Page 7 of Heart of Chaos (Chaosborn #1)

Chapter seven

Eisa

I couldn’t remember falling asleep, but I woke in the early morning to find Revna snoring in the other bed and Arik nowhere in sight.

I stretched, then winced. Every inch of me hurt, and I had to hobble to the bathing room to relieve myself and splash water on my face. My lip was bruised, my hair matted and knotted, and my clothes filthy. I sighed, looking away from the mirror.

Still, for the first time in thirteen years, no one screamed at me to get up, or pounded on the wall, or kicked me awake.

I could get used to such a life.

I quickly felt down my blouse to make sure Sigrid’s necklace was still around my neck, relieved to find the tiny gem warm against my belly. It was comforting, feeling like she was close to me, even though I knew it was sentimental nonsense.

I wondered if she’d already ruined batches of baked goods with her inability to season anything. Or if Anders was already getting in everyone’s way.

I swallowed down my sadness and returned to the room on silent feet, then moved quietly to the window to look out at the rising sun. I’d rarely gotten out of the tavern, and there wasn’t much around to see anyway in our little nothing of a way stop. I was eager to see more of the world before being trapped once again, this time by sea if not by actual shackles.

But my eyes weren’t drawn to little thatched buildings or the far off mountains or the glittering ocean. They were drawn to Arik, bare to the waist in the freezing courtyard below, his ashen hair tied atop his head as sweat dotted his brow.

He moved with a grace belied by his frame, each move of whatever exercise he was performing precise and measured. Frost had gathered in the night, but the cold seemed to have no effect on him as he moved his body, first lunging, then dropping to the ground in a slow roll that seemed physically impossible, then rising gracefully again. Muscles bulged in his arms and across his back and chest as he flipped onto his tattooed hands.

Tattoos which spread up his arms and down his torso, many marred by a patchwork of scars that covered his skin. The ripple of muscles in his back and chest made the patterns move like the sea as he continued his exercises, and my fingers itched to trace their contours.

“Staring is rude, you know,” Revna said in my ear.

I jumped, dropping the curtain and plunging the room back into semi-darkness as I whirled to find her standing right behind me.

“Gods, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t—I didn’t mean—“

She laughed, not at all annoyed that I’d been spying on her partner or whatever they were, and lifted the curtain again. “He’s annoyingly graceful. It’s truly not fair that a man as large as he is should be able to move so fluidly.”

“Are you two…?” I let the question trail off.

Revna frowned, then opened her eyes wide in shocked understanding before blurting out a guffaw so loud I was sure Arik heard it. “Gods, no. No, no, no. No.” She wheezed with laughter, I was torn between embarrassment at having labeled them incorrectly and a strange swooping sense of relief. “No, no. Arik is my friend and my reirleder. Nothing more.”

“Reirleder?”

“The commander of a reirhold. A unit of dragons,” she explained, looking back down at the courtyard. “I’ve been his second since the day he bonded Baldur. But nothing else. Impossible.”

She shook her head so vehemently, I frowned. “How do you know?”

“Because he was practically still a boy when I met him,” she laughed. “Only sixteen when he was sent to Ironholm, and that was two decades ago. We age slowly when we bond.”

I did some mental calculations. Arik was in his mid-thirties, but looked no later than his late twenties. Revna couldn’t be much older. “And how old were you?”

“Twice his age at least,” she snorted. “I’d been there for fifteen years already when he arrived.”

I gaped. “But you look younger than him!”

“Dragon magic,” Revna preened, nudging me with her shoulder. “And thank you oh-so-very-much for calling me old.”

I laughed. “The dragons keep you young?”

“Extended life, heightened senses, shifting, and fire breathing,” she confirmed, lifting the curtain and looking out again. “All perks of the job.”

I turned back to watch as well, Revna’s tacit permission emboldening me. “What is he doing, exactly?”

“They’re exercises for balance and strength,” she replied, looking at her reirleder with approval. It made me wonder what he had done to make her such a loyal friend, even with the gap in their age and experience. I must seem like a child to them both. “They focus the mind as well as the body. You’ll learn them too.”

“I don’t think my body will do that.” My eyes were still on Arik, who was balanced on one hand and one foot as he lowered his body to the ground and raised it again repeatedly.

“Well, no one sensible can do that, “ she agreed.

At that moment, Arik looked directly at us, his eyes narrowed in annoyance.

“Shit, he heard us,” Revna sighed. “He’ll be insufferably smug now.”

“He can hear us through the glass?” I asked, rethinking literally everything I had said within a hundred feet of him.

“Drage hearing.” Revna tapped her pointed ear. “The perks, remember?”

She stood, offering me a hand up.

“What do the dragons get out of it?” I asked.

“A tether to this world,” Revna replied, stretching, and glancing up at the sky. “Come on, we’d better get breakfast. It’s a long flight to Ironholm.”

Kindra swooped low, letting out a joyful bellow as she swept over the waves. I clung tightly to the scales of the golden dragon that was also Revna and nestled deeper into her heat, as she played with the waves.

“I know you can’t answer me,” I shouted over the whistling wind and the crashing sea, “but I think you should know that I can’t swim.”

The golden dragon snorted in a way that sounded almost like Revna’s laugh as she tipped, skimming one huge wing over the surf and sending spindrift flying all around me.

She was smaller than Baldur, faster and sleeker, and brighter than everything else in the sky. I felt a jolt of exhilaration and terror as she dove toward the water.

Arik had tried to insist that I ride Baldur to Ironholm, but Revna had offered, and I’d readily taken her up on it. Not only was Kindra less intimidating than Baldur, who had shot me a sullen look as he launched from the cliff’s edge without me on his back, but I was more comfortable with Revna than Arik. She had an ease and a warmth about her that her reirleder lacked, and I felt like I could be more myself with her.

Baldur bellowed in disapproval above us as I shut my eyes tight against the spray of freezing water that bathed my face in ice.

“Thank you for that,” I shouted irritably. Kindra snorted a rumbling laugh, rising higher until we were far above the turbulent waters and moving at breakneck speed as Baldur continued to growl at her antics.

The day passed slowly, the sun climbing ever higher and then descending behind a thick layer of clouds as my hands and legs grew more and more stiff. A hard lump of scale bumped incessantly against my inner thigh, and I expected I’d find another bruise whenever we finally landed.

Baldur stayed close on Kindra’s tail, as if unwilling to let us out of his sight. Every so often, I looked over my shoulder to find his huge, silver eyes trained on me, a fire in them I didn’t understand. I could almost feel him nudging at my mind, as if trying and failing to speak to me as he did Arik, but no words ever made it through.

The sun had just begun its descent when black rock appeared in the distance, the glittering white of the icy Odemark behind it.

Ironholm.

The peak grew and morphed like some great obsidian creature rising from the depths. Fitting, really, considering the real monsters who lurked both inside and beyond the crags.

Kindra and Baldur began to ascend, the stones climbing hundreds of feet and seeming to go on to reach the clouds. The whole structure appeared to be made from the rock of the land itself, more mountain than construction, its walls rising organically from sharp cliffs into turrets high above the sea. Something about the place made my skin feel prickly and uncomfortable. Kindra seemed to feel it too, chuffing as we flew into a cavernous tunnel of stone twice as tall as the massive dragon and landed.

The golden dragon lowered her head to the stone floor of the cavern and huffed.

A snort that I presumed meant, “get down,” blew hot air into the cold tunnel, and I slid gracelessly off her back, landing hard on my backside.

Something thrummed inside me, knocking the breath from me as a force like I had never experienced wracked my body. Sharp pain flooded me, coursing through my veins into every finger. It felt like I was dying and being reborn, and I doubled over, my palms spread flat on the stone as the sucking, electrifying force thundered through me.

Sigrid’s necklace warmed beneath my blouse until it was almost hot. And then, just as suddenly as the pain had begun, it stopped.

Baldur landed beside Kindra, his claws digging grooves in the stone as he rumbled a warning. His body shrank and smoothed until it was Arik next to me, completely naked, as I shivered on the stone. “ That’s Chaos,“ he murmured, crouching down to where I was bent double. “It takes awhile to acclimate.”

I felt my face heat as I looked up at him. Arik with clothes was intimidating. Arik without clothes was downright mesmerizing, all muscle and tattoo and confidence. I’d never seen a fully naked man before, and this…

“Eisa?” Revna asked, her shift complete and her body as bare as Arik’s. “Are you alright?”

“Just the Chaos,” Arik said, tossing her one of the packs Baldur had carried in his enormous claws across the sea. “Put some clothes on.”

“You’re one to talk,” Revna scoffed.

I could swear I saw Arik’s lip twitch in amusement as he retrieved his own clothes, and I took several deep, shuddering breaths until my body was finally my own again. Warmth trickled down my chin, and I lifted a hand to find blood dripping from my nose.

“You’re bleeding again.” A warm hand caught my chin, and I looked up into Arik’s silver gaze, no longer amused.

“I’m fine.” I wiped at my face again, cursing my blood for whatever weakness made me bleed like a faucet.

“Here.” He tossed me something white and warm that smelled like smoke and stone. Like Baldur. His shirt, I realized, as he pulled his jacket on over his bare chest. “It’s likely the Chaos.”

“Perhaps,” I replied thickly through the shirt. “What is it exactly?”

“The creation energy of the universe,” Revna explained as she strapped a sword to her back. “Dragons are pure Chaos. It’s how they come through the Rift.”

“And what is the Rift?”

“Think of it like a tear in the world. A portal through which monstrous creatures climbed into our world eons ago,” Arik grunted, pulling on his boots. “Ready?”

Not even a little bit. But it would do no good to say it aloud. “Here,” I said, holding out the bloody shirt.

Arik’s eyes narrowed and then elongated into slits, his nostrils flaring as if he were scenting my blood like he had in the tavern.

I stepped back nervously. “Baldur?”

Arik shook his head and his eyes returned to normal. “Keep it. Let’s go.”

I sighed, forcing my exhausted and bruised body to rise as I continued to dab my nose with the bloody shirt.

“You get used to the Chaos,” Revna said, matching my stride as we walked deeper into the cavern. Lanterns lit the tunnel in an orange glow and darkness swallowed up the daylight as we traversed deeper. “It becomes more volatile as we near the Rifting, but it will calm down after. It’s much worse near the Rift itself.”

“How far away is this Rift?” I asked, still dabbing my nose with Arik’s shirt.

“Not far enough,” Arik muttered.

“A few miles,” Revna said, scowling at him. “Ironholm was built as the last defense between it and the human lands. Now it’s the only defense.”

“Why?” I asked, still trudging behind Arik as we moved deeper into the tunnel.

“It’s a long story,” Revna said. “I’ll tell you all about it once we get you properly situated. History lessons are not really one of Arik’s strengths.”

I debated wondering aloud if his strength was brooding, when he growled, “History lessons won’t save you in the Odemark.”

I frowned. “I thought the dragons were supposed to do that.”

“Shit happens,” he replied, continuing down the tunnel.

The end of the passageway was blocked by massive metal doors that seemed to gobble up the torch light, their edges jammed into the stone as if plugging a weeping wound.

“Iron,” Revna explained, pressing her hand to the huge slabs of metal. Each door was carved with the image of a dragon facing away from the other, their necks bound by interlocking rings that formed a sort of triangle. A wheel of runic symbols was carved between them, parting where the doors opened. “Opens only for the drage. Keeps out the odemarksdyr, for the most part.”

“The most part?” I asked warily. “What happens when it doesn’t?”

“We fight like hell,” Arik replied darkly.

A clunking, thudding sound churned behind the iron, and the doors slid open slowly, the metal screeching as it dragged against stone.

“Welcome to Ironholm,” Revna said, nudging my shoulder as we stepped out of the cavernous hallway into the fortress atrium.

Whatever I’d been expecting, it was not what appeared before me as I stepped into the huge space. We were on a stone platform, one of seemingly hundreds that curved and climbed the interior of the mountain.

And it was a mountain. The cavern we entered must have been wide enough for five of Baldur to fly abreast. Little holes that pockmarked the stone walls served as doors to chambers from which men and women clad in leathers and furs moved with grim determination about their tasks.

The bowl in which hundreds of people must work and live was open to a gray, darkening expanse of sky above. Dragons—tiny against the darkening canopy—flew across the opening and out of sight, and a few smaller dragons swooped amid the rising platforms to rise through the center of the mountain itself.

“Kitchens, armory, training grounds, and archives are all below,” Arik said, pointing toward the bottom of the bowl. “Those caves,” he pointed up toward holes that peppered the stone walls of the cavern, “are where most bronzes and golds live. They generally enter and exit through the smokestack.”

Arik gestured to the central bowl, where an occasional bronze dragon rose and descended on its way to or from the Odemark.

“Why didn’t we fly in through there?” I asked, pointing to the open sky.

“Aside from the fact that Baldur is too big?” Revna laughed, slipping her arm through mine. “I thought it would be best if you didn’t fall off Kindra to your death when you first experienced Chaos. Come on.”

We began to descend, Revna pointing out places of interest with far more detail than Arik had.

“Are all of these people Chaosborn?” I gaped, taking a step back as I tried to take in the vastness of the space. It was a city, I realized, fully staffed and functioning inside the mountain itself. And based on the prevalence of rounded ears, most of the people who lived in it were not drage.

“Yes,” Revna replied easily. “Those who have yet to bond a dragon, or who cannot.”

“Cannot?” I asked, feeling cold dread creep into my heart as I glanced back at Arik, who walked behind us like a stone sentry.

A bronze dragon swooped past, not much larger than a tall man, followed by a chittering gold that was twice as large.

“Some are not found worthy.”

“Worthy?” I balked. No one had mentioned anything about being found worthy on top of the risk of dying during whatever the Rifting was.

“It won’t be an issue,” Arik cut in from behind us. “I’ve already told you, you’ll bond.”

I bit my lower lip to stop myself from scowling at the reirleder. His confidence—or his dragon’s confidence—should have given me some comfort, but his insistence that I didn’t need to worry only made me worry more.

“Reirleder!” An impatient male voice sounded from across the cavern, echoing loudly through the space. I looked to where Arik and Revna had turned to see an older man with eyes like chips of ice glaring at Arik as he leaned on a stone railing. Broad shoulders filled out his leather armor, and a single arm of tattoos highlighted strong muscles that could likely cut me in half with a metal sword, were he so inclined. He was likely handsome in his youth, but his bald head and grizzled beard revealed that he was much older than the reirleder beside me.

“Dragehersker,” Arik replied, nodding and standing at attention. Several other drage and Chaosborn bowed as Arik turned to Revna. “Do you have her from here?”

“Yes, go. We can debrief later.” With a wry grimace she added, “Good luck.”

He nodded, then hesitated as if he wanted to say something else before turning on his heel and walking away toward the opposite side of the cavern.

“Is Arik always so…” I fumbled for the right words.

“Broody?” Revna laughed. “Yes. More than usual right now. Dragejakt takes a toll. The dragons don’t like to be away from the Rift for so long.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated,” she replied vaguely. “Come on, down here.” Revna continued to descend into the bowels of the mountain, the stone incline winding around the interior of the mountain itself. I had to jog a step to catch up.

“And that older man—he was your commander?”

“Einar. Our Dragehersker,” Revna agreed, frowning over her shoulder after Arik’s disappearing form.

“Why does Arik need luck to meet with him?”

She hesitated. “They don’t exactly see eye to eye on how the drage operate. It’s all above my pay grade though.”

She forced a smile as if that were all there was to it, but I got the sense that there was something she didn’t want to—or perhaps couldn’t—tell me.

“Anyway, down here are the barracks.” She pointed down the path we were descending, then turned down a corridor lit entirely by the blue stone light. “Unbonded Chaosborn share living space.”

“Unbonded?”

Revna didn’t reply, turning down yet another dark corridor. “Here we are.”

She pushed open a wooden door that looked as if it had seen far better days. The room beyond was about the size of Henrik’s whole tavern. Several hanging lanterns illuminated the gray stone walls, and what looked to be beds had been carved into two sides of the room. They were more like ledges of stone piled with furs than actual beds, and I said a quick prayer to the Hearthmother for the bruises I’d likely sustain by sleeping on stone. A wooden trunk sat beneath each ledge, and I counted twenty spaces in all. There was another wooden door at the other end of the room, and the space was empty aside from a few ledges that looked to have been slept in.

“This is the women’s barracks,” Revna explained, checking the beds as we walked past each one. “Or one of them, at least. There are only three other women in this one right now, so you have your pick of beds!”

“Only three?” I asked.

“Drage keep their own quarters, and most of the new candidates are men.” Revna moved to one of the beds that looked to be in pristine condition. “How about this one? I’ll get you a few more furs from the unoccupied beds since I know you run cold. There’s a bathroom through that door if you want a moment to wash up.”

She nodded and smiled encouragingly to the other wooden door, which indeed led to a washroom with several privies and showers that were partitioned off from each other. Copper pipes nailed into the wall must carry water to and from the fixtures, and I wondered how deeply the builders of Ironholm had to drill through the mountain to outfit it with plumbing.

I would have killed for a bath, but that looked to be out of the question, so I settled for splashing water on my face from one of the sinks and re-braiding my hair.

“I’ll find some clothes for you,” Revna said, peeking into the empty trunk at the base of the bed she’d chosen for me. “It’s nothing much, and it’s not really private, but it should be better than what you had before.”

“It’s perfect,” I agreed, smiling appreciatively at her and trying to hide my shiver. I was still wearing my cloak and Arik’s, but it wasn’t enough to chase away the chill of the mountain.

“Wait until you see the dining hall.” Revna took my arm in hers and guided me back out to the stone hallway. “It’s nothing fancy, but I wager you’ll be spoiled for choice compared to that moldy old tavern.”

I watched carefully as she guided me back to the sloping platform that spiraled around the smokestack. Getting lost on my first night in Ironholm would not be a providential start to my life here.

“There’s food around the clock,” Revna said, guiding me downward. “Drage keep all hours depending on our patrols, so they are always open and staffed by Chaosborn.”

“Do all the Chaosborn work?” I asked, trying to shake the buzz of Chaos out of my bones. It grew stronger as we moved lower, increasing in intensity along with the smell of dinner, making me rather nauseated.

“Yes,” Revna said, smiling back at me. “Someone has to do the jobs to keep this place running, and the jernblod—regular humans—can’t survive here for long enough to be of any use. But Chaosborn also train to fight, and all of us have a few hours to ourselves each day. Many lead full lives here, even without bonding a dragon.”

Revna waved to someone in the crowd. “Come on. I’m starving, and I want you to meet the other new candidates.”

She pushed through a set of double doors and into a raucous dining room where at least a hundred people were gathered eating and drinking and laughing over ale and steaming plates of meat and potatoes. Stone tables and benches stretched from wall to wall, and several lit hearths filled the chilly, windowless room with warmth and light.

“Welcome to the best room in Ironholm.”