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The word filled my mind. Exploded into harsh reality as I stared up at the terrible beauty of it.

My focus sharpened on its talon-like fingers, at the shreds of Tamsyn’s cloak tangled there, and my stomach rebelled. Bile rose in my throat, and it was all I could do to stop from being sick.

Its face shimmered like firelight as it watched me with an intensity I took for hunger. I braced myself for a torrent of flame. The firestorm did not come.

Shaking with rage, I nocked my arrow and aimed, ready to let loose on this monster, this merciless killer. It had incinerated Arkin and taken Tamsyn, leaving only remnants of her clothing.

Those golden eyes blinked once, and then it vanished, soaring off into the sky.

My arrow fired after the creature, missing—not that it would have done much good. My arrow was simply an arrow. Long had been the day since we’d needed scale-tipped arrows.

It was gone.

Chest heaving, legs braced apart, I watched it, a bright point in the sky, until it faded from sight.

Fury and shock and a whole host of emotions seethed over my crawling skin.

The dragon was back. Or rather, it had never left.

First my parents. Then Arkin. And now Tamsyn.

My wife.

It felt as though a limb had been severed from my body. The distress I felt over that... over losing her, was knee-buckling. Astonishing in its fierceness. I’d only just found the girl, only begun to contemplate that she might be someone I wanted to keep... that she might not be the princess I set out to obtain for myself, but she was more, better than anything I had imagined... the hand in the dark that I could reach for.

Staring where the dragon had once filled the sky, I vowed vengeance.

I would find it. Hunt it to the ends of the earth. Nowhere would it be at peace. Nowhere would it be safe from me.

I would kill it dead.

Part IV

The Dragon

21

Yrsa

The Crags

Twenty-one years ago...

THEY WERE DYING. NOT TODAY. NOT TOMORROW. BUTeventually.

Eventually.

That made the end sound as distant and elusive as the fog circling above them. And yet death would be sooner than eventually for some.For most.

So many were already gone. Too many.

If she were honest with herself... the days were numbered for her pride. And yet being honest with herself was not something Yrsa was very good at doing. Not anymore. Not in a very long time. Not since the Threshing had begun all those years ago.

She preferred to hope and dream of a future. A future where she did more than cling to existence like it was the last leaf of fall on the branch. A future where she thrived. She still hoped they could go back to the times depicted on the walls of their dens and chronicled in their histories. A time when dragonkind flourished, when they teemed in the sky like banners in the wind, when their troves were overflowing with gemstones.

She had been a young dragon when the Threshing began. Little more than a hatchling. Just a dragonling when her lifehad become a haze of war. Blood and fire. Death and smoke. Dragons falling from the sky like rain. Entire prides wiped out in a single day.

She was over five hundred years old. She’d spent centuries committed to the fight, devoting herself to surviving the Threshing. Always on the move. Hiding. Striking like a serpent in the grass. Doing her best to use her talents and protect members of her pride from those hunting them. It was exhausting work. Ceaseless struggle. But it was the only thing to be done. Do or die. Die or do.