Chapter Twenty-Two
The morning did not dawn bright. Or warm.
Or even dry. A glance to the east suggested that the day wasn’t going to improve any.
Salvadora was in an odd mood too. The whole journey back, she’d been on and on about reuniting with Lord Aurexian, but now she wasn’t bothered.
Given what had happened to me, I wondered what she’d been fed.
The Stable Master was affronted that I even asked, but he had a look at her too and admitted she wasn’t the way he’d known her previously.
“She’s probably just tired. You’ve been travelling what? Fourteen days.”
Fifteen thanks to last night’s delay.
She was more than tired, this was pharmaceutical. “Do you have anything that counteracts dragonbalm?”
He scowled at me. “She didn’t get fed any of that here.”
With a deep breath I push down the rising red. “I know my dragon, this isn’t like her.”
“I don’t care,” the stable master snapped. “No one in this stable will have given her dragonbalm. I keep that stuff under lock and key, and no one got into it.”
Helpful. Still, it was only an hour to fly to Unkea.
To Ang. Oh I couldn’t wait to see his face again.
To hug him. Kiss him. Do … what grown consenting men did.
It was best to get underway as soon as possible.
Dora could sleep off whatever this was under Fenwick’s watchful eye.
Another glance at the grey skies, which oddly felt like a welcome home, and I got her to mooch out to the landing platform.
Her mind felt sluggish as I reached out.
Her reactions were slow, but at least she spread her wings and we were airborne.
There would be no playing on this journey.
I just wanted to get home, to be with Ang.
It took perhaps fifteen minutes for me to relax into the ride.
Dora was still lethargic, but there was no need for anything else.
We were used to inclement weather. There was nothing here we could not cope with.
So with the long lazy beat of wings we flew on.
The fireball came out of nowhere.
Dora screamed and dipped, her left wing singed, the sparks showered me but came to nothing, the hiss as the mis-aimed strike hit the sea was raw. I felt Dora screaming out to Lord Aurexian, but as I scanned the skies above and behind, three red dragons appeared in wing formation.
Copper flooded my throat and pounded through my body.
Urging Dora to speed would have been wasted effort.
She couldn’t go faster, her wing was in pain.
I looked to my left, the feathers were scorched, and the exposed skin below was blistering.
Reaching out, I splayed my fingers over the supracoracoideus muscle.
There, I activated my magic and reached out.
My healing wasn’t designed for treating anything major or even anything dragon, but all the lessons with Ang and Fenwick had strengthened my magic.
I had to act because we were in the middle of the ocean.
If Dora couldn’t fly, we were both going to drown.
I concentrated on taking the heat out of the skin, on making it whole.
A glance up. Dora and I had flown together long enough, I didn’t have to scream the word “Incoming!” as another fireball sped towards us, I just saw it and calculated when she should furl her wing in.
One wing in turned us further out to sea.
Dora was still screaming for Aurexian. I couldn’t hear a response, but unless Dora channelled that to me, I wouldn’t.
Our flight path unsteady and losing altitude, I had to twist in my seat to watch what our hunters were doing.
Each time telling Dora what we needed, instinct over mathematics.
But Ang wasn’t the only one who knew aerial ballistics and the three behind us were using that to force Dora into the path of their rapid fire.
Dragon scales even on an ice breather like Dora could easily withstand heat, but her feathers couldn’t, and they were aiming for those.
Desperate to be more than a sitting duck, I gave Dora a plan.
She flipped, and I only just held on as she looped under herself then accelerated up in a death-defying, near-vertical climb right through the bunching of the attack wing.
As she reached parity with the lead dragon, the two of them chest to chest, it roared, mouth open for another flame, but Dora streamed her ice right down its throat, then we were above them.
I smelt scorched flesh and heard desperate flapping, scrabbling.
Then came the man’s scream. Dora had left an ice dam in that rodding dragon’s throat that not only stopped the fire escaping, forcing it back into the dragon’s own innards, but stopped the thing from breathing.
The dragon fought but failed. It fell from the sky and into the ocean.
The roars of the other two dragons split the sky like a jagged knife wound.
I didn’t know how much longer I could hold on in this position.
As Dora finally levelled out, we were higher, but not as high as I would have liked.
Being a blue, she could cope with higher altitudes than the reds. She was built for colder climes.
The other two were coming after us, hard and fast. It was impossible to avoid all their hits, but I concentrated as much healing as I could on Dora’s wings. There hadn’t been a reason to travel armed on this trip. I knew Dora’s paws were scorched, I could feel her pain, but we needed her wings.
I ignored the heat of burnt leather, my own scorched skin and focused on Dora, on getting us out of this alive.
Another volley of fireballs and Dora was in a spin. A fireball went wide and as we spun again, I saw three dragons and Riders incoming. The lead dragon was white. Lord Aurexian. Ang.
The white flew straight and true at the reds.
Ice streamed from Aurexian’s maw and he drove in, taking a chunk of the dragon’s neck, dragging it up and out of formation with its partner.
Another twist showed me other dragons, riderless.
Dragons I recognised from Unkea. They were all screaming and they fell on our attackers.
I didn’t have time to thank them or appreciate the show.
Dora wasn’t spinning, she was plummeting.
Her right wing was part extended, the feathers mere stubs, but she could hardly stretch out the left wing. I forced her to lift her head, raise her neck. Where the neck went, the body would follow. But it wasn’t enough. We had mere seconds before a cold wet grave closed over us.
We rose.
For a moment I thought a miracle had happened and Dora had recovered, but as we were forced up, I was forced forward over the seat bone, and I looked down to see the sleek long white neck of Lord Aurexian beneath us.
He was lifting us up. On the power of his wings we were rising in the sky. Unkea appeared on the horizon.
Ang! The wind whipped my breath away too much for me to scream the name. We were speeding towards the Fortress, faster than I’d ever know. The desperation was pulsing off Aurexian and Dora alike.
No. There was a reason that dragons were never ridden one below the other. Misjudge the height and the rider on the lower dragon could be crushed between the two massive beasts.
There was no time for finesse. Aurexian crashed onto the landing platform, throwing Dora loose.
My trauma brain reminded me of Fin’s first flight, of his rolling and laughing.
But I was already struggling with breath and burning eyes as I rolled away from Dora, no perfectly executed emergency dismount, just a crash to the granite.
My ankle and knee gave way, but I didn’t care.
I rose as soon as I could, took one look and ran.
Hurdling Dora’s neck seared agony up my left side, but I had to get to the prone form of Ang, lying too still on the cold granite.
“No!” I don’t know if the word left my ragged throat, but I skidded to his side and leaned over him. His eyes were closed. Blood leaked from his mouth. I turned him to his back. His torso was the wrong shape. Broken ribs pierced his flesh and his uniform.
No. I couldn’t allow this. Sniffing back the anguish, I pushed his ribs back into his body.
Gathering what strength and magic I had left, I channelled every memory of Boutros’s teaching and every last iota of my power into imagining his bones reconnecting, his chest reforming, his lungs expelling blood and filling with air.
His gasp didn’t reach me. His heart had to beat.
The pulse beneath my fingers spoke louder than he could.
Air burned in my lungs. My heart was pounding.
Hands pulled me away.
“He needs—”
“I have him.” Boutros’s voice. Boutros, a healer as good as any medic I had ever known.
I leaned back against whoever had me, and I watched as Ang’s limbs were straightened and healed.
Around me I could hear movement, shouts of direction, people caring for Dora.
I cared but had no energy to respond to anything.
I looked into Ang’s ocean deep blue eyes, watched him take a blink that took forever, and saw that life had returned to him. Tears streamed down my face.
“You saved him.”
“No,” Boutros said. “You saved him. He’d have been beyond my reach by the time I got here if you hadn’t done what you did.”
He moved to my side. “Now for you.”
I shook my head, but he moved my leg straight and agony flooded out of me in a scream that rang around the world. Heat flooded me, pain compounded on agony, compounded on suffering. Then it stopped. Just stopped.
I looked down.
My leg was straight. I risked moving my foot. “Wow.”
“What?” Boutros asked. “You’ve been healed before.”
“I’ve healed myself before,” I corrected. “I never broke a bone before, didn’t know what that felt like. Thank you.”
“Thank him later.” The tall, black-haired figure stood behind him. “Time we got in out of this rain.”
I hadn’t even noticed it was raining. But as Ang and Boutros helped me to my feet, I turned around to see Gahunia had been behind me and nodded my thanks to him too.
We headed inside. Ang led us straight to the dining hall, Boutros made us sit then found mugs, poured something into them and put them in front of us.
“You’re both going to need some time to recover from the healing process,” he said.
I knew he was right. My body had been healed, but every fibre was screaming with exhaustion.
“Do you know why you were attacked?”
I looked up from my mug to Boutros as he sat across the table. Pain sliced down my left arm. I tried to fix on him. Someone punched me in the chest. My sight rose, the wall, the ceiling.
Ang called my name from the other side of the world.
Something hit my back.
The lights went out.
Ang was screaming at me to come back.
Come back from where?
“Shock him.” Boutros gave the strangest order.
In the dark I lay, a slight tingling tickled my chest.
“Shock him,” Boutros said again. “The body is all electrostatic impulses. Shock his heart back to beating.”
Was someone sobbing? I wasn’t sure, it was so far away. I felt a jolt. What was that? Where did if come from?
“Again. More.”
Something warm lay over my chest, a flash of light in the darkness, more tingles in my chest.
“Again. More.”
“I’ll kill him.”
“He’s already dead if you don’t.”
Warmth returned to my chest, more went to my side. Power flashed.