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Chapter Forty-Six It came up from the mine

Gwen closed her eyes and let Achilles carry her through the forest toward the dragon’s lair.

The thudding of her horse’s hooves

was rhythmic to the point of being hypnotic, and after several rounds of trying to gather her thoughts and corral them, she

finally let them go, to run alongside Achilles in his joyous sprint.

Her father had stripped off the armor pieces of his disguise and given them to her, allowing her to sneak out of the dungeons,

with his assurance that he could make his own way out.

After all, nobody had been told to guard him .

The armor had even allowed her to sneak into the ballroom as several dozen servants scrambled around, trying to reassemble

a massive oak table.

The diagram the castle staff were following was clearly a poor one, with half the servant battalion waving

bits of metal and various pegs while the other half turned the pieces of the table round and round, arguing which way was

up.

They never even looked up as Gwen slowly, silently took the ancient dragonslaying spear from its spot over the grand fireplace.

She had retrieved her horse from the stables and had beaten her father back to Ellsdale, galloping straight to the smithy and leaving Achilles stamping and pawing at the ground as she hurried inside.

Olivia had brought Gwen’s armor to her father, and if there were any pieces the guards hadn’t ruined, they would be better than the guard’s armor she still wore.

She’d walked in expecting an empty smithy—only to find a broad-shouldered figure standing in the middle of the room, staring

at her with wide eyes.

“Theo!” she gasped, trying to catch her breath from her headlong ride and her surprise.

His eyes lit as he saw her.

“Gwen! Oh, Gwen, I saw part of your joust last time against Lorenzo, and it was brilliant —of course, I didn’t know it was you, but I would’ve just thought it was even more brilliant if I had, and obviously now I—”

“Theo,” Gwen had cut in, aware the boy would go on talking until someone stopped him, like a runaway horse with an infinite

amount of road.

“I can’t stay. Do you know where my dad put my armor?”

Theo’s face had glowed even more.

“Oh, I have it! I fixed the leather straps—they’re a little stiff, definitely not as good

as the ones you made, but they’ll work in a pinch, because I figured if they end up letting you finish the tournament and

all that, you’d want—” He had turned, retrieving a pile of gleaming metal as he’d spoken.

Gwen’s breath seized in her lungs at the sight of her armor, and when she’d looked up to Theo’s shiny-cheeked face, every

misgiving she’d ever had about the boy went flying out the window.

“Theo, you’re amazing!” she cried, and leaned up to kiss

him on the cheek.

She’d left Theo behind, staring at her red-faced as he watched her ride away.

She’d paused only to ask a question of a woman who’d emerged, yawning, from their neighbor’s cottage—Gwen had recognized her from the jail cell, the night they’d freed the villagers from Aberfarthing.

The gold mine , the woman had said in response to Gwen’s urgent question, her eyes wide as she gazed up at the woman in armor.

It came up from the mine.

Achilles’s long, loping gait ate up the distance with ease, despite the added weight of Gwen’s armor and the dragonslaying

spear lashed to his saddle.

The moon was gibbous, its light filtering through the thinner trees that arched over the road, casting monstrous shadows onto

the silvered dirt.

The air streaming past Gwen’s cheeks was cool, growing colder as the day’s warmth slipped away into the

night.

Before her rose mountains beyond the woods, looming higher every minute she rode, blocking out the stars.

Without warning, Achilles burst out of the trees and onto a village path.

Gwen reined him back into a trot, catching her breath.

..

and then he stopped as her grip on the reins went lax.

It wasn’t a village anymore.

Aberfarthing.

Not a single structure was still standing.

Charred, blackened beams and pillars stretched up against the stars like the ribs

of some long dead monster, piles of ash and partially burned thatch strewn about like decaying patches of flesh and scraps

of hair.

The stones of the well at the village center were black with soot, and sunken on one side where the fire had been

hot enough to melt the stone and send it weeping down toward the water below.

Achilles’s skin twitched and rippled, trying to shake off the invisible weight of the destruction around them, and he walked with slow, nervous steps through the ruins.

The air smelled of old, rank smoke and something else, something far more disturbing that made Gwen’s stomach roil with nausea.

Not everyone had made it out of the village alive.

If she lingered here long enough to sift through the rubble, how many charred bodies would she find buried beneath the layers of ash and ruin?

Fury rose within her, so quick and fierce Gwen’s eyes watered with the intensity of it.

If Whimsitt had spared even one man

to go check on the women’s claims that a dragon had attacked their home, the truth would have been undeniable.

No one who

witnessed this scene could have concluded that bandits were responsible, or some careless youngster mishandling a torch.

Not

even the lord of Darkhaven could dismiss this attack as simply imagined by a group of women, lying for attention and hysterical

with superstition.

At the far end of the village, the path ended in a wide clearing at the foot of the mountains.

The entrance to the mines was

no more than a squat, black, rectangular hole at the edge of the clearing.

Gwen swung a leg over Achilles’s saddle and slid to the ground, keeping her palm against his shoulder.

Her big bay stallion

gave a nervous whicker, his eyes rolling and nostrils flaring as he sniffed and snorted.

His senses told him there was danger

here—he could smell the dragon that had made this place its home centuries ago.

Gwen ran her hand over her horse’s cheek and then stroked his neck, running her fingers through his mane until his breath

calmed.

“Stay here,” she whispered to him as his ears flicked and swiveled toward the sound of her voice.

“Unless something

comes—then run.”

She left him untied, wanting him to have the option to flee if the mine was empty and the dragon came flying over while she was inside.

Her mouth had gone dry, and it went drier every time she glanced at the squat little opening into which she had resolved to go.

The miasma of death and sour smoke hung in the air, and Gwen’s every instinct screamed at her to turn and ride away again as fast as Achilles would take her.

Eventually, Lord Whimsitt and the knights would do something.

They would have to, for the dragon was not likely to stop again

so soon after being woken from its sleep—at some point the dragon would attack the castle again.

But it would attack more villages first. Aberfarthing was the closest settlement to its lair, but the destruction would spread,

and the beast would visit its wrath upon countless people unable to fight back.

Any who survived would be like those women

who had come to the dragon bonfire seeking aid—penniless, terrified, with no means or homes to return to.

Gwen found a torch among the mining supplies strewn about the clearing, and after a few too many tries with her flint, got

the thing lit despite her shaking hands.

The light of the flame against the mountainside flickered and wavered far too much.

Gwen retrieved her helmet from Achilles’s saddle, but she left the spear.

It was a weapon for use on horseback, far too long

and heavy for Gwen to use in the tight confines of the mines.

If she could find the beast and catch it unawares, inside the

tunnels, she had a chance—if the dragon managed to get outside, the odds slid wildly in its favor.

Gwen pulled the helmet down onto her head, drew her sword, and stepped into the darkness.

Her breath was harsh and metallic against her visor, too loud to her own ears in the heavy silence of the underground.

The tunnel sloped sharply downward and bent back on itself, so that the exit was swiftly out of sight, leaving Gwen wrapped entirely in stone and the meager, wavering glow from her torch.

Twin ruts in the rocky floor marked the tracks of the mine carts, so she followed those down, ignoring the occasional side passages that opened up in favor of moving deeper into the earth.

Something dry and leathery whispered above and just behind her.

Gwen jumped and nearly dropped the torch, even as she shut

her eyes and told herself, Bats.

It’s bats. It’s only bats, stop cowering!

The sharp pounding in her chest made her stop, turn, and lean back against the wall, trying to catch her breath.

Despite having

seen the beast flying overhead at the tournament, Gwen was not entirely prepared for how desperately afraid she felt.

The

fear was like a monster in itself, infecting her moment by moment, replacing her strong limbs with ones that shook and weakening

the fingers clutched round the hilt of her sword.

What the hell am I doing here?

she thought desperately, closing her eyes and focusing on the air moving in and out of her lungs.

Dupont had taught her a

pattern of breathing that forced the body to relax as a way to combat her nerves before jousting.

Gwen wasn’t sure she’d ever

really mastered it, though, relying instead on her fury at her opponents, at the tournament itself that reduced a human being

to a prize.

Now, the anger she’d felt at seeing the destruction outside paled in comparison with her fear.

Still, Dupont’s breathing exercises worked, even though the air she inhaled was acrid with sour smoke.

Her heartbeat was slowing,

quieting.

Each inhale felt easier, her lungs less tight.

The hand holding the torch steadied enough for the flames to stop

quivering.

And as her mind quieted, Gwen became aware of a soft sound.

At first it seemed to her that she was hearing some distant underground ocean, tides still stirred by the moon invisible beyond the top of the mountain—she heard the rise and fall of the surf, a soft, rhythmic susurration.

The sound was so incongruous, there in the depths of the earth, that Gwen could only stand still in confusion, staring into the darkness beyond her ring of torchlight.

And then a section of shadow beyond the light moved, and all at once the meaning of the sound, the moving shadow, and the

faint rumble that now echoed through the tunnel clicked together into a single, awful truth.

The dragon was there.

It lay just beyond the light of her torch, chest rising and falling in a rhythm like an ancient sea.

Gwen’s body moved of

its own accord, even as her mind froze like a mouse before a deadly serpent—she took one step, and then another, moving as

silently as she could in her heavy armor.

Sweat gathered damply against the padding at her lower back, and dripped, itching,

between her breasts.

The torchlight fell upon a flow of thick scales—an outstretched leg, the foot alone as large as Achilles, each scaled toe

tipped with a black claw as long as Gwen’s leg.

She stepped closer, still strangely distant from her own movements, like an

observer watching some foolish ant about to be annihilated by a booted foot.

Gwen lifted the torch higher.

The dragon lay on its side, its back half out of sight around a curve in the tunnel.

Its body was covered in scales the color of decaying bronze, with shades ranging from deep brown to copper to the pale, putrid green of corrosion.

Its front legs were grotesquely, disproportionately long, forming the arch of the wings, which were currently folded in close against its thick body.

The neck was long and serpentine, and its head rested on the ground, pointed squarely at Gwen.

One of its eyes was a mess of scar tissue, the marks of ancient blades etched into the ridge of scales forming the upper edge of its eye socket.

The other eye was closed.

Slowly, Gwen backed up, moving along the wall until she found a place to wedge the torch.

Then she gripped her sword, breathing

in the bitter scent of latent dragonsfire, and moved in.

Carefully, she stepped between the taloned toes of the monster.

Her armor scraped the tiniest bit, the articulated plates

at hip and knee whispering against each other, and her boots tapped a soft, irregular patter against the stone.

She was close

enough now to feel heat radiating from the creature, not from its body, but from the base of its long, curled neck—the place

from which it brought forth its flames, a burning forge above its heart.

The scales there were long and thicker than Gwen’s arm, impenetrable, but they overlapped much like the articulation on the

joints of Gwen’s armor.

If the beast stretched its neck back far enough, it might be possible to thrust a sword or a spear

between them.

But not while it lay curled up this way.

Gwen crept instead toward the head, approaching the closed eye.

Even these scales on the dragon’s eyelids were thick, but

if she struck at the seam and managed to drive her blade deep enough, she might reach the creature’s brain before it could

react.

Gwen caught her breath, wrapped both hands around the hilt of her sword, and raised it over her head.

The eyelids parted. They were followed by the wet slide of a second cloudy membrane sweeping back from the outer corner of the eye.

A gaping hole of a pupil rolled down from the top of the eye socket, wandered a moment, and then narrowed into a wicked slit, pointed directly at Gwen.

Neither of them moved.

Gwen could see her armored reflection, sword raised, in the huge eye.

Its irises were the color of

molten gold and seethed like cauldrons of liquid fire.

The slitted pupil trembled, adjusting its focus as the creature clawed

its way out of sleep.

Then Gwen drove the sword down, throwing her entire body weight behind the thrust, a scream of effort bursting from her—and

suddenly she was flying, breathless, suspended for two heartbeats in the air until she hit the wall with a horrible metallic

clatter and dropped to the ground.

She’d managed to keep hold of her sword, and she scrambled up, head spinning, to see the

dragon shaking its own head where it had knocked her aside.

It was climbing stutteringly to its feet, though the confines of the tunnel prevented it from standing fully—Gwen would have

thought it ridiculous or pathetic, a dragon crawling on its belly through a tunnel barely large enough to fit its body, if

she’d heard it described to her.

But as its head swung toward her and it lunged into effortless motion, flowing sinuously

along the cavern far quicker than she could move, all hints of the ridiculous vanished.

Gwen threw herself to the side, down one of the excavated tunnels.

Though she could see the light of her torch glinting off

bronze around the corner back the way she came, it didn’t reach far enough to illuminate the darkness ahead of her.

From behind her came a sound that would almost certainly haunt her dreams for the rest of her life: an awful, keening, bubbling roar, like that of a beast with blood in its throat.

She had only an instant to realize what the sound betokened, and saw a brief tableau blossoming into illumination before her—she threw herself down behind a cart loaded with stone as a gout of flame filled the tunnel.

She held her breath as long as she could, and when she finally gasped for air, it scorched her lungs, her eyes watering with

smoke and the acrid stench of the thing.

Her armor was warmer to the touch now than her skin, the air as dry and hot as that

of an oven, hotter than the air above her father’s forge.

She might have passed out if she hadn’t spent so many hours laboring

in those conditions.

Tears streamed from her eyes, and she blinked furiously, blinded by the sudden darkness as the flames

died away.

She focused on trying not to sob, on staying as quiet as she could.

The creature was still waking up.

Gwen didn’t have much time before it was fully alert—and she had only one idea.

She waited, listening to the awful scrape of the scales lining its belly dragging along the stone, each one screeching like

a blade on ceramic.

The thing snuffled and grunted as it searched for her blindly in the dark, seeking the stench of burning

flesh.

Gwen closed her eyes, though it made no difference to what she could see.

She listened, waiting.

The scrape of scales on stone was nearly beside her now, and her mind constructed an image of the beast creeping past the

cart at her back.

She moved slowly, silently, easing out of concealment—she imagined the head was there, just before her,

weaving back and forth as it sought her in the pitch blackness.

A faint glow blossomed to her right, and a wave of dread slid down Gwen’s spine to rest like lead in her belly.

She turned and saw twin orbs of sullen red emerge from the darkness, a low, rumbling growl cutting through the quiet.

The glow brightened and became two trickles of molten flame that spilled forth, dripping from the beast’s flared nostrils inches from where she stood before the tip of its snout.

The flames slid onto the floor of the cave, creating puddles of fire that illuminated the dragon’s head as it turned, the light pooling in its one good eye as it fixed on Gwen.

Gwen knew that this was her last chance, that the dragon’s fire had given her exactly what she needed, enough light to find

her target.

She raised her sword, shifted her weight, and struck—

Except she didn’t.

She hadn’t moved. She was still standing there, motionless, helpless, so close to the dragon she could

have put a hand on its scaled lip if she could move.

Its arms were curled on either side of her, the wings folded so she was

very nearly encased by the creature.

She could not so much as tear her gaze from the seething gold of its one furious eye,

now fully awake.

It held her, even as the pupil scanned side to side, trying to see past the slit in her visor.

Unbidden, old Bertin’s story swept through her mind, his tales of being frozen by the dragon’s gaze.

She remembered the traditional

target of practicing knights everywhere: a suspended ring called a dragonseye.

The fact that the knights of old, centuries

ago, who had died fighting this creature, had taken out the monster’s right eye before succumbing.

She should have known not to look into its eye.

Despair swept through Gwen, but she found she could not so much as tremble, her paralysis was so complete.

Her own eyes began

to water from lack of blinking, and even her ribs refused to shift, her lungs becoming as still as stone.

The dragon’s eye narrowed a touch, and from its throat came a hideous, growling rumble.

The frequency was so low and the sound so raspy that it rippled, a shuddering sound that hit Gwen’s ears like some terrible, mocking chuckle of laughter.

She knew, in that moment, that she was going to die.

But through the despair, rising like a breath of soft, cool air in the parched heat of the tunnels, came a single thought:

Isobelle.

If Gwen was going to die, she would do it thinking of Isobelle’s laugh, not the mockery of this monster.

She would die picturing

her blond hair and blue eyes and her particular way of wrinkling her nose when Gwen said something unexpected.

She would die

thinking of the look on Isobelle’s face when she came to Gwen’s tent after her defeat of Sir Ralph—the sudden lifting of all

her reservations, the joy and yearning and release in those glorious eyes.

Gwen dragged in a breath, chasing away the spots swimming in her vision.

She thought of Isobelle’s arms around her neck, of

waking in the blackberry thicket with Isobelle’s head on her lap, of the way Isobelle’s fists had uncurled and softened as

Gwen held them in hers.

Gwen found she could shift her weight, moving onto the balls of her feet, clawing her way back toward some kind of agency.

She could imagine Isobelle so vividly it was like having her there, standing at Gwen’s side.

Gwen could picture her, hands

on her hips, eyes wide with alarm.

What are you doing? she would cry.

Go on—MOVE!

Gwen felt a groan rise up inside her, a sound that burst into an agonized cry by the time it reached her lips and wrenched her body into movement.

The dragon blinked once in surprise, and that was all the reprieve Gwen needed to lunge forward, stepping up onto its clawed foot and launching herself upward to swing her sword in a glittering arc toward the only vulnerable part of the dragon she could reach.

The wing membrane tore with a long, satisfying rip like that of a canvas tent, spattering the stone with a fine mist of blood

from the delicate capillaries branching out from the creature’s elongated arm.

The dragon let out a scream of fury and pain

so loud Gwen lost all sense, coming back to herself lying flat on her back.

The beast had flung her aside, knocking her helmet

loose—Gwen gulped in a breath of air, dizzy.

A sluglike wave of liquid flame dribbled from the dragon’s mouth, illuminating

the scene in time for Gwen to see its foot come down on her helmet, flattening it as if it were no more substantial than a

costume piece of paper and paste.

Roaring again, the dragon crouched, its muscles bunching—Gwen realized what it was going to do an instant before it launched

itself into the ceiling of the tunnel and erupted through the stone like a whale breaching the surface of the ocean.

Gwen caught the briefest glimpse of the sky overhead as the dragon burst up through the edge of the mountainside in a shower

of house-sized boulders, saw the creature silhouetted for an instant against the pearly white of the waxing moon as it spread

its wings—one whole, one torn—before the rocks and stones came showering down again, bringing the darkness with them.