Chapter 1 #2
Her entire family was in the castle; they’d been partaking in the very dinner she’d been on her way to attend.
But nobody would be dining now. They had to be rushing to the underground tunnels for protection.
No, wait. Was that her mother and older sister, Nyvia?
Out on the ramparts with their weapons, helping the defenders?
Fel tightened his grip, keeping Syla on her feet and running.
“This way,” he urged. “One of the ancient bunkers is off Three Fountains Street. The Royal Protectors will fight off the dragons.”
“I should go to the temple. There’ll be wounded.”
“Later. Once the attack is over. You have to survive first to heal people.”
Someone in the street ahead screamed, startling Syla into tripping again.
Dozens of people were out now. Maybe hundreds. They were running away from the dragons—or so they thought.
A great blue-scaled beast swooped toward the street.
Its wings tucked in close as it dove, and its maw opened, its fangs dripping saliva.
An icy-faced rider with a gargoyle-bone bow rode on the dragon’s back, no saddle or harness keeping him in place.
Dagger tattoos on his hollow cheeks gave him a fearsome visage.
The man glanced at her but focused on a horse-drawn cart full of wooden kegs, its driver the only person heading to the castle instead of away.
The rider nocked an arrow, but it was his powerful mount that represented the greater danger.
Smoke wafted from the dragon’s nostrils an instant before fire roiled out of its maw.
Fel still had a grip on Syla’s wrist, but he wrapped his arm around her waist and hefted her from her feet as he sprang into a doorway. More curves than leanness, she wasn’t light, but he carried her over his broad shoulder without slowing.
Scant feet away, in the center of the street, the fire struck. It enveloped the cart and rider, the man screaming. An instant later, the cart—no, the kegs—exploded.
Black powder, an analytical part of Syla’s mind processed, even as utter terror gripped her and Fel carried her deeper into a carpenter’s shop.
The shockwave from the explosion struck the buildings on either side of the street, blowing out glass and knocking down walls.
Roofs caught fire, more people screamed, and the dragon…
Syla couldn’t see what happened to the dragon, but she imagined it flapping casually away while its rider grinned with pleasure at the kill.
Cries of pain grew audible once the explosion faded. For the first time, Syla squirmed, trying to escape Fel’s grasp.
“I need to help,” she said.
Overhead, a beam snapped. Not five feet away, a flaming section of the ceiling fell to the floor, hurling sparks over furniture and workbenches.
Swearing, Fel spun to put his back to the fire to protect her. “I’m getting you to the bunker.”
“I appreciate your adherence to duty, but—” Syla squirmed again, wanting her own two feet under her, longing to do her job, not run away when people were in pain, “—I’m a healer.
A gods-blessed healer.” She waved the back of her hand at him, as if he might have forgotten the quarter-moon-shaped birthmark that she and her close relatives had, hereditary gifts that imbued them with the power to help the kingdom when needed.
“I can keep people from dying,” she added as Fel dragged her toward a back door.
“There’ll be plenty of people who need that at the bunker.”
Between his arm around her and the smoke and heat in the shop, she felt frustrated and claustrophobic and tried again to free herself. She might as well have been attempting to escape iron shackles.
Fel thrust open the back door and started into an alley but halted abruptly, swearing again.
Thanks to whatever distracted him, Syla twisted free and set her feet on the floor.
His arm tightened around her waist, but he didn’t lift her again.
Instead, he unhooked his mace from his belt and glowered across the alley toward the rooftop of the building behind theirs.
Flames leaped from the gutters of both structures, but Syla saw what he saw.
A green dragon even larger than the first perched atop a chimney, its size dwarfing it and the building underneath.
Its scales gleamed, reflecting the dancing flames all around it, but the creature seemed impervious to the heat.
As did its rider, an athletic-looking man in black leathers, including fingerless black gloves.
He was striking, with bronze skin and wild, windswept black hair framing a lean, angular face.
His emerald eyes matched the scales of the dragon.
She had no trouble noticing those eyes because the man was staring down at her.
His dragon looked toward the castle, and its muscles bunched under its scales, as if it meant to spring into action at any moment, but he…
his eyes locked not onto her face but her hand. The moon-mark.
Realizing it would make her a target, Syla tucked her arm behind her back. But it was too late. He’d seen it.
Fel raised his mace and crouched, prepared to defend her, even against a rider and a dragon. Even if there was no chance that he could survive the encounter.
The dragon’s head swung around on its long neck so that it also looked at Syla. Terror gripped her, and she wished she hadn’t slowed Fel down, that they’d already reached the bunker. As he’d pointed out, she wouldn’t be able to heal people if she were dead.
“That’s Captain Vorik Wingborn,” Fel growled, drawing her back through the doorway and under cover, out of the line of sight of their enemies.
She could still see the bottom of the dragon, those talons gripping the chimney.
“Warrior, archer, and storm-possessed bastard,” Fel continued, “whose hobby has been sinking every third cargo or merchant ship that’s sailed beyond the protection of the sky shielders these last ten years.”
Syla doubted they would make it to the bunker. The captain hadn’t yet attacked, but more dragons flew overhead, their roars drowning out the screams of fear and pain coming from all over the city.
Would anyone in the capital survive this?
A war horn blew in the distance, from across the sea.
The green dragon shifted on the chimney, as if the call beckoned it, and crouched to spring.
Before it did, its great tail lashed out like a whip, long enough to cross the alley and slam down onto the carpentry shop. The roof above Syla and Fel collapsed.
As stone and wood crashed down, Fel sprang atop her, using his body to protect her as the great weight crushed them to the floor and buried them.