Cedric shook his head. There was no way the she-Dragon would open her defenses so quickly; she was a wild one, her scales burning brightly only spans from Ashleen. He turned to walk away, but suddenly, he stilled.
The she-Dragon lowered her head, tentatively, her nostrils drawing close to Ashleen, sniffing her. A smoke ring unfurled from the flaming muzzle and a moment later, rainbow colors refracted in the air between them as Ashleen exhaled at the same time as the she-Dragon, completing the psuche connection.
Cedric's jaw hung slack. How under the Stars had Ashleen managed it so quickly? It was the fastest psuche he had ever seen.
She turned and grinned up at him, nearly stealing his breath with her beauty. “I told you I felt that immediate connection,” she called. “I won her over. I won Sperah's trust. She's merely living up to her name.”
Ashleen had whimsically named the she-Dragon the ancient Lismarian word for spirit.
He shook his head in awe. “So you did,” he murmured. He turned to Ember and smoothed his gloves over the flaming scales before searching in one of the horses' saddlebags for a skin of water. “You took a whole lot longer to trust me with psuche, didn't you, Ember?” he asked the Dragon rhetorically, slightly annoyed by Ashleen's instant success.
The Dragon snorted, and flames licked up the dead leaves at Cedric's feet. The horse screamed and backed away, and Cedric quickly grabbed the bridle, stroking him to calm him. The gelding's eyes rolled in fright, but stood still beneath Cedric's soothing voice.
Beyond his annoyance, though, Cedric was impressed by Ashleen's instant kinship with the she-Dragon. She had pinpointed the Dragon's insecurities, her weaknesses, had identified with her and brought her into a relationship almost before Cedric could gather his scattered thoughts regarding their mission and what they needed to do next. Their time was budgeted. They were to be meeting the next army bankroll wagons north of ClarenVale on their way to the Midland Ridges by sundown in two days.
He thought sheepishly of his warning only hours ago. “You can't force a psuche connection, Ashleen,” he'd said.
“I'm not,” Ashleen had retorted, her face hardening. “There's a difference between gaining trust and forcing psuche, Cedric. If psuche comes, I would be overjoyed, but all I want right now is to show her that I won't hurt her. For her to trust me.”
Cedric sighed now as he gave the gelding one last pat. “It's never simple,” Cedric asserted as he turned to watch Ashleen with her new psuche partner again. “That's for certain.”
Ashleen ran her hands up and down the flaming scales of the she-Dragon's neck, pausing every time the creature jerked, trembling. She waited until the Dragon quieted, and then began her slow, careful strokes again. Calm descended on the two of them, their peace flooding the clearing.
Minutes later, Ashleen dusted her hands on her breeches and strode up the hill toward Cedric, shaking her head. “She doesn't think I'm boring, at any rate,” she said. “Her thoughts are clear in my head. She's tentative, still, uncertain of you, but willing to trust me.” She glanced up at Ember. “Did he have any part in getting her to trust me?”
Cedric remembered what Kinna had told him of Chennuh's aid with Luasa when Ayden was attempting to achieve psuche with her. “Aye,” he said, knowing full well that Ember had done no such thing.
Ashleen stared at him, her lips sliding up into a grin after a moment. “'Tis certain he did,” she laughed. “And Sebastian just declared peace between the Andrachens and abdicated his throne forever.”
“Not yet, anyway,” Cedric said. The thought of his uncle's throne felt as though someone had placed a grappling hook behind his stomach and yanked outward. The Amulet on his chest burned him every time a thought of it entered his mind. He touched the chain, wishing to fling it from the tallest cliff or burn it in the hottest fire, but he knew it would do no good.
It was his to destroy, a “gift” passed down from his cruel father who had degraded it, according to Kayeck and Helga. The truth of Liam's past burned its own scar inside him. To enhance his power, Liam had taken the Amulet to some trusted Seer Fey, filled it with evil taibe, further turning it from its original purpose. Now it sealed within its possessor a thirst for power, and no matter how good, how true Cedric's intentions were to rule well, the Amulet would darken and subvert those, too. Until it was destroyed, it would give him no peace.
Ashleen's perceptive gaze settled on his face, the levity of a moment before dissolving. “Cedric?” she asked quietly.
He jerked his shoulders into a shrug, refusing to answer. It did no good to burden her with his thoughts; she couldn't change anything.
She stepped closer, reaching for his arm, but then pulled back, and a sudden awareness settled between them. She glanced down at her hands and then back up at him. “I want to help; will you not tell me what weighs your mind?” She shrugged. “I—I hate to see how very blighted your spirits have become.”
Cedric swallowed, turning away, stroking Ember's nose. The Dragon huffed a ring of smoke around him. “There's nothing to be done. It is a burden I must bear. I will inherit the throne, a throne I have no wish to have, and I will be given power—power that my father and my uncle misused, power to abuse and oppress the masses, power that no man should ever have. Ever!” To his complete and utter surprise, tears clogged his throat, and his voice broke on the last word.
He looked in horror at Ashleen where she stood a span away from him. Silent tears tracked down her cheeks, and the sympathy in her black eyes was almost more than Cedric could handle.
“Ashleen,” he whispered. “I can't. I can't take the throne, or it will consume me. I will be destroyed beneath a virulent greed that will eat me from the inside out. Such darkness is in the Amulet itself; I feel it. I wrestle with it daily. You yourself have told me of my own father's callousness, of his ability to chain a four-year-old girl to his service, to kill her family because none of the rest of them could serve him. My uncle has demonstrated over and over again his megalomania, his grasping for any straws of power that may slip into his reach.” His voice sank even further along with his gaze until its weight rested on the ground. “It will take me, too.”
Ashleen's cinnamon-colored moccasins moved into view, and her rough hand cupped his cheek, her thumb rubbing the skin below his left eye. “Do you truly believe that, Cedric?”
“Believe what?” She smelled of fir and mountain streams. His fingers itched to bury themselves in her hair, to pull it to his face, and to inhale deeply, to fill him with its life-giving essence.
“That you are your father? Or your uncle? That you will throw aside all your thoughts of who you are, all your hours and days and years spent shaping the heart of you, and that you will toss it in the fire like so much chaff, to be burned in a flash and done? Cedric, the inept? Cedric, the ineffectual?”
Cedric threw his arms wide. “That's exactly what I'm afraid of! I,” he slammed his fist across his chest, “Cedric Andrachen, with all his grand intentions and ideas, will disappear behind the much more powerful bidding of the Amulet. Who am I against the Stars? Who am I against their gifts to man? I am nothing.”
“Cedric,” Ashleen captured his hands in hers. “You are everything. Everything, do you hear me? Liam came. Liam failed. Sebastian overtook, Sebastian corrupted. Cedric, your very inhibitions and your fears show that you are aware of them. The others were not. You are. You—are.” Her cheeks were shiny with tears, and she swiped her arm across her face. Her skin had turned blotchy and red. “I hate crying,” she muttered, but she couldn't say anything else.
Cedric's hands trembled, his entire body shook. He wobbled like a dry leaf on the end of its stem, blown about by the breeze, released from his moorings by a strong wind. Without thinking, he reached for Ashleen, his hands sliding around her back, pulling her toward him. He sought comfort, but it somehow became more than that as her forehead touched his chest, and then tilted back, her dark gaze on his lips.
He tried to remember all the reasons
he could not have her. Andrachen heirs would continue the dark legacy of many generations. Power-hungry monsters would sit on the throne and crush those weaker beneath them. He could not. He could not.
He couldn't help himself. He lowered his head, and his lips brushed hers, slowly, just tasting. Her fir scent trailed a heady fragrance into his lungs, and his hands tenderly cupped her cheeks. He rested his forehead against hers, a surrender. “Ashleen,” he whispered, trailing kisses along her jaw.
Her eyes were closed, and tears still leaked from the corners, slipping slowly beneath his thumbs where they touched her soft skin. After a moment, she stepped back, wiping her nose again on her sleeve, and turned, stumbling up the hill away from the Embers, away from the horses, away from him.
“Ashleen.”
She didn't turn. She strode up the leafy embankment and disappeared over the crest.
I didn't see that coming, Cedric thought, his mind still tumbling confusedly over how much he wanted her.
Ember's snort yanked his attention to the Dragon, who'd understood his thoughts.
“What are you looking at?” Cedric growled as he stared at the Dragon's derisive gaze. “I didn't see it coming.”
Ember tilted his nose forward into Cedric's chest, nearly knocking him backward, a rumble shaking his throat.
Cedric shrugged. “She needs to be alone, Ember,” he answered the Dragon's silent question. “We're both confused, and we both need time to think.”
Cedric didn't see Ashleen again until the next morning, and worry had kept him awake half the night. He'd scouted the area, telling himself it was only to be sure that none of Sebastian's patrols were making their way through the woods, but when he could not find Ashleen, he returned to the horses and the Dragons, irritated and out of sorts.
In the predawn gray, lighter than the black of the trees, he cracked his eyes at Sperah's grunt. She lay curled beside Ember.
Ashleen's silhouette walked down the hill, and she sank silently onto a stone next to the cold fire ring where Cedric had sat the entire evening before, not waiting for her, not scratching her name angrily with the blackened end of a stick on the stones surrounding the fire, not thinking of her at all.
“I'm sorry.” Her voice was soft as the early morning mists around them.
Cedric didn't move. Silence pressed, broken only by the steady breaths of the Dragons and the quiet wicker of a horse spans away. At last, he stirred. “For what?”
“For—hating you.”
The words were sharp, like nettles brushed over sensitive skin.
Cedric raised himself, his elbows digging into the ground beneath his shoulders, staring at her. “Hating me?”
She sighed and stood, approaching him and sinking to the ground beside him, facing him, her slim fingers fidgeting with a stick she'd picked up. “I—not hate, Cedric. I couldn't hate you.” She shook her head, blowing out a frustrated breath, turning her gaze to the hillcrest where the light grew brighter. “I suppose I hated myself—for f—falling in love with you when your father was the one who killed my family.”
The words repeated a refrain over and over inside Cedric's head, a steady tympanic beat that gained meaning with each repetition. Falling in love with you.
He pushed himself straighter, leaning toward Ashleen, grasping her chin and turning her so he could look directly in her eyes. “You love me?”
She blushed a deep scarlet beneath her tanned skin. “I've tried hard not to.”
Cedric's grasp on her chin tightened. “It's I, Ashleen.” His voice was rough. He cleared it. “It's I, Cedric Andrachen, son of your family's murderer and nephew of a tyrant.”
Her hand covered his, removing it from her chin, cradling it in her lap. “It is you, Cedric Andrachen, humble, loyal...” She brushed a strand of his hair from his forehead, her gaze softer and brighter than he'd ever seen it, “kind, honorable. A good man, a good King. A man I can revere for the rest of my life. A King your people can trust to lead them with justice and fairness.”
Cedric winced. “I do not see how; the way is dark before me.”
She leaned forward, her lips a mere breath from his. “Then let me guide you through.”
Cedric dug his hands into her thick, black hair, nudging her head forward, pressing his lips against her warm ones, closing his eyes, releasing thoughts of wars and kingdoms and responsibilities, simply slipping into the pleasure of her hands sliding around his back, her breath hitching in her throat, her movement as she pulled herself against him.
Ember screamed, the flames on his scales blazing in alarm.
Cedric jerked backward, reaching instinctively for his sword. Ashleen already scrambled toward the horses, seeking her bow.
Shouts echoed over the hill as Cedric gained his feet, and he flinched to the side as an arrow swished through the air, thudding into the ground behind him.
“We found you, Andrachen spawn.” The archer who had released the arrow stood tall atop the hill, nocking another arrow and pointing it at him. A commander's insignia colored his armor Lismarian silver and blue. “The mole told Sebastian of your sister's whereabouts in the Sand Flats on her way south, and now we have you—a full day's work for Sebastian's spy network. Two Andrachens will be delivered to ClarenVale tonight.”
Ember released a maelstrom of fire at the man, who ducked behind a hemlock that kindled and lit, flaring brightly into the sky for one brilliant instant before dying into smoking, black char.
“Ember! There's more!” Cedric called, but the Dragon had already snapped open his flaming wings and lit the hillside with a trench of fire, highlighting the figures that crested the hill.
Cedric swallowed. At least fifty, perhaps more, pressed forward. Another arrow thudded into the horse beside Ashleen, and the animal reared and screamed, its foreleg catching Ashleen in the side and hurling her into the trunk of a tree. She crashed to the ground with a groan. The animal twisted in agony, writhing to the ground nearby.
Cedric lurched toward her, but shouts pummeled his ears. He whirled.
At the crest of the hill on the other side, another company of soldiers, all clad in the silver and blue Lismarian livery, poured over the slopes, their shouts surrounding the company. To Cedric's horror, behind them, robed and stooped figures, at least six of them, their bright-colored hair falling in long plaits from their hoods, moved into view. As they slowly approached, more followed.
The Seer Fey songs crested in power almost immediately, and Ember's roars shook to a standstill.
“No!” Cedric shouted, his throat raw. “No, Ember! Wake up and fight!” He turned his head, but as he'd feared, the Dragon hovered on the ground, his eyes glazed over, his breath hitching in confusion. Sperah did the same.
“Ember!” It did no good. Cedric whirled once again to Ashleen and saw that she had pushed herself to her feet. She pulled her bow and quiver from the saddlebag of the dying horse. “The Seer Fey, Ashleen!” He waved his sword to the hooded creatures on the hill. “Get them first!”
He started to move, but Ashleen drew her bow, the feathered tip of the arrow behind the ear, her aim directly on him.
Her black eyes, too, had glazed over.
“No!”
“Don't move!” the Commander of Sebastian's companies called. “Cedric Andrachen, you are under arrest, you and the maid with you.”
The soldiers streamed around Cedric; he lost sight of Ashleen in the thick cluster.
The Commander approached Cedric, his gray hair and beard embedded with dirt and mulch where he'd evidently been sliding on his belly through the undergrowth to gain the surprise.
Cedric spat on the man's boots.
The Commander stiffened. “You will be taken to ClarenVale where you will be brought before King Sebastian and questioned—”
“Tortured, you mean.”
“—by an impartial panel of Lismarian subjects.”
“Impartial, indeed,” Cedric muttered.
The Commander ignored him. He turned to
the men who held Cedric's arms tightly behind his back. “Kill the remaining horses and leave the Dragons.” He nodded toward the Embers. “As yet, sovereign decree forbids the intentional slaughter of the beasts, but they're too troublesome to take with us.” He stalked back up the hill toward the Seer Fey, who still sang a steady, strong taibe over the wooded area.
Cedric's wrists were wrapped in chains, and he was pushed up the hill after the Commander. Clearing the crest and marching down the other side some distance, he found horses standing, tied to trees and roots, stamping and nervous, as they awaited the return of the soldiers.
Behind him, Cedric could still hear the Seer Fey singing. They would have to be the last to leave if they wished the Dragons to remain still until the rest were gone.
Cedric pushed at Ember's mind with his own, but a steady gray blankness kept him from entering it. His jaw clamped in frustration.
Ashleen's slender form appeared over the hill behind him. Like him, she, too, was chained, pushed along by four soldiers. One of them shoved her hard, and she stumbled. Cedric yanked his arm away, running toward the soldier who'd done it, but a heavy weight smashed into his knees, ramming him into the ground. Pain lanced his side where a pointed rock ripped a hole in his tunic, possibly his skin as well.
“Ashleen,” he gasped.
“It's no good trying to escape, Dragon-Master,” a voice said. It sounded familiar. Cedric's attention swiveled to the man who had tackled him.
“Natan?”
“In the flesh.” Natan grinned. He'd been one of Cedric's few friends in The Crossings soon after Cedric had arrived from the Rockmonster Dwellings and had begun his work in Sebastian's keeps. The lad had filled out considerably since that time.
Cedric glanced over his shoulder at Ashleen. She'd been pulled to a halt next to a horse, in wait for the Commander to return her way. Her dark gaze found his.
“You have remained with Sebastian all this time?” Cedric asked, not removing his gaze from Ashleen.
Unleash the Inferno (Heart of a Dragon Book 3) Page 21
