Page 116

And her heart ached every time she poked her head into the sickroom and saw Ragnar seated beside the bed, head down on the edge of the mattress, the curve of his shoulders eloquent of grief. He wasn’t worried about the war, or political alliances; he wanted his alpha, and time and time again, Amelia found she hadn’t the faintest clue how to say anything that might be of comfort to him.

Now, finally, Leif was awake.

And the surgery, when she entered it, had been transformed into a necropsy theater.

The wounded had either been given private rooms upstairs, or returned to camp to drink away their pains and be comforted by comrades and camp followers. In the center of the room, several inlay tables had been pushed together to form a wide work service, and draped with old, peachy silk curtains. Atop it lay the severed head and neck of the purple drake that had tried to come last through the portal, and Colum, sleeves rolled up and hands encased in thick, leather blacksmith gloves, was methodically taking the whole thing apart, bit by bit, while Leda walked behind him with a board and scroll and quill, cataloguing his findings.

Halfway across the vast room, Amelia ran into a wall of decomposition stink; she pulled up short and clapped a hand over her nose and mouth.

Leda glanced over, the lower half of her face swathed with a white linen kerchief for the same reason. “Lovely, isn’t it?” she asked wryly, voice muffled by the makeshift mask.

Amelia drew up the collar of her tunic to serve the same purpose, and held it in place with her hand. “Found anything interesting?” she asked, as she closed the gap to join them at the side of the table.

Colum turned sideways, and dumped a double handful of sopping meat into a metal pail. It landed with a sick squelch that left Amelia’s stomach rolling. When he turned back to the table, she saw that his gloves were smeared with black. He nodded to the far end of the table, where an assortment of fine, Dale wedding china had been laid out in a row. “To begin, I compared samples from this drake with the samples you took for me from Alpha.” He moved down the table, and Amelia followed.

Alpha hadn’t appeared to be seriously wounded, but a few of the gouges from the small drakes had bent back scales and drawn blood. Amelia had carefully gathered a bit at Colum’s request. A sample that was dry, now, in a crusted black puddle in the center of one of the plates. Beside it, an identical sample.

Colum pointed to the one on the right. “This is Alpha. And this is the big one.”

“They look the same.”

“Yes. I’d imagine they’re of the same genus, if not species. Perhaps only differing breeds, like with dogs or horses.”

“Hm.”

He picked up a small stub of candle, burning low, and tilted it over the plate until the barest edge of the flame touched the dried blood.

Smoke boiled up immediately, thick, dark curls of it, along with the stink of singed hair.

“Whoa.”

Colum waved the smoke away, and coughed into his shoulder. “Quite. I’d need a larger sample size for further testing – to be sure, you understand – but from what I can tell, Alpha’s blood is flammable.”

Amelia’s brows were still up, surprise sparking in her fingertips, where she felt the phantom heat of Alpha’s smooth, too-warm neck beneath her hands each time she stroked him. “It makes sense, I suppose. They run so hot. I wonder if their stomach acid is as well, or some sort of fluid in their lungs, given they breathe fire.”

Colum nodded. “I would hypothesize as much. But, here, watch this.” He tilted the candle over the purple drake’s sample, next. “You might want to step back.”

“Oh?” she asked, and then saw why.

At first, the sample reacted as Alpha’s had: the dark curls of smoke, the smell of burned hair. But then there was a crackle, and a spark, and Colum stepped clear just before a thin jet of green flame shot upward from the plate.

“Gods,” Amelia swore, skipping back herself, hand coming up to shield her gaze from the terrible brightness of the fire. The phosphorescent green jet hissed, and shot off sparks, and the puddle of dried blood was eaten away to nothing but a lone half-curl of ash before the fire subsided. It left behind a cloud of noxious smoke, and a singed plate.

Amelia fanned the air before her face, trying to wave away the smell, which was burning her sinuses and making her eyes water. Leda joined her.

“Horrible, isn’t it? He dropped the whole candle in the first sample, and I thought the entire ballroom was going to go up.”

“So that was that smell I caught yesterday,” Amelia said, grimacing. “Gods, you could have cooked us all.” If she was a little accusatory, she blamed it on surprise.

In a dry voice, Colum said, “Clearly, this other drake’s blood is a bit more flammable.”

“Why is the firegreen?” Amelia asked.

“The most reasonable answer is that it contains traces of some metal or mineral – most likely copper or some compound of it, given the color. Much more than you would find in a human or animal,” he clarified. “This level of concentration suggests poisoning.”

“Or genetic tampering. The Sels have bred them for a purpose.”

He tipped his head in concession.