I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
The dragon surged heat again. This time, it burst toward me, coming with a bit of intensity. The dragon looked at me, and there was something in his dragon gaze that suggested I should understand him. It suggested frustration I didn’t comprehend, and it suggested an urgency with which I needed to act.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell what more I needed to do.
I heard the voice again.
We’d gone all the way down the hallway, so whoever was coming might reach the room and realize the dragon was gone; we would then end up either fighting our way out or being captured by whoever was coming toward us.
The dragon roared softly.
“No,” I whispered. “We have to be quiet. We can’t let them know we are out of the other room.”
The dragon sent another hint of surging power outward.
Thomas. I needed to find him. He was involved in trying to understand what had happened to the missing dragons, and he was convinced the Djarn were involved. I had denied him, and had ignored him when he’d asked for help, which maybe was a mistake. In hindsight, I should have known better and should have trusted him. He was the king’s chief dragon mage, after all.
The dragon seemed to believe there was some way out here. Maybe there was some hidden entrance, some way for us to escape.
The voice sounded closer.
I clutched the metal vase up against my chest, holding on to it, and could feel the power stored within it—it circled from the dragons and into the vase where it was stored.
There was a soft scraping sound along the hallway.
I turned back to the dragon. “How did you come through here?”
The dragon breathed out, a stream of flame streaking from his nostrils, but nothing more. Heat surged within him. It was subtle, but as it burst outward, I could feel just how he used that heat to connect to me and the other dragons.
I had to find a way to hold back the others coming toward us. Did I dare use something to prevent them from getting through here?
I pulled on the power, suppressing it deeply, and began to send spirals of flame out. They knew I was here, along with the dragon, so there was no point in maintaining any semblance of secrecy. I sent spirals streaking away from me, streamering toward the wall behind me, and looped them together, forming a pattern. It was more complicated than anything that I had tried before, but necessity forced me to attempt something new. As I bound that fire to the wall, I created a crisscrossing weave that would hopefully prevent Jerith and his accomplice from getting too close to me before I was ready for them.
I pushed that power out, and found that the other dragons helped in some way. They added a layer of power to what I was doing, and the combined effort allowed me to hold the power much easier than I would’ve been able to otherwise.
It bought me time.
I turned to the dragon, holding my hand out. He held my gaze, and in that moment, I couldn’t help but feel as if there was some understanding that passed between us. “I need you to help me find my way out of here,” I said to the dragon. “Help me figure out how they brought you in so that we can backtrack and go out,” I said.
There came a faint surge from the dragon.
Still, the power was pouring out of the dragon and into the metal vase, flowing in a way that suggested to me the dragon was not completely freed of that influence. Whatever the Djarn had done, whatever connection they formed between the dragon and the vase, had put this dragon in danger.
The dragon roared softly.
“You’re not helping,” I said.
I opened myself to the energy of the dragons, feeling for the way power cycled through the others, through me, and felt a shift. Accompanying it was a strange fluttering nearby.
A section of the wall was a little bit different. Darker, perhaps.
I pressed my hand up against it and felt a distant surge probe through me from what I assumed was the green dragon. Then I realized that the green dragon was only a conduit—this surge came from the yellow-scaled dragon in the forest.
It was as if the yellow-scaled dragon knew exactly what this was and what to do. The power flowed out of me, slamming into the wall, forming a pattern of circles along its surface; power spooled into the pattern until it began to glow. As it did, it took on the heat and energy of the dragon, a sizzling sort of heat that built until something shimmered.
A doorway.
As it formed, the power continued to build, pressing into it until something shifted and the door opened.
My breath caught.
Behind me, more and more pressure built. I motioned for the dragon, urging him ahead of me. He proceeded through the doorway but got stuck. I pushed on him.
“You had to have gotten through here one time,” I said.
Only when he had come through here before, he must’ve been smaller. In the time I’d been around the dragon, I’d felt he had increased in size, almost as if he were swelling with power. It had to be the connection to the other dragons that had enlarged him.
I pulled some of his power out. The dragon cried out, a soft and mournful sound, but I had to pull more of it into myself. Even as I did, I wasn’t going to be strong enough. I didn’t have enough stores to hold that energy.
But the other dragons who were connected to us did.
I shifted the energy, cycling it to the green dragon and the golden-scaled dragon—when I did, there was a pulling of power, and it held. The dragon slipped forward.
I chased after him.
As soon as I did, the barrier behind me exploded.
I staggered through the door and turned, shifting some power against it, and it closed. I attempted to create a seal over the door, but the dragon was running off into the darkness, and I didn’t want to lose him.
We needed to warn the king that the Djarn were not only trying to steal the dragons, but they were preparing for an attack.
21
The tunnel had stretched an impossible distance, leaving me jogging for nearly an hour before it ended in a rocky hillside surrounded by trees. I stepped out to find the dragon curled up around the base of the cavern, resting. He had moved quickly through the cave, far more quickly than I could; after a while, I had pulled upon some power, hoping to ensure I was heading in the right direction, but I hadn’t been able to draw on enough of it to light up the tunnel all the way to the end. Eventually, the dragon had disappeared from me, leaving me wondering if I was going to lose him altogether.
The afternoon air in the forest was cold and cool, and there was a hint of dampness in the air—and a hint of energy, unsurprisingly. I looked at the dragon and could feel he was tired.
That was new. When I had worked with the dragons before, I had been aware of their power, but nothing more than that.
I touched him on his side and he woke with a start, turning his massive brown head toward me, flames beginning to erupt from his nostrils before calming. I pushed power through him, connecting to the other dragons, drawing a bit more power to him to feed him. As I did, I realized something. The connection might be helpful to this dragon, but it was probably sapping the strength of both the green dragon and the yellow-scaled dragon.
I had to figure out how to destroy the vase. If I didn’t, the dragons would be depleted of power and all that energy would fill the vase—and I had no idea what else would happen then.
It was even more reason for me to find Thomas.
“You need to disappear into the forest,” I said to the dragon. “Follow . . .” I thought about what the dragon could do, whether it would be safer for me to bring him back to the city and to the dragon pens, then I decided that would be a mistake. That would only alert Jerith and whomever he was working with to the fact that I was responsible for sneaking the dragon away. Right now, I had to hope that he had no idea who had been responsible.
The dragon rumbled.
“You can follow this dragon,” I said, holding on to the yel
low-scaled dragon’s connection, pulling it closer, shifting the dragon’s bond to me onto the other dragon. As I did, I could feel the energy coming to us, and I could feel the way their bond had formed; they linked together so that the yellow-scaled dragon created a draw through this dragon.
The dragon got to his feet, then slipped off into the trees. I watched until he disappeared altogether. Even as he did, I could still feel him, could feel the power of him, but more than that, I could feel the way that his energy was cycling through the others and also into the vase.
Distantly, I was aware of the weave that I’d formed inside of the tunnel shattering.
That was my signal to leave.
As I neared the city, the draw of the dragon pen calling to me, I noticed a mournful note in the air. It was the howl of the mesahn. It was close enough that I could practically feel the creature coming.
The aching irritation stayed with me. I had thought helping the dragon would take care of it, but it hadn’t.
Other dragons.
The voices had mentioned five.
I had only freed one.
If that were why I felt the irritation, then I had to find the other four dragons.
I didn’t have to wait long before one of the mesahn appeared. He prowled forward, dappled brown fur slipping into the shadows, making it difficult to see him, as if he were camouflaged by the forest itself. There was something familiar about the mesahn. Perhaps it wasn’t so much the mesahn but the pressure that pushed against me—pressure I felt in a way that I had never felt from the mesahn before—or perhaps it was simply that I had seen the dragon kill one of the mesahn.
“Shouldn’t you be in classes?”
I spun. I had already begun lacing power together, separating my hands, creating a weave of energy that bound between them, then lashed out.
Manuel was there, and he spun off to the side, avoiding my sudden turn of power.
I tamped the energy down deeper inside of me, then released some of it back into the dragons I had bonded to.
“Manuel,” I said, looking past him and toward the deeper part of the forest where the tunnel had let out. “I’m sorry. You startled me.”
He looked at my hands, the power that crackled from them, and a hint of a smile curled his lips. His face was lean, and a bit of dirt smudged under the corner of one eye. He was dressed in a brown jacket and pants that blended into the forest when he stepped near the trunk of a tree. “You’ve gained far more control than the last time I saw you.”
I looked past him, still staring into the distance. Was that somebody coming toward me? I could feel the power out there pressing upon me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I needed to keep moving so that I didn’t have to deal with whatever Jerith might do.
Having Manuel here was a bit of a relief though. If nothing else, Manuel would offer me a level of protection. I could share with him what had been going on.
“I’ve been studying with Thomas Elaron,” I said.
Manuel’s gaze lingered on my hands, and I could feel something pushing on me. That had to be Jerith coming from behind me.
“Thomas?”
I shook my head. “Before you say anything, I know the rumors about him. I think he was on to something.”
Manuel frowned. “What do you mean?”
“He thinks the Djarn are responsible for stealing dragons.”
“And you now think the same?”
I glanced past him again. “I told you about the Djarn that surrounded me during my testing. And now I’ve found something, Manuel. There was a dragon held beneath the Academy.”
Manuel frowned again. “Why would there be a dragon there?”
“That’s just it. I don’t really know. I detected something and went after it.”
Manuel smiled slightly. “You detected it?”
“You don’t have to believe me, but I found a dragon trapped in a room beneath the Academy and I freed him.”
“You freed a dragon? You understand how that sounds, don’t you?”
I hesitated, looking over to Manuel before shaking my head. “It wasn’t quite like that. I didn’t free the dragon to release him. I freed the dragon from one of the instructors at the Academy. I think he was working on behalf of the Djarn.” I held out the vase and Manuel looked at it. “This is Djarn writing. I recognized it because I’d seen it back in Berestal. I told you about my friend’s father who traded with the Djarn. Some of their items had writing like this on it.”
Manuel held the vase for a moment before turning it, tracing his finger over the letters, then he handed it back to me. “Are you sure about this?”
“The only thing I’m sure about is what I’ve heard and found. There are other dragons throughout the city getting drained in the same way this one was.”
Manuel pressed his lips together, frowning deeply. “We need to alert the king.”
“I think that was what Thomas tried to do, but when he did, the Sharath had argued with him about it.” There was more pressure upon me, and it was getting closer. That meant whoever had captured the dragon—maybe Jerith—was getting near. “Listen, Manuel. I don’t know how much time we have left. I know there are other dragons in the city getting drained. When I overheard the conversation between who I think was Jerith—”
“Jerith? Jerith Isanth?”
“Yes. Why?”
Manuel turned, looking behind me; he whistled something softly and the mesahn went darting off into the forest. He turned back to me. “Something isn’t quite adding up,” he said to me.
“I know, but I don’t have much time. These other dragons are in danger.”
“They’re captured. That doesn’t mean they’re in danger.”
“I think it does. I felt what was happening to this dragon—the way power was pouring out of it and into the vase, as if they were trying to empty the dragon of its power. If they do that to the others, they’ll destroy them.” I looked over to Manuel, holding his gaze. “There aren’t that many dragons. They are a precious resource to the kingdom to keep us safe. If we have to deal with the Vard and now the Djarn”—and whomever Elaine had been working with—“we’re going to need as many dragons as possible to defend the kingdom.”
Manuel watched me for a long moment before shaking his head. “I think you’ve learned more than just one thing in your time within the city,” he said. “Do you think you could find these dragons?”
I hadn’t been able to before, though I’d looked.
Now . . .
I knew what that irritation felt like.
That was what I could follow.
“If they’re within the city, I should be able to uncover them.”
“Good. I’ll go to the king, then. I’ll report what you shared with me, and we can get ready for a possible attack.”
“Be careful, Manuel. The Sharath seemed as if he were really against the idea of the Djarn being involved in any way, and it makes me wonder . . .”
Manuel frowned at me slightly. “What makes you wonder?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You really have learned a bit more in your time here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Only that there are layers within politics. It’s not always straightforward. You would do well to keep that in mind.” He glanced behind him, muscles in his jaw clenching a moment. “Get going. If you have only limited time, find these dragons and rescue them. We need to stop whatever is taking place.”
“We need to stop the Djarn from attacking,” I corrected him.
“Perhaps,” Manuel said. With that, he spun and started off before pausing and turning back to me. “I’m going to need this.” He grabbed the vase from me. “The king is going to need to see this as proof.”
I nodded. “Take it. I have to find others anyway.”
Manuel left me, and I stood in the forest for a moment before realizing I no longer felt the pressure of Jerith pushing
on me. I hadn’t felt it ever since the mesahn had gone streaking off into the trees. Manuel had chased him away.
I was tired from my night out with Natalie the night before, and could feel the other dragons, the faint fading energy that flowed out from them, leaving me with an awareness of how that power shifted, drawn toward the vase. I tried to pull it back, shoving it toward the other dragons, and realized I could control it, if only for a little while. It would take focus on my part, and doing so meant I would be limited in my other abilities.
It might be necessary though. For the dragons to maintain the strength they needed, I might need to continue my effort so they could withstand whatever was taking place. As I made my way through the forest, there was something more I thought I could do. I needed Thomas’s help.
There was one way I could get it.
He might be distant, far too distant for me to reach, but not so much that I couldn’t feel for his connection to the dragon. That was what I needed to latch on to, the power I needed to find. I could focus on his dragon as I had felt it before. Could I somehow signal to the dragon?
Maybe I didn’t have to. The other dragons could do that for me.
I closed my eyes. His dragon was faint, distant from me. I imagined Thomas circling over the forest as he hunted for the Djarn. Using the connection I shared with the dragons, I let power flow out from me. It was a signal. Nothing more than that.
There was nothing else for me to do but wait. Get to the city. Figure out what I needed to do next. Find the other dragons. Trust that Manuel would reach the king and convince him.
I reached the edge of the city, the dragon pens in the distance. The green dragon was there, pressed up against the bars of the pen, looking at me. There was almost something in his eyes that looked as if he understood what I was doing and what help I might need. If only I could release the green dragon to help me with my hunt, but I feared that if I did that, it would attract the wrong kind of attention.
My gaze was drawn to the Academy. I should be there, studying, working with others, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to find these dragons—and until I did, there was nothing else I was willing to do.
The Betrayed Dragon (Cycle of Dragons Book 2) Page 23
