The water of Life. Jhinn talked about it all the time, and she was seeing it, wasn’t she? Just like the waters between worlds, this water in the egg had sustained that baby dragon all this time.
As the young dragon rose into the air, flapping sopping wet wings in the dusky night, and sending a rain of life water over the streets around them, a silver beam shot up from the egg and expanded until it dwarfed the city, shining more brightly than the sun.
A portal – identical to the one they’d seen in the mountains – opened where the egg had been. Water that was not water poured out of it in a flood, washing over her and her dead. The flow was so powerful that she scrambled to get out of the flow and to the space of air under it, as under a waterfall, pulling Tamerlan with her. She couldn’t give him up. She wouldn’t. She wrapped her arms around his remains, clasping his face to her chest under the waterfall. She let the water wash all around her as she shivered under it. She should get out. She should go find Jhinn. She should do something.
But all she could do was shiver under the waterfall and stare at all this supposed life with her one good eye while the one person whose life was precious to her lay lifeless in her arms.
Water washed over and over and over them until they were soaked with it. The scent of it so overpowering that it was all she could smell now. It smelled of spring rains and turned earth, of growing grass and spring breezes. It smelled of new life.
She gasped in a breath of it.
Tamerlan moaned.
Marielle almost dropped him as a gasp caught in her throat. She began to shake, her teeth chattering together. She didn’t dare look at his face. Hope was too much for the despairing. It broke you and broke you until you heard what you wanted to hear.
She risked a glance at his face, afraid to look and feel disappointment stab through her again.
His eye fluttered open.
Oh.
Oh, sweet dragons.
Her breathing was so fast she couldn’t catch a breath. Her heart thudding in her chest like a dozen horses racing.
She clung to him, gasping until she could speak.
“Tamerlan? Is that ... you?”
His smile as he looked up at her was radiant.
She choked back a sob, and now she was really crying, her hands caressing his face and her breathing ragged as she her words tumbled out.
“You’re alive, you’re alive!”
“Marielle,” he said, but whatever else he might have said, she didn’t know, because her lips sought his and she kissed him, channeling all her fears and hopes, all the desperate longings she had that this was really true into that one kiss. She clung to him, her hand that had been holding them in place snaked around to hold his waist instead, drawing him closer as she frantically kissed him.
Maybe she had gone mad, too. Maybe none of this was real. But if it was a dream, she never wanted to wake up. If it was madness, she didn’t want a cure.
They washed out from under the falls, sweeping through the rushing portal water, tangled in each other’s embrace and then flying through the air.
She fell on something hard but padded, and Jhinn’s frustrated curse finally brought her head up.
“Still not dead, boy?” he said roughly as she drew back from Tamerlan just enough to look at him again.
She didn’t care what Jhinn thought. She didn’t care about anything beyond this moment.
She let her eyes run all over Tamerlan. The bloody wound at his side – and the other one through his ribs – were gone. The fabric of his clothing was still torn and stained there, but the flesh was whole. She touched her hand to it in wonder, words spilling from her lips.
“I’m so sorry, Tamerlan. I’m so sorry. I had to do it. I – ”
He kissed her again and cut off her words, laughing when he pulled back, his face filled with assurance and love.
“You saved me, Marielle. You saved us all.”
“But I put a sword through your chest!” she protested. “How are you still alive?”
“I told you,” Jhinn said reverently. “Water is life. And the water flowing from that portal brought him back to life. And now look. Stop kissing and thinking you’re both so amazing and look.”
Yan was circling above Xytexyx, the new hatchling at his side. They looped tight circles around the city four times while the people gasped in amazement. Marielle gasped right with them, but her hands found Tamerlan’s and her fingers threaded through his. She wasn’t willing to let go of him. Not now, not ever, not even for the sight of a lifetime.
She stole little glances at his face to watch his reaction and felt heat creep over her whenever her gaze brushed over his doing the same.
Yan and the hatchling took a final loop and then dove through the moon-like portal and were lost in the bright light. Around them, the city roared, a great cheer rising up from thousands of throats.
We leave you now to join the others between the stars.
Marielle held her breath and then the portal began to close and the water started to flow into it instead of out of it. Jhinn pedaled frantically to the nearest canal lip. And pointed to it as the gondola crashed against the stone.
“This is where you get out,” he said, tension in every word. “I need to go through before it closes.”
Marielle gaped at him, but Tamerlan was quick to nod, dragging Marielle out of the gondola to the shore.
“Thank you, my friend,” he said sincerely to Jhinn, catching him in a quick embrace. “For everything.”
Jhinn caught Marielle’s eye with a smile on his lips.
“Redemption,” he said, simply. “All is forgiven, I think. For both of us.”
And then he was angling the gondola to the sucking water being pulled back into the portal. He leaned forward, pedaling hard, his eyes fixed on the gap ahead. The little craft sped upward into the falls while the people around them gasped. Jhinn had to duck low as the portal nearly closed on him, but he made it. He turned, finally, and she could just see him wave to them, winking as the portal shut, the light extinguished and darkness descended in the city of Xytexyx.
It was done.
No more Legends.
No more Dragons.
Epilogue: Gifts Make a Giver
Tamerlan
Sometimes, on days like this, when everything was happy, he wondered if he’d really been raised from the dead or if this was the life after. Because if this turned out to be what came after, then he wouldn’t be surprised. Because it was perfect.
His mind was gloriously free. So free, and so quiet, that sometimes when no one else was around, he wept with the sheer relief of it. His body was his own. His mind was his own. If he did something wrong, it was only his own choices to blame. If he did something right ... well, he’d done a lot right. And he’d do a lot more right yet.
Because that was the beauty of life. As long as you were breathing, every minute you had left, was a minute to make the right choice. A minute to save someone else. A minute to treasure what you had.
“Tam!” a little voice called, and he looked down to see Sabrin holding up one of his brown rabbits in his little hands, his eyes very grave. “Can you hold Mr. Acorn while I go and play.”
“Of course I can,” Tamerlan said, gathering the fluffy rabbit into his arms and tussling Sabrin’s hair as the child ran to join his friends kicking a whicker around in the long dirt street.
Their streets didn’t have gondolas and canals anymore. And every time that Tamerlan walked up and down the peculiarly straight, dusty streets, his heart would feel a little pang at the reminder that they were the poorer for the lack of them. He’d never see Jhinn again, never sleep in the bottom of a boat or brew tea over a swinging brazier in a boat. The lack of canals reminded him of that every day.
Whenever the moon was full in the sky, Tamerlan always found himself pausing and staring at it and remembering when the boy from the water had gone up to live forever in the space between the stars, through a portal that looked like
the moon.
But Etienne had been right to order the streets be made broad and straight. With all the traffic coming into the City of Velendark from the mountains and the sea, and the landholds around the city, even these wide streets were hardly wide enough.
The former Lord Mythos had named the city after himself – of course. Just like Allegra had named her city Spellspinner. And though the cities were friendly, they disputed the details of how to split the Dragonblood Plains almost as often as their founders disputed things. And they made up again just as quickly. Tamerlan was fairly sure that Etienne was in Spellspinner as often as he was in Velendark, though he only saw the ruler occasionally when Marielle convinced him to join her for a party in the brand new palace, or when he had to go and ask Etienne for funding for the orphanage. The Lord Mhythos always gave Tamerlan what he asked for with a look in his eye that made Tamerlan’s heart freeze. No one else on the Dragonblood Plains knew who he was. And Marielle didn’t care. But Etienne knew and he would never forget. He watched Tamerlan like you might watch a dragon sleeping beneath your city who could rise at any time. And he always said yes, as if he were wary about saying no.
He shivered. His hands still twitched sometimes, thinking of power and his lungs longed for the smoke of the spice. Because although they’d slain the Legends they knew about, Tamerlan wasn’t entirely convinced that there weren’t more across the Bridge. And if he ever slipped – if he ever ground up that recipe of spices again – he might call new Legends and ruin everything. Marielle had tried to give him a mortar and pestle for Summernight – not the same Summernight as they used to have. They gave gifts on this Summernight and Etienne gave a speech about wrong assumptions and heroism in honor of Marielle. And most importantly no one was slaughtered. Tamerlan had hidden the pestle and mortar in the cellar, but a few nights later he’d gone down there, hands twitching and mind racing, wanting him to blend the spice and call the Legends. Instead, he’d taken the fine items, shoved them in a sack and tossed them in the river. Never again.
He stood and stared so often at the moon or at the river that the children of Waters of Life Orphange sometimes called Tamerlan ‘Moonman.’ And he didn’t mind that at all.
There were forty-two children in the big house. He’d gathered them one by one from the ruins of the old cities and the gutters of the refugee camps. Children with no homes or families left. Children who’d had no hope – until now. They’d been reborn into a new hope, just like him. And he loved every one of them for it.
And most days, when Marielle came home from her day as Captain of the Velendark City Scenters, she brought another child with her. Even after a year, there were still refugees and orphans trickling into the new cities. All of them looking for a place to call home again. All of them needing someone to care about them. And for once in his life, Tamerlan’s big heart wasn’t a hinderance.
He turned at the sound of a low laugh and saw Marielle lowering her face-veil to smile at him, the patch over her eye matched her smart leather uniform.
“How is Mr. Acorn today?” she asked with a look at the rabbit and a smirk that made her face alive and vibrant.
“He seems fine, Captain Zi’fen,” Tamerlan said, meeting her smirk with a soft look of affection. “How is our fine city?”
“Getting finer,” Marielle said. “If we can sort out this dispute between he Alchemists and the Librarians over who gets the haul of books we found in a library that fell from H’yi’s back into a swamp to the west of here.”
Tamerlan laughed. “Any good books left over?”
Marielle pulled a hand from behind her back. She was holding a small leather tome entitled, Birds of the Dragonblood Plains.
“This particular book went missing from the stash,” she said with a grin. “I thought maybe you could take care of it for a while. It would be a shame if the Librarians or the Alchemists tore it in their fight to keep all the books for themselves.”
And after that poor Mr. Acorn had to fend for himself in the grass around their feet as Tamerlan pulled his wife into his arms and very thoroughly kissed her, wondering again at how everyone could say that magic had left the world when every day seemed so richly magical to him.
Behind the Scenes:
USA Today bestselling author, Sarah K. L. Wilson loves spinning a yarn and if it paints a magical new world, twists something old into something reborn, or makes your heart pound with excitement ... all the better! Sarah hails from the rocky Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario – learning patience and tenacity from the long months of icy cold – where she lives with her husband and two small boys. You might find her building fires in her woodstove and wishing she had a dragon handy to light them for her
Sarah would like to thank Harold Trammel, Julie Thomas, and Eugenia Kollia for their incredible work in beta reading and proofreading this book. Without their big hearts and passion for stories, this book would not be the same.
Sarah has the deepest regard for the talent of her phenomenal artists – Francesca Baerald who designed the gorgeous map for this series and Lius Lasahido and his team at Polar Engine who created the gorgeous cover art that accompanies this book. Without their work, it would be so much harder to show off this story the way it deserves!
www.sarahklwilson.com
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