Page 46 of Court of Embers (Dragonesse #2)

Chapter

Twenty-Five

I met her eyes, wordlessly communicating in desperation: not a sound .

Mykah nodded, tears streaming silently, swallowing her sobs.

I waited for a few seconds that felt more like an eternity, until I was sure no sounds would burst from her, but our little draga was a professional in the art of stealth.

The tears might be flowing, but she forced her breathing into a slow, even pattern, not a single gasp or hitch to give away her presence.

I squeezed her hands tightly and released her, pointing at the ground to make sure she stayed put before padding on silent feet to the door.

I leaned in close, listening.

There it was again: a faint rustling, the click of claw on stone, and the sound of a very large pair of lungs breathing in deeply, tasting the air.

Emei was coming for us.

I moved like my muscles were made of syrup, slowly, oh so slowly lowering the bar on the door. My arms shook from the strain of the heavy wood, not allowing it to crash down, but gently nestling it into place.

Neither the bar, nor the thick wooden door, would stop her. Even sick, infected though she was, Emei was the Ascendant of this eyrie. But it might buy a few precious seconds as she sniffed her way up the stairs, following the trail of fresh meat.

I slipped back into the provisions room, motioning for Mykah to follow me. The next door led outside onto the dragon terrace, the open peak of the eyrie, with the dragon door overhead gleaming with the wide blue sky.

There was no bar on that door, only a lock I didn’t have the key for.

I took in the terrace in a swift glance: the crown of the tower was rounded, the dragon door above the only exit.

No windows, no other doors to escape. It was all icy white marble, the pale expanse broken only by the heavily-lacquered desk of the Eyrie-Master.

And, like the throne room, it had become an abattoir.

I leaned in close to Mykah, almost touching her ashen skin, and whispered low in her ear. The kind of whisper that wouldn’t carry to the sharp ears beyond the doors.

“I need you to stay brave for a while longer, and we’ll need to be fast. Emei is coming and as soon as I drag that desk over, she’ll hear us. We’re going up through the dragon door. Do you think you can climb?”

She nodded her head once.

“Then as soon as you’re up and out, go. Start climbing. Kirana and the Horde are out there; get to the forest, head east, and they’ll find you. Do you understand?”

Her wide eyes were fixed on what remained of the Eyrie-Master, and she was trembling violently, but she nodded again. “You’re coming, too?”

Her lips barely moved, and I hesitated for only a second before nodding. “I’ll be right behind you.”

I would not allow Emei to add Mykah to the pile of corpses she was nesting on. Even if I had to stay behind and do whatever I could to hold her off.

I eyed the desk, and the dragon door above us. It was too high a jump for Mykah alone, and we needed the extra height.

I gripped the edge of the desk and dragged it forward, no longer moving slowly, but with frantic haste. The wood screeched on stone, and I heard the sounds of crashing as Emei narrowed in on us, throwing her body through the doors.

She didn’t just melt through, as an Ascendant should; whatever Yura had done to her, she was no longer able to manipulate her eyrie, the heart of her power.

As soon as the desk was poised just under the edge of the dragon door, I jumped up onto the desk, Mykah right behind me.

I knelt swiftly, feeling the draga shiver as the sound of shattering wine bottles came from behind the eyrie door. Emei released a cawing screech without speech in it.

Mykah stepped onto my linked hands, and with my newfound strength, I launched her upwards. She gripped the edge of the dragon door, feet flailing, and her heel caught me behind the ear with a burst of pain.

I stumbled, falling off the desk, clutching my head. I looked up with a wince, watching as Mykah disappeared over the edge of the dragon door, and then the eyrie door shattered.

Emei burst through, all of her eyes focusing on me. My head was still ringing as I got to my feet, and I shook it once, grounding my stance as I cleared my mind.

The Ascendant had stopped in her tracks, her raw, feather-plucked body coiled in the doorway. That bloodred constellation of eyes above her razor-sharp beak were bright with some strange, unreadable emotion.

I flexed my claws as Mykah made strange noises overhead. I hoped she was doing as I’d ordered and climbing down now, but several of Emei’s eyes moved independently from the rest, a grotesque contortion as she stared me down, and looked up at the dragon door at the same time.

“You cannot have her,” I said, planting my clawed feet. I summoned every last shred of the strength Erebos’s blood had given me, hoping it was enough.

My throat already burned with thirst. The might of a Naga wasn’t endless, not without replenishment, and Emei…I knew just from looking at her that her blood was poison. The thought of drinking from her made my stomach roil with sickness.

She was not dragon-kind any longer.

Emei exhaled with a low sound, her voice like a choir, male and female voices shrieking all at once: begging for mercy, for death, for their torment to be ended.

I knew they were the voices of the dead, the last remnants of those poor souls below.

But Emei didn’t move. She remained coiled in the door, muscles taut, staring at me, trembling with need as Mykah made more scuffing sounds.

It dawned on me slowly, something so beyond my perception I almost couldn’t accept it.

Was she…afraid of me ?

When was the last time an Ascendant had seen a Naga walk the earth? Someone with the form of the Daughters themselves?

I drew Aela slowly, taking a step forward, and Emei hissed, withdrawing several inches.

Gods. She was afraid.

And that was all that gave me the courage to stand up alone against an Ascendant.

Another two steps, and Emei withdrew into the storage room, knocking aside broken wine bottles and shattered crates, hissing at me in the voices of the dead.

I could drive her back down to the throne room, and when the Horde got closer, we could kill her, put her out of her misery.

And then Mykah popped her head over the side of the dragon door, and Emei’s eyes focused on her once more with a deep, ravening hunger.

“I can’t make it over the side,” she gasped. “There’s no grips , there’s blood everywhere —”

The Ascendant rammed into me, sending me flying back across the open eyrie. I slammed into the far wall for the second time in as many days, the breath exploding out of my lungs on a sharp gust, my fingers loosening on Aela’s grip.

Emei scrabbled onto the desk, rising to grip the lip of the dragon door and pull herself up.

I followed, leaping upright so fast my stomach muscles screamed, slamming Aela into her sheath. I followed Emei, my body performing feats of acrobatics I never could’ve done as a draga.

I perched on the rim, out in the open sky, and in the next three seconds I took it all in.

The Horde had moved closer, the dragonship hovering about fifty yards out. Most of the Undying Light dragons were crushed carcasses so far below; the draga on the ship were still firing, the free-flying dragons herding the dead into the range of their iron bolts.

Emei was before me, snarling like an animal and pacing back and forth on the narrow rim of the eyrie peak, looking down at something.

So Mykah had found a handhold after all, but she was right. Like the interior, the peak was covered in gore, still slippery.

My back itched terribly as I crept along the rim towards Emei, feet slipping even with the powerful strength in my limbs and the sharpness of my claws. I shrugged my shoulders, but it was maddening, taking up parts of my brain that I needed to focus on not falling to my death.

Emei reached down, scrabbling to grab at Mykah. My ward must’ve been clinging by her nails just out of reach.

There was something sad about Emei, reduced to an unthinking beast. An Ascendant, a creature of the old days, the Age of Flame and Shadow, a direct creation of Larivor himself…now meaningless hunger. A simple animal with a malevolent mind.

I hissed at her, drawing her attention, and the Ascendant recoiled. Her eyes were squeezed to slits, weeping viscous fluids in the brightness of the sun.

“Get away from her,” I snarled, creeping closer. The itch on my back was becoming a sharp pain, shooting along my nerve endings. I tried not to look at the drop to my left; strangely, that seemed to make it hurt worse.

“Sera!” I heard Mykah’s gasp, thin with strain, and looked over as I walked heel to toe, driving Emei back from her prey. “ Hurry! ”

Mykah was clinging by her nails, splayed out like an ungainly spider, her toes resting on the slightest outcropping of stone. Just out of reach of Emei…and no way down or back up. I thought it might’ve been sheer luck she’d found a grip at all on these polished stones.

I had only an instant to regret my orders to her, but as long as she kept her grip, she was safe. “Stay there. Hold tight.”

Emei mewled, and it was a terrible sound, driving into my eardrums like a needle.

I drew Aela, readying to leap across the dragon door, and Emei hissed, suddenly expanding. Her flesh was wet with fresh blood, leaking from her pores under the sun, and her wings spread wide: the framework of bones and membrane seeming so fragile, so much thin tissue, without her feathers.

She swayed back and forth like a snake, and I realized her squinting eyes weren’t focused on me, but on something over my shoulder.

I couldn’t look. I didn’t dare look.

Emei hissed, quivering, and lunged at me across the empty space, teeth stained red and flashing, and I heard a familiar shout behind me: “I’ve got her, Sera!”

Kirana. Somehow here with us, on top of the eyrie.

The Ascendant shrieked, plunging down through the dragon door, and I saw my chance. She was fleeing the Naga, unwilling to stand up against two.

I stood and leaped over the empty space, driving my full weight into the sword and crashing down onto the Ascendant.

The sword slid through her flesh, crunched through bone. We landed in the slimy mess of blood within the terrace, Emei’s coils thrashing, my feet slipping.

I gripped Aela, tugging the blade back out, and swung with all my strength, carving through her neck.

Again, and again. Chopping at the Ascendant, hacking through flesh and bone, until her wild convulsions became stillness.

I took a breath, then another. Then turned aside, my stomach heaving, unable to look at what I’d wrought of the Ascendant of Undying Light.

I wiped Aela on my leathers with shaky hands, sheathed her, and tried not to see what was left as I used the desk to haul myself out of the abattoir. I wasn’t entirely surprised by what I found waiting for me.

Kirana and Mykah perched on the rim. My wyvern-rider was still trembling, still ashen, but the relief in her eyes was almost unbearable.

Kirana crouched beside her, black wings spread wide to cover them both, her arm protectively draped around Mykah. She looked more draconic than ever, her horns curling, hardly any skin visible under her ebony scales.

“Heights,” she said with a crooked smile. “Your body wants to change, Sera. Don’t fight it.”

My back was aching again, so badly I wanted to scratch through my own skin with my claws, rend it down to the bone.

I looked over their heads at the dragonship, the draga firing their ballistae at the last Undying Light dragon, and realized what we’d done.

We’d destroyed the last of a canon, an entire bloodline.

“They’re afraid of Naga,” I finally said. My hands were trembling. “Emei is dead.”

Kirana nodded and stood, guiding Mykah upright. “Let’s get home. Rhylan needs us.”

Rhylan. I thought of Pyrae below, her body a host for the horrors that had come to Everael.

I needed to get home. I needed to be sure that what had happened here wouldn’t happen to him. I wouldn’t allow it, even if it meant losing Rhylan, even if it meant he would be a dragon forever.

He wouldn’t want to be the plague that destroyed his House.

I nodded, and Kirana saw my shaking, blood-slick hands. “I’ll get her to the dragonship,” she said briskly. “Sera…just let it happen. Look down and feel the wind. That was the trick.”

With whispered assurances, she got Mykah to cling to her, and spread her wings. She seemed to plummet off the tower…then she was rising, cradling Mykah as she glided gracefully to the dragonship.

I stood on the rim that only dragons had touched until now, and looked down at the ground, so dizzyingly far below. If I slipped now, I would drop like a stone, screaming all the way…

But the pain suffusing my back spiraled higher, burning with icy fire.

The wind brushed through my hair, cooled my scales where the blood had saturated me. It wanted me to join it, to feel weightlessness, a fire carried on the breeze.

The pain made me gasp, and I felt the tearing, the splitting of flesh, as my wings burst forth.

I fell. Plunged into the open air, let the wind take me. My wings, silver-pale, the color of the moon, spread wide and caught me, and I finally knew what it was to be a dragon.

I flew away from the House of Ashes, from the end of a lineage, to the dragonship and home.