15. Eradin
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ERADIN
The world snapped back sideways.
Stone bit through my boots and sky pressed down like a hand on my skull, while my stomach remained in the between-space, scattered across the nothing where magic had torn me apart and knit me back together.
I fell forward, hitting the ground. Sand scraped my palms, too hot, and I retched. Nothing came up.
Six of us left.
The second trial waited.
Around me, the other survivors materialized in stages.
The woman about my age appeared on her hands and knees, vomit already pooling underneath her.
The red-haired man solidified upright, but his legs gave way.
He toppled to the ground and lay still, staring at the grains of sand.
Only the gray-bearded man managed to stay on his feet, though his face had gone the color of old snow.
The dragons came last, lurching into existence beside their assigned riders. Still saddled and harnessed. Staked down like they’d flee. Lykor’s chain snapped taut as he tried to back away from wherever we’d landed, his wings half-spread, his breathing ragged.
The scale in my pocket flared hot against my thigh, branding my skin. I sucked in a breath and shifted it beneath the fabric. The heat didn’t fade. If anything, it intensified, a pulse that matched my heartbeat.
Another heartbeat. Bigger. Somewhere else.
No, it wasn’t just a heartbeat. A question. The wild dragon, wherever she was, was asking, where are you?
And underneath that, the maze. She recognized it or something like it. Fear spiked through our connection, sharp enough I gasped.
She was as afraid of this as she had been of the Oracle.
I yanked my hand away. The heat lingered, a ghost-touch that crawled up my spine and lodged in my brain.
Waiting.
No, not waiting.
Coming.
The certainty hit like a fist in the gut. Something was coming for me, and the scale knew before I did.
I pushed myself to my feet and forced my eyes to focus.
An arena. Stone rising on all sides, stands filling with elites who materialized as smoothly as stepping through doorways. Not one stumbled. A woman in yellow silk appeared mid-laugh. A man blinked into existence holding wine, the liquid undisturbed.
They cushioned the magic for themselves while we were given violence.
Ahead, the next trial gaped, a throat carved into a valley, walls climbing until they met a strip of sky too narrow to matter. Iron mesh hung overhead, a net to keep dragons from flying over, or to keep us from flying out if our dragons bucked us off.
Watch for timing. Spires. The net overhead. The prince’s words, either a gift or forewarning of my upcoming death.
Scorch marks layered the stone, black on black, some old enough the rock had fused to glass. The sand appeared darker near the entrance, stained with something that had soaked deep.
Runes crawled along the walls of the course in lines I could track even from here. They pulsed with light, a warning written in a language I didn’t understand.
Fire maze, per Prince Fenian.
This was a killing ground. It had been for decades.
The viewing boxes rose above the stands, cushioned seats and silk canopies. I didn’t let myself look for him. But Prince Fenian would be there, watching us die the way his father had, and I couldn’t afford to wonder what his face looked like while he did it.
Betting slips changed hands before I’d gotten the sand out of my mouth. Coins clinked. A child pointed at the red-haired man and said something that made the adults around him laugh.
We weren’t riders here. We were odds.
Servants moved through the rows with food and wine. Musicians started playing a lively tune completely incongruous to what was about to take place. Many laughed, the sound carrying across the open expanse where we stood with dragons that had already been broken.
Eight of us had entered the first course. Six had survived the first round. Would any of us be standing by the time the day was through?
Their screams still echoed in my mind. The wiry man who’d tried to kill me, falling onto stone teeth. The sunburned man who’d nodded at me in the courtyard, his kind eyes going blank somewhere in that wind-torn gap.
An official stepped forward, his voice amplified by magic until it echoed off the walls.
“The next trial is a fire maze. Flames will erupt from the runes at irregular intervals. You and your dragon must make your way through the gaps.” He gestured to the entrance, a dark mouth cut into the nearest wall. “Riders will enter one at a time.”
“Watch out for the net overhead. Time…something,” I whispered to the others, though they were far enough away I wasn’t sure they heard. I’d go to them if the handlers weren’t watching.
Marda met my gaze and nodded.
I walked over to Lykor’s head and hummed. He stopped thrashing, trying to escape the binding, and settled.
His scales had dulled to ash-gray, but up close I could see more.
Burn scars webbed his left flank, pale twisted skin where scales had never grown back.
A few holes riddled the delicate membrane of his wings.
Burns that had healed badly, leaving puckered scars and gaps that would never close properly.
He’d competed in the Scorching, and it had broken something inside him that healing magic couldn’t touch.
And now I was about to make him do it again.
Unless I didn’t.
I could forfeit. Walk away. Let them call me a coward while Tolross died slowly in Shaleside.
Or I could climb on this broken dragon’s back and break him further.
I couldn’t drag in a breath. The moment I signed that waiver, I’d chosen my brother over everything else, and that choice was a blade I’d swallow every day for the rest of my life, however long that turned out to be.
I breathed in through my nose. Out through the mouth. My mother’s trick for when the world became too much.
It didn’t work. The world was always too much.
The official’s voice cut through again, and he pointed to the older woman. “First rider. Begin.”
No pairs this time, then.
More bets erupted.
The older woman paused before mounting, reaching up to touch the dragon’s neck once. Gentle, like she was apologizing. Then she climbed into the saddle, and the dragon launched upward, its wings snapping out. It flew through the fire maze’s entrance.
The viewing enchantment activated, and images appeared above the arena in a shimmer that quickly solidified, this time they were back far enough even we could see what happened inside the maze.
They navigated the first turn. The woman was doing fine, her dragon responding to the reins, banking carefully around the corner. The second turn came and flames erupted from runes along the ground. But she’d timed it right. They flew through the gap as fire churned behind them.
My heart skipped. She was going to make it.
Three runes flared at once.
Her dragon tried to dodge, its wings snapping it left, but the corridor was too narrow. Its right wing clipped the stone wall, and they spiraled down. The dragon tried to pull up, but the corridor was too narrow, or they were going too fast, and the stone caught them wrong.
Two shrieks echoed back at us, dragon and woman, braided together. My breath caught halfway down and stuck there, my ribs locked around it.
I counted because I couldn’t stop myself.
One. Two. Three.
The screams kept going.
Four. Five. Six.
Ten. Fifteen.
The blonde woman clapped her hands over her ears. The gray-bearded man turned away.
Seventeen. Twenty.
Silence dropped like a guillotine before sound rushed back all at once. The musicians playing. The nobles laughing. My pulse slamming hard in my ears.
The official’s voice echoed. “Cleared for retrieval.”
All those names the woman had been saying, and I’d never learned hers.
A crew of commons emerged from a side entrance, pulling wagons and carrying shovels. They entered the maze.
We waited.
The crowd went back to their wine. Their betting slips. A servant popped into view with a tray of sweets, and three nobles took pieces without pausing their conversation.
I could watch the next rider. Learn from their mistakes. Or I could watch Lykor. Figure out what he needed from me before I asked him to fly into fire again.
The crowd leaned forward, hungry for the next death.
I turned my back on the viewing enchantment and scratched along his jaw hinge.
Inside the maze, the retrieval crew’s shovels scraped stone. The sound carried, metal on rock, rhythmic.
Ten minutes became fifteen. The scraping stopped and wagon wheels creaked.
The smell reached us before the crew emerged.
Burned meat and charred leather. Not much of it.
Not enough there for a person and a dragon.
Wasn’t there more to collect? Or had they scraped off the surface and left the rest behind?
Bile surged up my throat. I swallowed it back, my teeth clenched enough to ache.
Lykor’s breath hitched on exhale, the same sound I’d heard in the canyon. I stroked his jaw hinge again and felt his heartbeat beneath my fingertips, too fast, too hard.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
His rheumy eye found mine.
The scale in my pocket flared again, hotter now. The wild dragon was trying to show me something, pushing impressions through the connection the way she had in the forest.
Stone walls. Runes glowing red. A pattern that wasn’t random but deliberate.
Ah, yes.
The runes fired in sequence, and if you knew the rhythm, you could see the gaps before they appeared. But knowing wasn’t enough. The dragons had to feel it. Had to sense the heat gathering before the fire came.
Lykor couldn’t. Not anymore. Whatever they’d done to him had torn that instinct from his body.
Pressure built behind my ribs. The wild dragon was trying to help me. But she was showing me something Lykor didn’t have.
Marda went next. I forced myself to watch. Not the rider, but her dragon. The way it hesitated before entering each turn. The way its good wing beat harder to compensate for the crooked one.
The beast sensed the timing. I could see it in how it leaned before the flames came. But when the dragon’s damaged wing failed to follow the cue at the fourth turn, knowledge wasn’t enough.
The impact echoed. Flames followed.
I looked away before the screaming stopped, pressing my hand over the scale in my pocket. The heat had settled into a rhythm now, a pulse that wasn’t my own. Faster than mine. Stronger.
The retrieval crew scraped their shovels again, and another rider was called.
The red-haired man made it through, though his dragon’s flank came away blistered. Then the gray-bearded man. His dragon’s wing caught fire on the last turn, but he kicked the beast into a dive that saved them both. Barely.
Two deaths. Three survivors.
The pattern was becoming clear. The dragons that made it through weren’t the ones that were best at following commands. They were the ones whose riders felt the hesitation and adjusted before the dragon faltered.
Marda had figured out the maze, but she hadn’t known how to cue her dragon.
My hands were shaking again. I shoved them in my pockets and the scale burned against my palm like a demand.
Fly.
The word wasn’t mine. It came through the scale, through the connection to the wild dragon.
I pulled my hand away, my palm red and tender.
Then the official’s gaze found mine.
“Next rider,” he called out. “You.”
It was my turn to die.