Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ice flames crash against the wards of the Unseelie Court like a furious avalanche as Jessina tries to force her way inside. Behind her, the rest of the silver dragons hesitate and whip their heads back and forth between their clan leader and the dragons that are still attacking them.
Diana doesn’t hesitate. She and her people surge forward and press the advantage, convincing the blue dragons and the orange dragons to do the same. Dragon fire and ice flames clash in the sky, making steam explode through the air while dark clouds and storm winds howl around them.
My gaze immediately darts to the massive black dragon close to Jessina.
Draven.
He doesn’t hesitate either.
Shooting forward, he aims straight for Jessina’s neck while she is busy trying to break the wards around the Unseelie Court.
My heart lurches as he opens his jaws, trying to rip her throat out.
Jessina, blinded by rage and grief, doesn’t see him coming until he’s already right on top of her.
Whipping her head towards him, she breathes a burst of ice fire straight at his face.
A panicked scream rips from my throat. But Draven meets it with a blast of real dragon fire.
The two forces crash into each other with a crackling and hissing sound that washes over the landscape while Jessina flaps her wings hard and shoots upwards, trying to get on top of Draven.
He swerves in the air and speeds after her.
On her other side, Galen and Lyra breathe torrents of dragon fire at her while Alistair throws even more fire magic at her from another direction. She screams in fury, her head still snapping towards where Bane lies dead on the ground inside the wards.
The moment she’s distracted, Draven strikes.
A massive bolt of white lightning splits the air.
Jessina tries to yank her body out of the way, but her split-second of lost focus is all Draven needs.
The lightning bolt cracks into her front leg. Her muscles spasm, and even her wings stop beating for a second as the lightning courses through her body, making her drop downwards. But most importantly, it makes her open her claws.
Hana and Severin Godblessed plummet straight down as she drops them.
But Galen, who knew exactly what his best friend was doing, was already moving before Draven’s lightning had even struck, and he shoots through the air underneath Jessina while Draven once again aims for her throat.
Severin and Hana crash down on Galen’s back, barely managing to grip his spikes. Jessina roars, but she is forced to twist and snap her teeth at Draven to stop him from tearing her throat out. Lyra swoops down around Galen, circling him and putting herself between him and the rest of our enemies.
“Call everyone back!” I bellow into the churning storm clouds and booming wings before snapping my gaze to the Unseelie King. “Orion—”
“I’m on it,” he replies, already sprinting towards the edge of the wards.
Galen and Lyra shoot straight towards the wards while Jessina is still trying to get past Draven. He claws at her body, forcing her to change direction. Then he lets out a roar that reverberates across the entire landscape.
Purple, orange, and blue dragons immediately disengage from their enemies and start speeding towards the wards. Grey, who brought them all here through his portals, is already back across the border of the Unseelie Court. Sweat lines his brow as he collapses down by a tree and breathes deeply.
“Draven! I yell, my heart almost beating out of my chest.
He needs to make it back through the wards. Jessina has completely snapped. There is no telling what she will do now, and I don’t want my mate to be caught in her insanity.
Galen and Lyra reach the wards around the Unseelie Court at the same time as Orion does. Not hesitating a second, they trust the Unseelie King completely and swoop down so that they’re flying right above the grass as they speed across the border.
It lets them through.
Black smoke explodes into the air as the wards force them to shift back into their human forms.
Five figures hit the ground. The smoke swirls around them as Galen, Lyra, Alistair, Hana, and Severin slam into the grass and roll over and over with the force of the movement.
Our allies in the other dragon clans race towards the wards as well.
But silver dragons are chasing them from behind.
And Jessina is roaring and snapping and clawing at Draven with all her fury.
My pulse pounds in my ears as I watch him dive and swerve while breathing fire at her and shooting bolts of lightning.
The blue, purple, and orange dragons draw closer.
Even in their dragon forms, I can see the hesitation on their faces. All of them slow down as they close the final distance, making the silver dragons almost catch up.
Draven roars at them with all the fury of a commander while slamming massive storm winds into Jessina from the side and then blocking her ice flames with his own fire.
The other dragons, used to obeying the Commander of the Dread Legion without question, immediately pick up speed and shoot towards the border again. The grass trembles in fear as they swoop down closer to the ground.
All of them look down at Orion as they reach the wards.
Most of them brace themselves for impact.
The impact never comes.
All purple, orange, and blue dragons soar right through the wards.
The black smoke that their forced shifts creates is so thick that it blocks both Draven and Jessina from view.
Panic clenches my heart.
Massive impacts hit the wards somewhere on the other side of the smoke.
“Draven!” I scream, my throat tasting like blood.
Jessina roars.
Then the smoke clears, and I find a host of silver dragons trying to straighten again after slamming right into the wards that they chased our allies towards.
My gaze snaps back and forth as I desperately search for Draven.
Outside the wards, Jessina screeches in fury again and shoots ice flames at the impenetrable wards over and over again. Draven is nowhere to be seen. I can’t breathe. Where is my mate? Where is—
Draven swoops down in his half-shift form and lands right in front of me.
My legs give out.
Collapsing down on the ground, I curl my fingers into the soft grass and just gasp air into my lungs. My head rings as I just kneel there on the ground, my mind still trying to process that we all survived this. We all survived.
A shadow falls over me. Then Draven’s fingers appear underneath my chin, tilting my head back. His eyes glitter and there is a slight smirk on his lips.
“I know you love being on your knees before me, but is this really the time, little rebel?” he says in a teasing voice.
And the relief of hearing his usual banter like that makes an exhausted and utterly overjoyed burst of laughter rip from my lungs.
“I’m so sorry!” Hana calls as she and the others run up to us.
Lyra, Galen, and Alistair somehow look entirely unaffected.
As if hitting the ground at full speed like that is an everyday occurrence for them.
I swear there isn’t even a single blade of grass in Lyra’s wavy brown hair.
It just brushes the top of her shoulders merrily as she jogs towards us with Galen on one side and Alistair on the other.
Severin, on the other hand, looks like someone just ran him over with a horse cart.
His flowing beige and gold robes are rumpled and twisted around him, and there are green grass stains on the white garment closest to his body.
His long red hair that is still done up in a braid around his head with that little bun at the top is thoroughly messy.
Strands stick out in every direction, and the long golden tassel that hangs from his bun is completely askew, now hanging down the side of his face instead.
Somewhere in between their very different states is Hana. Her clothes are slightly rumpled and blades of grass cling to her hair, but she looks surprisingly unbothered.
The Unseelie King strides across the ground towards us, looking as put together as always. Not a strand of his long dark blue hair is out of place when he comes to a halt next to Hana. Because, as he has informed me, royalty doesn’t sweat.
“I’m so sorry,” Hana repeats, looking at her king and then flicking a quick glance at the rest of us as well.
“I had to order him to make those shield things. Otherwise, they would never have believed that I was truly broken and would never have taken my word for it when I told them that the wards were down.”
Because this was the plan. This was the plan that I came up with in the Icehearts’ dungeons after they mentioned that they were planning to break Hana and use her to control the leader of the Gold Clan through the dragon steel.
The entire scheme is based on an offhand comment that Jocasta made when she was training me before the Great Games all those months ago now.
I’ve mainly used it while being tortured.
And when I, half-joking, questioned if she had been tortured a lot, she just casually replied that everyone in the Unseelie Court has been trained in how to withstand torture.
That statement had shocked me, because I had no idea that everyone went through that kind of training in this court.
And I bet all of our lives on the assumption that the Icehearts didn’t know that either.
They just looked at Hana, this short and skinny girl with big eyes who speaks with a soft voice and gets distracted easily, and thought that she would be an easy target. Oh, how wrong they were. Hana might be small and soft-spoken. But she is still an Unseelie fae to her core.
So we planned for Hana to pretend to barely hold out against the torture and then pretend to break completely.
The riskiest part was of course convincing Severin to trust us enough to actually put the dragon steel on.
But apparently, his need to restore his clan’s honor and do right by Azaroth was greater than his worry.
Once the Icehearts had the Gold Clan, we knew that they were going to come here to destroy the wards around the Unseelie Court. So our plan was always to have Hana pretend to lower the wards and then lure Jessina in through them so that we could isolate her and kill her that way.
It was a ridiculously overcomplicated plan.
But we have been outsmarted by the Icehearts so many times now.
They wouldn’t fall for just any scheme. They’re too smart, too cunning, for that.
So I knew that we had to play the long game this time.
That we had to use a complex plan with several layers so that they wouldn’t see it coming.
And it worked.
My gaze darts to Bane’s corpse, and then back to Jessina again, who is still attacking the wards like a maniac.
Well, it mostly worked, anyway.
It was supposed to be Jessina who died first. Not Bane.
As if Draven could hear my thoughts, he turns to look at Jessina as well. And so does everyone else.
Severin flicks his wrist. The wards around the Unseelie Court go back to their usual appearance. He never lowered them. He only made them look invisible. Now, they once again appear as if they’re shimmering slightly, like water moving across glass.
All across the ground inside the wards, our allies are dusting themselves off and getting to their feet. Most of them just stare up at Jessina as she continues trying to break the wards down.
Then at last, she appears to accept that they won’t break.
Opening her jaws, she bellows out a deafening roar that makes my heart clench in fear and my blood turn to ice.
But from out there, she can do nothing more.
So she abruptly jerks around and starts flying away across the grass. The other silver dragons follow her.
Tense silence falls over all of us as we watch her speed away.
“All bets are off now,” Draven says, his voice grim. “The only thing holding her sanity together was her mate.”
“So what happens now?” Alistair asks.
“Now, there will be hell to pay.”