“It is only the heir of Mer who can close it again,” he said gently. “That’s you, Marielle. We need you. Please don’t give up.”
“You don’t understand,” she whispered, putting her weary head in her hands. “The dragon here is dead. But we aren’t free. Yan senses another somewhere.”
“We’ll find it.”
“It could be anywhere,” she protested. She felt like there were glass shards in her chest, cutting her with every breath, tearing her apart with any movement at all. “Anywhere. We’ll never find it in time.”
“In time for what?”
“To save Tamerlan! To free your people. To do what we promised to do.”
Jhinn was silent for a long time.
“Marielle, we can only do what we can. But I think you can go a little further. Maybe just for today. And then you can think about it again tomorrow. Can you keep going for today, Marielle?”
Could she? She felt like she couldn’t keep going at all. But she pulled her head from her hands and stood up. She’d gotten that far. Could she go just a little further?
She looked down at Tamerlan, chained and delirious and her lower lip began to tremble. She had to try. For him. For them all.
“Can you help me get him into the boat?” Jhinn asked. “You can’t carry him, and I don’t think he can walk.”
Marielle nodded and focused on the work of lifting, rolling and dragging Tamerlan into the gondola. When they were done, she leaned against him, hugging him as she gasped for breath. He was heavy. And so were the chains binding him.
“The dragon says he lined up our canals with the canals of Xytexyx. If we let the water out of the dam in a waterway with a straight shot downhill, we have a good chance of reaching their river, and getting into Xytexyx.”
Jhinn nodded soberly as she climbed into the gondola and kicked off from the canal ledge.
She just had to keep on going and keep on breathing. One step at a time.
They would find the other dragon. They would figure out how to destroy Ram’s avatar – wherever it was. They would take it one step at a time. The first step, was tearing apart the dam. And she could do that. She just had to keep on hoping, keep on pushing forward, keep on refusing to allow anything else to thwart her will.
A pain blossomed in her chest – dull and soft, but aching – right over the Windrose.
Perfect timing.
She groaned.
29: Fevers and Nightmares
Tamerlan
Nightmares filled his mind. He was Ram the Hunter, carefully trapping the last of the beasts – the one that had already fled to the other side of the world. He was laying a trap for it on the rocks beside the sea.
He was Tamerlan, carefully compounding a tincture. He weighed his sulfur carefully on a pair of brass scales.
He was a dragon, sleeping. Pain was all he could feel, his eyes sealed shut, his wings and legs held tightly in place.
He gasped. Marielle’s face swam into view. She was wiping his brow, adjusting his eyepatch. Oh, Marielle. She was so gloriously beautiful in the sunlight. He’d never before had a person he knew he could trust absolutely, like he trusted Marielle. She would always do what was right. Always. And when the time came, she would slay him.
A wave of pain blossomed in his side – old pain. Pain he’d been living and breathing in constantly, he tried to adjust to ease it, but his arms were pinned by heavy chains.
Good.
Why was that good? He couldn’t remember.
You’re a fool.
He was a fool. He remembered that.
She doesn’t love you.
That was for the best. He didn’t want to hurt her. He wanted her to go on and live her life and be all the beautiful things he knew she would be. Someone’s wife. Someone’s mother. Someone’s friend. Someone’s protector, striding through the streets like the hammer of the Legends.
He could feel the smile on his lips.
Someone who isn’t you.
Good. That was good, too.
And then the blackness took him, and he was Ram again.
I will kill her. I will kill them all.
Good. Good.
The dragons will pay.
I will make them pay in pain forever.
He was a dragon.
He was paying in pain.
30: Into Xytexyx
Marielle
If she had to guess, she wouldn’t have expected that the people on the other side of the ocean celebrated Springhatch, and yet their decorations put the Dragonblood Plains to shame.
As the gondola shot out of Xytexyx into the mouth of the river, where it flowed into the sea, they could see the grand city of Xytexyx ahead of them, rising up on the edge of the sea cliffs in glorious beauty. Every surface of the rocks was coated in thick green vegetation, and every rock towered above the sea as if the sea had slowly slipped lower, but the rock had remained firm and unmovable.
A fleet of ships were anchored just out from the river mouth and boats filled the river and the open bay – fishing boats, trading boats, passenger dinghies, and wide river boats. There were no family boats, though there were sleek gondolas in the river, filled to almost overflowing with people.
“There’s the military forming up the shore,” Etienne said sharply, pointing to where men and women thickly covered in tattoos rushed out of stubby passenger boats and onto the land, harpoons in hand. Each group of about fifty was led by a single Ki’Squall and all of their eyes were on Yan and on the people running out of it as if their lives depended on it – which they did. “It will take them all afternoon to find and question the survivors coming from the city – maybe longer if people choose to hide instead of fleeing the dragon’s back.”
“They won’t,” Marielle said. “Not after the past three days.”
Etienne had helped them tear down the dam and shoot out of the city. Marielle was a little surprised by that, but Etienne’s face had been grim when he met them there.
“We need to be ahead of the news,” he’d said without preamble as if he’d thought this whole thing through. “The city leaders will be scared and intimidated by the arrival of a new dragon. They’ll send their military forces to take the city and round up the refugees within. The population in the city will be terrified. We need to be out of the city before they arrive if we don’t want to be caught up in a sea of interviews and then quietly stashed somewhere.”
“I have a letter from the Captain we met in Choan,” Marielle said. “It asks them to give us access to the dragon.”
“Good,” Etienne had said as he covered Tamerlan with a tarp. Tamerlan moaned softly, but his eyes never even opened. “But even with a letter, our captive looks suspicious.”
Marielle nodded at that, but as she straightened and forced herself to remain calm, she delivered the news. “The dragon here is already dead. But there is another – somewhere. And I don’t know where.”
The disappointment in Etienne’s eyes matched hers perfectly. He froze for just a moment, inhaled and then nodded.
“Any guesses?”
“My Windrose is hurting again. It’s probably leading us to the dragon.”
“It led her to the guards gathering in Choan,” Jhinn said quietly. “I learned that it’s better to listen to it.”
Etienne was already nodding. “Tell us if it gets more specific.”
He ripped the board out of the dam – the one they’d placed just in that place so you could remove it and it would flood all the canals – and then they were shooting the rapids on the forefront of the flood of water, and racing down the canals and out into the sea.
I’ll give you a little time, Yan said in Marielle’s mind. I need the rest, anyway.
And in less than an hour from when Yan landed, they were off his back, out of the city of Yan and in this strange river, dodging between ships and boats and the terrified looks of strangers as they angled toward the city. Marielle patted her belt pouch and hoped that the officials in the to
wering city above them would listen to the letter and let them in.
The city called to her, pulling at the windrose on her chest and demanding that she enter it. All she could do was hope that her answers lay within.
“Sit low in the boat,” Jhinn suggested. “I look like the people here, but you both look like foreigners.”
Around them, people in other boats pointed at them and called out in thickly accented voices. But they spoke the same language despite the accent. Marielle wouldn’t have guessed that was true.
Marielle squatted down beside Tamerlan, lifting the edge of the tarp to check on him. He drowsed fitfully, jerking and moaning, his head as hot as a forge. There was nothing that could be done for him. Her only hope was that she could find Ram’s avatar in time to kill it and free his mind.
“I think you should take the chains off,” she whispered to Etienne. “We aren’t going to be able to march him around the city with them on and he isn’t even thinking straight – not with this fever. I doubt he could attack us.”
Etienne looked skeptical. “I wouldn’t underestimate him, if I were you. Even raving mad and almost dead, he can do an enormous amount of damage.” He looked around them at the hostile, concerned foreigners and sighed. “I see your point.”
He ducked under the tarp and a few moments later she heard the sound of metal sliding against metal as he dragged the chains off Tamerlan. He resurfaced as they were nearing the locks that led up to the city.
“I bound his hands behind his back with rawhide. At least that should hold for long enough to draw a sword if he decides to attack.”
Who would have thought a few months ago that the ruler of Jingen would be so nervous around an alchemist’s apprentice? And who would have thought she would be in love with one even after he tried to kill her and then snapped her mother’s neck?
She swallowed down the horror of those thoughts. That wasn’t Tamerlan. That was Ram.
And yet, sometimes it was hard to sort through exactly how complicated all of this was. She shook her head and kept her gaze forward.
Stay focused, Marielle.
She ignored how her breath hitched whenever she thought of Tamerlan. She had to keep hoping. She had to keep trying.
Above them, eggs on the ends of ribbons hung across the entry to the locks. They were laced on the railings of ships, painted so brightly that they hardly looked real.
As they approached the choke of the part of the river that fed into the locks, they joined dozens of other small boats seeking entry and Marielle was relieved to see that the styles of boats and the dress of the people entering the city were varied and strange looking. Good. They would not be the only visitors to the city. Perhaps, they would even slip within the gates.
Unfortunately, she could smell apprehension and anxiety in the air around them as people’s gazes kept creeping back to Yan lying near their city. Low murmurs and lined brows were everywhere. Fair enough. Dragons didn’t just show up and fall asleep next to your city. These people would be crazy if they weren’t anxious about it.
Jhinn kept them in the center of the mass of boats, as if he could keep hidden in plain sight.
“All boats will pass through the Offices of Inspections once they enter the city,” the operator called from the wheelhouse of the lock operator’s shed. He said it in the bored way of someone who did this a thousand times a day. Beside him, the other operator wasn’t paying attention at all, his eyes looking past them to the novelty of the dragon and the surging waves of soldiers disembarking around it.
They were waved ahead hurriedly and the small boats jostled for position to move into the lock. Jhinn sped deftly between larger boats, ignoring the curses of other boatmen.
Marielle held her breath as the water filled the lock and lifted them up. So far, so good. They spoke the same language. They used canals, too. She could do this. It was far from home, but not so far that she couldn’t find her way.
Breathe, Marielle breathe.
They rose up four levels of locks, one by one, in the middle of the jostling masses of boats. Etienne joined her in the bow, looking up tensely as they rose into the city.
“Strange how similar they are to us, and yet how different, don’t you think?” Etienne asked.
“Are they different?” Marielle asked. “It hardly even seems so.”
Etienne looked at her blandly. “I suppose you are distracted.”
The burning in her chest was intensifying. But he was right. The fashions around them, the patterns of speech – too quick in parts and drawling in others – the formal way that the lock operators spoke and moved, the lack of family boats but increase in trade vessels that were clearly foreign – it was all different. But they were still just people living in a city, with the threat of Legends and dragons hanging over their heads. And that was something she could relate to.
“I suppose you are right,” Marielle conceded as they reached the final lock, and were disgorged on the other side.
The boats around them spread out, and before them rose the solidified, dead dragon with the city built on top of it. On its back, the city rose up glorious and powerful, molding itself to scales and wings and tail, bright and bustling, straining with activity and music and bright decoration. The architecture foreign in its curves, planes, and open-topped buildings, but breathtakingly beautiful.
And at its very center, as if in celebration of the holiday, a golden egg as large as a castle was nestled, the city wrapped around it protectively.
The windrose in Marielle’s chest flared with so much heat that she stumbled.
“That’s it,” she gasped, pointing at the egg. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
31: Whisper
Tamerlan
He was clinging to consciousness.
Give in, Ram urged. But he’d bested the Legend again and his mind was his own for now – what was left of it. His thoughts felt as slippery as the fish Jhinn would throw into the gondola as he reset his lines. They leapt and jumped and when he tried to catch them, they slipped away.
He would not give in.
Give in to what?
Marielle’s face swam into view. He tried to reach up and touch her, but his hands wouldn’t move. Something bit painfully into his wrist.
“Marielle?” he croaked. His throat was dry. He saw the look of concern in her eyes and a moment later, she was pouring cold water over his lips. Just a trickle, and he could barely keep up to choke it down.
He coughed and sputtered. Gasping for air. It felt like his lungs couldn’t suck it in.
You are dying. As soon as you slip, I will have you. I can live long past the time you would die. The moment you give in, this body will be mine.
He had to warn her.
“Marielle.” It came out as a whisper, but she heard him. Her purple eyes were close to his. One of them was slowly turning a milky white.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “Lie still. Etienne is talking to the guards. He has the letter.”
“You have to hurry,” Tamerlan whispered.
“We will. We’ll get you somewhere safe.”
“No!” it was barely loud enough to hear. “Ram almost has me. I can’t hold on much longer. If he takes me over, then he will take this body forever.”
Her forehead wrinkled.
“Kill me now,” he gasped.
“I can’t,” she whispered back, looking up and around her frantically before looking down on him with tear-filled eyes. “Don’t ask me to do what I can’t.”
Maybe there were guards around. She’d mentioned guards, hadn’t she?
“Please hang on,” she whispered.
“Sunset,” he gasped, his mangled chest an aching mass of pain. “I’ll try to stay alive until sunset.”
The sun was hanging low in the late afternoon sky. He could give her that long at least – couldn’t he? He’d read stories about people surviving on will alone. He would have to do the same. At least until sunset.
“You have to know,” he whispered.
“Know what?” She put her ear to his mouth as if she could barely hear it. The touch of her skin against his lips sent shudders of happiness through him. One last kiss. One last moment of tenderness. He wanted to savor it forever, but he had to tell her.
“If I die, he’ll take my body. Ram. He won’t die, too. And then you’ll have to kill him quickly. I’m keeping him weak by being here. With me gone, he’ll be powerful again.”
She started to pull away. His strength was fading.
“Wait!” he begged and she paused. He kissed her ear and whispered. “I love you forever. Don’t be afraid to do what you must.”
Blackness took him again.
32: Egg of Dragons
Marielle
Marielle felt cold all over as Jhinn pulled away from the guard station.
“Etienne says they’re letting us into the city but they’re asking him to report to the Nine Seas Palace on our behalf. We need to report back to this guard station in one day to retrieve him or be taken into custody if they don’t like what he says on our behalf,” Marielle told Jhinn.
“And if we don’t,” Jhinn asked, and she shot him a worried look. He was going to get them taken in right now, and she couldn’t afford that!
“If we don’t, then we’ll be wanted by the City Watch, the Palace Guard and all the Gate Guards, which will make life here exceptionally difficult,” she said, trying not to snap. “Can you angle us toward that huge egg in the middle of the city?”
She was watching the sun as it sank in the sky. It was so close to the horizon. They might not even have an hour before it dipped below the horizon of the sea in the west. She licked her lips nervously. Tamerlan had sunk into oblivion after giving her his dire warning. And that had been an hour ago. They’d lost a lot of time talking to the authorities. Would they have enough time?
Bridge of Legends- The Complete Series Page 96
