pain, and rage of the citizens who lived outside the wall had been given form to rise up against the gods who could do no better for them.
“Oh, please,” Tyber said to the stars as he dropped his buckets and took several steps forward. “Please see to my safe return and protect my family.”
He tucked his head down and ran into the alley.
Chapter 23
“Hello?” Tyber called.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and started to call again, but stopped as his eyes rested upon a small cottage with two windows, one on either side of the door. The eaves of the cottage drooped over one of the windows and gave the structure a look of mild disbelief or slight annoyance. He recognized the building. He wasn’t that far from home.
Tyber raced down the lane and bolted to the right, down another lane. A man shot around the corner of a cottage and slammed into Tyber, knocking him to the ground. The man stopped long enough to point behind him. “Fire!” he yelled, then ran away.
Again, the cry came. Shrill. A woman’s voice.
Tyber scrambled to his feet. “Hello! Can you hear me?”
He ran in the direction of the cry. As he approached, the fire’s roar grew louder. Gashes of light split the cloud of gray smoke to his right. Heat pressed against his face. The wind shifted suddenly, and a roll of black fog washed into the lane like a foul river. He fell to his knees, coughing and gasping on the dirt and stone beneath him before the wind shifted again and drove the smoke away.
Huffing and wiping tears from his eyes, Tyber pushed on through the lane. Dark windows and empty doors stared out at him, and it was the absence of people who made the sight nearly as strange as the light of the fire. “Hello!” he yelled, and his voice tore at his throat.
“Help! Help! Please help us!”
Tyber stopped. “Where are you?” It felt like he was running in circles.
He spun to his right. A lane ran away from him and plunged into a wall of fire. A cottage collapsed and sent out a puff of sparks. The flames around it lurched away as if flinching, and then resumed their riotous dance of destruction.
“Help! Please!” the voice cried.
Tyber jogged down the lane into a wall of heat. His eyes teared, and every breath hurt and stung.
“Where are you?” Tyber called.
“Here! Please help us!” a woman called from the door of a cottage in front of Tyber. She darted back inside before he could say a word.
Fire rolled from one of the windows and flames licked at the door frame. The cottage was back against the wall of a half-burned warehouse. Beyond the wall, flames half as tall as the mother city’s wall raked at the clouds above. And beyond the warehouse, was the courtyard where his family’s cottage sat.
“Hold on!” Tyber yelled. The weight of the heat was enormous, unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It tried to drive him to the ground. A cloud of smoke billowed before him. He clasped a hand over his mouth and coughed briefly before charging into the cottage.
Immediately, the heat searing his temples and arms ceased. But the wall of heat radiating from the back of the cottage was still stifling.
“Help me!” the woman cried from right beside Tyber. Flames licked up the window sills and provided a little light, but the thick smoke made it hard to see.
“My grandmother,” the woman said.
Her words threatened to drop Tyber to his knees as he thought of Theola and Fafa.
“We have to get out of here,” Tyber said. His voice sounded so far away, muffled by the roar of flames. “We have to go!”
“I can’t leave her!” the woman cried in the dark.
Tyber squatted and moved forward. His hands touched the ground to steady himself, and for a second, his eyes widened in surprise at how cool it felt. A hand slipped over his face. He nearly fell backward, but the hand gripped him about the shoulder. “Please!”
The pale face of an older woman emerged from the shadows. She slept. Whether or not she would wake up, Tyber couldn’t say.
“We have to leave!” Tyber said, then peered into the shadows, at the soot-stained and sweaty face of a younger woman.
A loud crack pierced the air. A great crash followed it, and a rumble sent a tremor through the ground.
“I can’t leave her! She’s all I’ve got. Please!”
Tyber shook his head as he moved around her, then th
readed his arms under the old woman and lifted her. She weighed no more than a bundle of sticks. Her head fell back on her neck, and Tyber sensed that it was too late for her, but taking her was the only way to get the younger woman to leave.
“Come on!” Tyber yelled as he stood, lifting the old woman.
He moved to the door. Flames licked at the corner of the ceiling. Among the thatch, hundreds of angry, orange embers flared to life, and it seemed like the gods had gone mad with violence. Tyber paused with the old woman in his arms and held his breath. Was this what the Originals had seen before the gods had struck down their cities and split them in two?
The younger woman bumped into him and broke his trance. He ducked down and slunk past the fire only to find a field of glowing embers before him.
“I don’t have shoes!” the woman behind him screamed.
Tyber glanced over his shoulder. Wind whipped the woman’s long hair across her face. She pushed it back behind her ears as she returned his stare, her eyes wide and full of terror.
Dear gods, they were going to die.
He lifted his face to the fire rolling off the cottage roof. Flames towered over the top of the warehouse wall. Beyond was his family’s home.
He clutched the older woman to his chest. As he did so, the granddaughter placed her hand upon his forearm.
If his family was gone, if they had risen to the gods and could watch over him, then they would know if he didn’t at least try.
“Wrap your arms around my neck!” Tyber yelled, then turned away from the woman. She clutched her arms around him and nearly cut off his air, what little of it there was.
Tyber staggered forward, carrying both women. Glowing embers skittered away from the toes of his boots and bounced across the ash before him.
A choking sensation grew in his throat as he shuffled forward, heat gathering in his boots. His feet ached.
He cleared the last of the embers and meant to crouch, to let the young woman down, and instead he fell to his knees and lurched forward in a coughing fit. He dropped the older woman to the ground before him as the younger woman rolled away. A foul, hot wind whipped past Tyber and fluttered the smock over the bones of the poor woman before him.
Not yet. Not yet. He had to try a little more. He pulled in another breath. It burned, searing his lungs, and he launched into another coughing fit. Knots of pain blossomed in his side.
The face of Rius flashed into his mind. Her blue scales soothed like water. The dark of her eyes regarded him in cool comfort.
She still needed him. As soon as the thought began to leak strength back into his legs, he was struck with how ridiculous it was. She had lifted him up, carried him upon her shoulders over the city, and shown him the world as he had never would have been able to imagine.
She didn’t need someone to care for her. She simply needed a partner.
“Rius,” Tyber whispered, and his whisper was whipped into ash and buried in the roar and raging air around him. Tyber slid his arms back under the old woman as her granddaughter coughed and gagged beside him.
The granddaughter’s hand gripped his bicep and gave a tug. “Look!” she rasped.
Tyber glanced at her, then followed her gaze back to the warehouse. The building was gone. It had collapsed and taken the cottage with it, fire dancing and raging, lifting a column of heavy smoke.
Something parted the flames. A black sliver approached in the manner of a walking man, but that would be impossible. He must be seeing things. Tyber blinked away the dryness in his stinging eyes. The silhouette of a man drew closer. The breath of the fire blew the dark edge of his cloak around him, but not the hair on top of his head. It was slicked back, pressed neatly in place.
“Tyber!” the man called.
Tyber sat back on his heels. “Master Groal?”
“Do you need a hand?” Master Groal asked as he approached. He gestured at the woman before him.
“I have her,” Tyber said, then lifted the woman and staggered to his feet. Master Groal’s pale hand wrapped around his shoulder, holding Tyber steady. The other one took the granddaughter’s outstretched hand and pulled her to her feet. Tyber felt the shift in Master Groal’s touch as he pushed his own weight back on his heels and pulled the young woman to her feet. He was surprisingly strong and apparently not at all winded from the smoke.
“Where did you come from?” Tyber asked.
“This way!” Master Groal shouted and nodded in the direction of a narrow alley between two cottages engulfed in flames. Smoke belched from their windows.
“We’ll never make it!” the young woman cried.
“Trust me,” Master Groal yelled. “It’s the only way out.”
He pushed them forward. Tyber nearly stumbled.
They crossed a small courtyard blanketed in ash pocked with burning bits of trash. They hurried past a wooden table that smoldered and smoked. Heat rolled off the flaming cottages around them and tried to push them back.
Tyber glanced over his shoulder in time to see a bank of smoke roll in and cover them. It blotted out all but the brightest flames behind him. He coughed and sputtered and nearly stumbled before a wash of air blew the smoke away. He peered up, expecting to see a dragon hovering above, but there was nothing but black. Darkness. The gods themselves had closed their eyes at the sight.
He was on his own, other than for Master Groal.
“We can’t!” the young woman cried. “It’s too hot! We can’t get through there.”
“We can do it,” Master Groal said. “Trust me.”
The woman began to turn away. Master Groal yanked her back into place before him, and then darkness wrapped around Tyber.
He gasped, coughed, and then looked about. The heat no longer felt like a force pounding upon his skin. The roar of the air still crawled through his ears, but it was muffled.
“Keep moving,” advised Master Groal’s voice from the dark. “Keep moving forward. I have each of you. You will be safe as long as you stick close.”
“What’s happening?” the young woman asked.
Tyber moved forward. The air tasted of ash. He peered down and saw the light of the fire leaking in, as if he were beneath a tent now, a tent that moved with them.
He looked up, stumbled, and Master Groal’s grip righted him. As they approached the flaming cottages, the sky turned from a charcoal gray to dark, dirty orange. Silhouetted against the orange, directly above them, mantling them, Tyber saw two points, nearly touching like the joints in a great pair of wings. Dragon wings.
Tyber’s jaw dropped. He coughed and sputtered, and Master Groal’s grip tightened on his arm, shoving him forward.
“We’re almost there,” the Master called.
Fire licked the sky ahead of them, and the wings trembled slightly. The grip on Tyber’s shoulder tightened.
The man was in pain. Whatever he was, whatever he was doing, it was causing him pain.
“Almost there,” Master Groal called again, perhaps reassuring himself.
The sky above returned to the charcoal gray.
“Protect your eyes. Look down now!” Master Groal shouted, and Tyber found himself looking down.
The wings parted, and the heat smashed into Tyber’s side.
He grimaced and looked back to Master Groal, but could see nothing strange about the man.
“This way!” Master Groal called and led them down a lane, toward a group of men who were dousing rows of squat, low buildings as more men worked to yank the thatch from the roofs and carry it away.
As soon as they were spotted, several of the men ran up to them, shouting questions and warnings that clashed against Tyber’s ears like nonsense.
The grandmother was lifted from his arms. Without her weight to pin him, he looked back in the direction of his family’s home and fell over.
Chapter 24
Someone knocked on the door.
Tyber pushed himself up onto his elbow as he lay on his bunk and peered to the far end of the bunk h
all. Who would bother to knock?
“Come in?” Tyber called, unsure of what to say. It was a bunk hall. There was no expectation of privacy. He was alone in the room simply because he had been excused from classes and none of the others had. They had suffered nothing worse than a poor night’s sleep fighting the fire.
The door opened. Ander stuck his head around the edge. “How are you feeling?”
Tyber sat up on his bunk. The effort sent a coughing fit ringing through his chest. He finally quelled it and left his palm against his breastbone as he wheezed. “Like I’ve inhaled all of the ashes of a blacksmith’s foundry.”
Ander smiled as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
“Have you heard anything about my family?” Tyber asked. His posture straightened as if he were bracing himself. He studied Ander’s face for a reaction.
“I have,” Ander said with a slight nod. The smile on his face widened and flooded Tyber with a relief that he didn’t know he could feel.
“They are all accounted for, and they are outside waiting to see you in the garden.”
Tyber grinned and began to stand. Ander placed a hand on his shoulder and held him to the bunk.
“Before you go, I want to talk to you a moment.”
“About?” Tyber relaxed, and then his posture tightened again as he thought of Master Groal and the wings draped around him and the woman.
Ander reached into a pocket in his tunic and pulled out a small purse. He dropped it into Tyber’s lap. Metallic jingles sprinkled the air.
“It’s your bonus,” Ander said.
He sat on the bunk beside Tyber. “I had a discussion with Master Groal—”
Tyber opened his mouth to ask about the man. Ander held up his hand to cut him off.
“And we agreed that after your efforts last night, you have demonstrated that you would pass the first final. In fact, you have shown a level of courage and bravery, and dubious decision making, that is the hallmark of the best royal hordesmen.”
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