Page 58 of To Touch A Silent Fury

I knew where her tribe was; I’d learnt to avoid them over the years. Yvon had warned me long ago to keep out of sight. The best I could hope for was them thinking I was a lone Euphon. It wasn’t uncommon to live alone in the forest and many did, those whose hearing was too sensitive to live with any noise but their own.

But she had touched me. Yvon had never touched me, and I was too busy reeling from the touch, the only touch I had felt in years, to process her words.

It was only when she was long out of sight and sound that it turned in my mind, scratching something around my head like a broken music box.

You were once kind to another lonely girl.

Sollie.

She helped me for Sollie.

I stared down at the moonstone in my gloved palm, and my hand tightened around it.

15

Lang

The acrid smoke filled my lungs as I turned from the clearing for a second, blinking fast.

“How many more weeks of this?” Foxlin grumbled, holding his torch with a grim forbearance.

He was half a face nowadays, the lower part of it lost to an oily beard and the rest of him submerged in thick, dark clothing. The smouldering embers of yet another blazing pile of nothing warmed the shadows under his wyvern-amber eyes.

“It means we still have hope,” I replied.

Foxlin laughed, casting his hand out at the bleak trees around us. I had preferred them snow-capped; now everything in the forest was muddy and grim. “We’ve been chasing fires all Ergreen. How can you find any hope left in this festering forest?”

“Because if the fires stop, that means we missed it.”

Foxlin scanned my expression, and finally sighed. “I’m starting to believe there is no dragon. We’d have better luck discovering one of Mephluan’s nymphs.”

I smiled, but it didn’t reach my eyes. “I’m sure that’s exactly what they want us to think.”

Foxlin turned back to the fire. This one had been a grass fire, and it was the second one we’d visited that night.

I watched my men trawl the debris for any dragonsign, but I already knew they’d find none. It was too deliberately constructed, and there was no crater or true smoulder to indicate the sort of heat a dragon would produce.

“Do you think they’re out there now?” he asked. Any fear he had of the forest dwellers seemed to have been lost now after years in their company and now weeks of this fresh torment. Of course, we were wary, we had to be. But true fear was too exhausting. “Watching us?”

In the last five years, since the Brothers had foretold Vellintris’ coming, I’d spent weeks in Gossamir’s clutches, then months, and then in the last year, my father bade me not to leave until the task was done.

Well, that wasn’t strictly so; he had always offered me a choice. I could come home, choose a wife, and let my brother Banrillen deal with Vellintris. He knew he offered me no real choice, but not for the reasons he believed.

Chaethor had been the one and only egg of a now passed ruby dragon, Andillin. Andillin had mated with Skirmtold, we presumed, and laid her egg. My grandfather, Norgallin the Hammer, killed Andillin and took the egg, but he had no dragonbreath hot enough to hatch it. The egg had lain dormant for twenty years, for the bulk of that time sitting next to the fireplace in Banrillen’s quarters. Braxthorn had declared that Kallamont would use his fire to hatch it when my brother reached his third span. Until I stole the egg and dragged it to the war room to make my case to Braxthorn on why the dragon should be mine instead.

I was only two spans old, and already I knew my brother’s cruelty far too well.

My father believed I was as power hungry as he was. A motivation he understood, and even respected, and as such, I did not correct him. The people here hated me, but they had no idea what would have been in store had my father or my brother been in charge. If it was my life’s work to keep my brother from these ancient creatures, then it would be well lived.

I nodded. “I am sure their eyes are on us, always.”

Two men approached us, then, stepping through the grey smoke and damp mud. I watched them as they bowed shallowly, too exhausted for more. A somewhat famous captain, and his somewhat infamous ensign.

The captain cleared his throat. “Your Grace.”

“At ease, Ravillin,” I replied.

A dirty and bearded Lord Ravillin straightened from his bow, but he barely relaxed. His hand was still on the hilt of his sword, and I couldn’t tell if the shining fear in his eyes was due to the dangers around us, or me.