Page 66 of Dragon Fight (The Dragon Queen #2)

66

“G limmer’s been poisoned!”

Any strategic impulse to keep this to myself, to hide the strike the queen had made against us, was pushed aside by my panic as I shouted it to the world. But the world did not respond the way I wanted. The kitchen erupted into panic, people screeching and flailing, but no one did what I needed.

Pip—in…

Her mental voice was weakening and her breaths were becoming more laboured, as her whole body worked to suck oxygen in. And then it came. That little cough, then a splatter of blood on the floor. Something I had seen before.

“Poisoned?” Brom looked dumbstruck, his eyes swinging to the others. “What do we—?”

“Nothing,” Soren snapped. “Who’d poison a fucking dragon? I’ve got remedies for the things the stupid beasts ingest on accident, Calamity Jane and the like, but—”

“Someone has to,” Flynn insisted with all of the certainty of a man born to rule, a duke, not a third son standing before us. “Someone must! We’ll take her to Madam Gilly.”

But I knew what would happen if we tried that.Glimmer would splutter out her last breaths as we rushed to the healer’s office and, just like Lassie had before, she’d die in my arms and I’d be left holding her, feeling her body went cool. I shook my head at that.

“Give me the dragonstone.” I held out a hand, snapping my fingers when I didn’t get it quickly enough. It was slapped into my palm and I rubbed my other hand at my nose, pushing at the crust of just-congealed blood so that some of it seeped onto my fingers. I gently swiped my fingers along Glimmer’s muzzle, a cold, hard anger rising inside me as I touched my bloodied fingers to the egg.

Tanis appeared, at least an apparition of her, because I could still see the outside world, and my men standing there as witness.

“How do I heal her?” I snapped. “She healed me—”

For the future to be ensured, the past must be resolved , Tanis began again, as if I’d stepped back to the first moment we’d touched Cynane’s egg and she was ready to thrust me into my memories of my stepfamily’s petty tyrannies.

But I was done with the damn past. Only the future mattered and I would have my answers.

“Glimmer can heal. I can heal.” All of a sudden, it was as though having this desperate need had given me belief in myself, in possibility, in hope. My doubts had been stripped away, burned as if by dragon fire. “I’ll do anything, just tell me what to do!”

She stared directly at me, this time the vision of Tanis actually meeting my eyes, a terrible sadness in them as her mouth moved to say familiar words, nothing new, nothing useful.

Connection is where all power comes from.

There. That.

I stared down at my dragon, saw the blood frothing at her jaws, her tongue lolling out of her open mouth, her eyes growing duller by the second. I needed to do it, so I could . Glimmer had said that with absolute certainty when she had healed me, and I needed to borrow that queen-like energy right now.

I need to heal my dragon , I told the dragonstone, myself, not willing to give an inch to doubt, not now. I need to heal her like she did me. I grasped the egg tighter, our blood smeared across the shining surface as it grew brighter and brighter.

But I was right.

I couldn’t wield the fucking thing, not the way I needed to, because what had my life been but a cry for one thing and being given something far worse? I hadn’t asked to be bloody queen, to be the obstacle Raina had to grind to dust to achieve her terrible goals, to put my dragon in her sights. Because instead of a shower of golden light, my scales growing brighter and brighter as I healed the other side of my heart, the past kept shoving forward, a horrible ghost that seemed to haunt me so thoroughly I was useless for anything else.

“C’mon, lass…”

I heard the desperation in Draven’s voice as he fought to feed me that bloody awful moss and wash it down with water, forcing me to drink more, chew more. He’d known exactly what was wrong with me, struggling to get me to take the antidote even as—

My mind stuttered to a stop.

Tanis dropped away as I shoved the stone egg into my pocket. My mind felt like it was on fire as I quested out, the sound of hundreds of dragons humming in my head, filling me up. I searched among them, looking for one in particular.

Darkspire’s mind was exactly as I’d expected, sharp as a knife’s blade, but I slid along it, letting it cut me, as I speared in.

Where is Draven? I demanded.

Nesting sands. The queen—?

Is dying if your master can’t heal her. Be ready to take us to the palace.

He will know this , ‘Spire assured me and that’s when I moved.

If you asked me what the path between the kitchen to the nesting sands was after that day, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I didn’t have to know. It felt like I gleaned the knowledge from all too many minds as I zipped through them, lifting the relevant information, until I burst out onto the open area of the nesting sands.

There wasn’t as big an audience as a Gathering, but the Dukes of Skane and Tharfield, were present, standing by their representatives as they readied the young men and women to present themselves to the eggs beyond. I didn’t pay them any mind, stepping onto the sands to get closer to him, driven by the need that kept pushing me forward, strengthening my resolve as it squashed my self-doubt.

“Draven!” The prince’s head jerked up, his eyes widening, and his body going still when he saw the state of Glimmer and her blood spotting the pale bleached sand. “Draven!”

“What in the gods—?” the prince snapped, about to approach.

“Don’t move, my son.”

And that’s when she stepped forward.

From the corner of my eye, I noted that Beatrice was here, not in the general’s office. Of course she was. Why would she meet rider justice when the queen was here to decide on her fate? I watched the countess sidle up to Draven, taking the prince’s arm, as a lady might. Her grip though? There was nothing ladylike in the way she struggled to stop him from coming to me. But the far greater obstacle and danger was where the greater part of my attention lay. The queen reared up before me like a snake about to strike, her eyes as cold as one.

“What have you done to your dragon?”

“NO!” I shouted, the whole nesting grounds echoing with it, and my hand went to the knife strapped to my thigh, jerking it free and pressing the tip to her throat. Gasps rang around the nesting grounds, but I no longer cared. When the dukes had urged me to commit treason, I had blanched, but no longer. “You will be silent or, gods help me, I’ll go to the scaffold gladly, knowing I cut your throat open.”

“Draven…”

Raina ground that out, obviously not having thought that this eventuality might arise. Her hand clawing at her necklace, but I jerked the knife down, twisting the tip between the wide links of the soft gold chain and dragging it to the side to get the resistance I needed to slice it apart. The screech she made as it slipped to the ground was delicious, and I stamped my foot down on top of it to stop her from grabbing it back.

“Mother!”

Was Draven’s cry to rebuke his murderous parent or a plea for her safety? I didn’t have the chance to check because, as he said the word, Glimmer did the same, although her mental whisper had a different tone. One of distress and need.

Mother…

My dragon never spoke about Zafira and I had assumed that was the way of dragons. They were reptiles, not mammals, their process of bearing progeny completely different, but when I heard it, my heart felt a pang of empathy.

Mother…! Mother…!

I’d made similar sounds myself while my mother lay on her deathbed, bleeding out onto the mattress as she’d tried to bear my father a son. I’d cried out for her in her lacquered wooden coffin while I watched it lowered into the ground, keeping up my sobbing until my father had forced me to stop. I’d gone back later in the night, flinging myself at the marble headstone that was all I had left of her, crying into that impervious surface, all of my pain and anguish, the bewildering emptiness I hadn’t realised could exist until she was gone.

But how often had Glimmer cried out the same thing, getting much the same result?

Zafira’s head rose, snakelike and dwarfing the lot of us. Her nostrils flared at the sight before her, sucking in a deep breath then expelling it in flurries that stirred the sands.

“Is this your cunning plan, you little bitch?” the queen sneered at me. “Poison your own dragon and then try to pin the crime on me? Draven, you must act. You see exactly what this jealous little chit is now.”

Gods above… It felt like all the breath was driven out of my lungs because, even as my dragon hung in my arms dying, Raina was still playing politics. But she wasn’t important. Draven’s healer at the palace had cured him of Kashian nut poisoning, so he could help Glimmer.

“Draven,” I said, much more steadily. “You can heal her.” My eyes flicked up to see Darkspire appear above us, gliding down to the sands. “We can take Glimmer to the palace. Your healer has the antidote.”

“Don’t take another step, son,” Raina said in a tense voice. “And call your dragon off. Zafira can dispatch Darkspire after she gets rid of this little problem and he won’t even put up a fight.” She stared down at me. “A queen does not tolerate another queen in her territory and I am done with this little facade. Zafira!”

Mother… Glimmer’s voice was weaker now, as if her essence was fading. Mother…

“What the fuck did you do, Mother!” Draven snarled, shaking off Beatrice and striding towards us. Not to disarm me, that became apparent, even as the rest of the wing came running out to the sands. “Did you poison Glimmer? What the fuck am I saying?! Of course you did.” His voice broke then, the princely mask not simply dropped but shattering in the face of his realisation. “You… You tried to kill her? What did you give her?”

When Raina didn’t answer immediately, his hands slapped down on her arms. Turning her away from me, he shook her, her head flapping back and forth on the end of her spine, her jaws clacking.

“What did you give her!”

But the queen just smiled then, despite the small drop of blood forming on her neck from my knife’s blade.

Raina was going to win. Of course she was and I took an involuntary step backwards, that instinct to run, to get the hell away from here, from the queen and her bloody dragon, from all of them burning hard inside me. She would kill Glimmer, me, and anyone else who got in her way, even Draven now he’d proved himself not willing to be a Harlstonian puppet. It was all for nothing. My fingers tried to tighten into fists, but one was curled around Glimmer, the other the dragonstone egg.

“Zafira.” Raina clicked her fingers like she was summoning a footman, not her bondmate.

Her dragon’s head rose obediently, preparing to strike. I wondered idly how painful Cecily and Arabella’s deaths had been. Did they die quickly, their lives snuffed out by the jaws of my men’s dragons? Or did they feel every movement of those razor sharp fangs as they—

“Zafira, back!” Draven snarled, throwing up a hand that had the great golden dragon jerking her head away, and he grabbed his mother’s arm. “What the fuck did you do, Mother? What did you do?”

“What I’ve always done.” She slapped her hand across his face, and Draven went still, his hand covering the mark she’d left on his cheek. “What I always will do. I remove obstacles, burn away the dross.” She raised her hand as if to attempt another blow before pointing her finger at him. “And it remains to be seen what you are. Prove it now, son. I know of your little plots and attempts at rebellion, was willing to allow you enough rope to hang yourself, but now we find out which. Do you die with your friends or slip your head from the noose?”

Darkspire let out a raucous bugle which was taken up by countless other dragons around the nesting sands. Wings flapped and dragons cried out against this crime, all but one. Mine. She coughed up more and more blood, her scales turning from gold to copper, then a dull orange. Raina noted this with a smirk, then jerked an eyebrow up at her son.

“Time’s running out, son, to prove your loyalty.”

Draven shouted and Raina screeched back, verbally jousting in a way they’d been dying to for years, no doubt. But my attention was no longer on the.

“Pippin.”

Brom slid to the sands beside me, trying to help cradle Glimmer’s lolling head, but he went pale when my dragon’s blood splattered his fingers. Soren dropped to his knees and quickly moved his hands over her body, searching for signs, something to indicate what she’d been given.

Ged stood staring down at Glimmer, his fists opening and closing as though trying to find something to hang on to. “She’ll be alright,” he tried to promise, but the look on his face, the shake in his voice, made clear that even he didn’t believe the lie he told. Flynn had turned towards Raina and was drawing his sword free of its scabbard.

“That fucking bitch…” he snarled. “I’ll cut the answer from her if I have to.”

All I could do was slump down on the sands, cradling my dragon in my arms, holding her close in the way I would after she was gone. But I wouldn’t hold her for long. If it meant I got close enough to Raina to attempt to take her life, I’d walk into Zafira’s jaws willingly after. If Glimmer was gone, I had nothing left. Nothing.

My heart… I told her, trying to keep my voice strong and true. She deserved that in her last moments. You are queen, queen of mine, always.

Mother… she whispered, so quiet it was almost as if I imagined it.

I could feel it then, a faint hint of a memory, of being in an egg and lying against her mother’s side, hearing the steady beat of her mother’s heart when she was very small. Too small to become a target for Raina’s control.

I got to my feet and stepped forward then, walking towards the queen dragon rather than away from her. My men cried out in protest, but still I strode forward. While Raina was distracted, her dragon’s head wavered, watching my every step and that’s when I realised what I could do. I hadn’t learned to wield the stone like Raina, hadn’t become strong enough to force anyone to do as I bid, but I could reach out, connect as Tanis had said.

She’s dying. I pushed that thought at Zafira, although her mind felt slippery, like I was trying to gain purchase on a cliff-face made of glass. Your daughter, your heir is dying. Zafira’s head jerked backwards at that, the only acknowledgement of my attempt to tie my mind to hers. Can’t you give her this moment? I felt irrationally angry then at the dragon’s recalcitrance. You can kill me straight after Glimmer dies, to please your queen. Just… give her this.

Sometimes people bring two parties together to get them talking, connecting, and that’s what it felt like was happening right now. Glimmer was helpless, unable to reach out to her own mother in little other than a weak plea, but I… I could give her this.

I was trying to link my mind to Zafira’s, to be the conduit between her and her daughter’s, but that’s not how it works with dragons. They don’t have layers of themselves they reveal or hide, not like humans do. So when we connected, it was completely.

And that’s when I beheld the depth of Raina’s treachery.

Zafira’s mind was a maelstrom of fear and anger and confusion, but at the centre of all that swirling emotion was one thing. A memory. Not of Glimmer, nor Raina, but of her.

Golden-haired where Raina was dark, she was still a girl in Zafira’s memory, though I had no idea if she would be now. She swirled around in a circle with all the innocence of a child, a smile on her face, her gown flaring out as she went. It seemed a perfect moment, a young dragon just as bright as the sun at her feet. And the girl swept the dragon up to spin her as well, the two of them caught up in the feeling of it. They both liked the exhilaration of being off kilter, and for Zafira it was the closest thing to flying in a way that both of them could share.

This was Zafira’s true bondmate.

If the dragon had been left to give her heart as she’d willed, this would’ve been our next queen—the one who should have married to our king—not Raina. And I realised that the Harlstonian would do literally anything to keep power in their own hands.

And I had gained that knowledge from Zafira.

Our minds were connected. And Raina had not even realised. She was too caught up with Draven, Beatrice and my men all raging at each other, fighting, fighting as Darkspire hovered overhead, as all dragonkind watched and waited.

When I had first met them, the riders had tried to explain how their dragons helped them to enforce the law. But when I’d come to the capital, I’d seen how arbitrarily this was applied and I realised that this was Raina’s doing. But it seemed the dragons had been keeping score all the while. Their humming song rose in pitch, and Zafira seemed to hear it for the first time. Her head shot up, and her neck craned around to take in whatever they were communicating, before she turned back to us. Her golden eyes seemed to see us for the first time. They were a much softer gold now, that of the sun and her true bond mate’s hair, not the harsh beaten metal of the setting that held Raina’s stone.

Mother…

A wash of love came in answer to that, filling me and Glimmer up, as the dam that had been holding back everything that Zafira felt finally broke. Glimmer might die, but she would do so in love, in my love, in her mother’s.

Mother , I agreed, and it was like the return of the last moment I remembered of my mother cradling me into her arms, that wonderful certainty of her love filling every crack that had formed since. I was ready to take my punishment, if it meant getting this. Zafira’s head reared up, ready to strike, the sound of the dragons’ song becoming harsh, discordant, when all we could feel was peace.

Perhaps we will be queens in another life , I told Glimmer, holding her close, burying my face in the coppery blood-scented scales of her stomach and just letting my breath out.

When Zafira struck, I felt the whistle of wind, the cries from everyone around me, but no more than that. Because when her jaws crushed together, it was Raina who met her end between them, not me.

The queen was dead. Long live the queen.