Chapter 8
TAMSYN
I COULD KILL THEM.
It was a knowledge that slithered and clung to my mind like the silk of a spider’s web. This dark whisper wove through me as we inched closer to my reunion with Stig.
Killing these soldiers was the obvious tactic to take and completely within my power. Even with their bone swords, I could catch them off guard and end them. Killing them went along with everything I had been taught over these long months in the pride.
Save yourself.
Save the species.
Leave no witnesses.
In keeping with that, it was an honorable recourse. My duty even. I would then be free to find Vetr and the others and finish out this rekon.
I could not permit myself to reach Stig and his regiment. I had to escape before then because there would be no escape after.
I reminded myself that I had done it before.
Arkin had forced my hand in his killing.
It was in me, buried deep, this ability to wreak ruin and devastation, my secret talent that burned and cleansed and ended life.
I could change form at a whim now. I was practiced and more in control.
I knew how to manifest into my dragon with very little effort. If I willed it, it would happen.
I stared at the men riding beside me, at the stretch of open road in front of us. Behind us. Well, two men and a boy, really.
The third soldier, Frode, had just turned eighteen and was immediately conscripted.
Another recent development under Stig’s regime.
Every household in Penterra was obliged to offer one child to Stig’s northern army.
It didn’t matter if the family only had one child, as in Frode’s case.
This was his first time away from home, and I could not get the idea of Frode’s parents out of my mind.
I’d learned they both owned a bakery in the City, and I envisioned them with their sweating pink cheeks, working in the warmth of their kitchen, waiting for their boy to come home.
Frode was wide-eyed and wore an expression of perpetual anxiety. I doubted he even knew how to properly wield his sword. He would be easy to kill. All three would present no challenge. I could do it now and be done with it.
If only killing came easily.
Even when I suspected what these men had done, even when gray-green eyes haunted me in a way that would stay with me for the rest of my life, it wasn’t in me to simply … kill.
So I kept my fire to myself as we traveled east, leaving the coastline and the briny sea air behind.
In my frequent surveys of the road ahead of us and behind us, I almost expected to see Vetr and the others trailing me—or catch glimpses of them in the brush edging the road. I did not.
I understood why they let me go. And yet they had done it so easily. Not a blink or flicker of emotion on their faces as I was hauled away.
I understood why.
I wasn’t one of them. Not really. I had tried. They had tried. For a year we had all tried.
It hadn’t worked.
I recalled their shocked expressions when I’d been recognized, when the truth of my past had been revealed. Perhaps they believed me more trouble than I was worth, and they thought themselves well rid of me.
My new companions were armed with gear appropriate for combat with dragons. That only made sense. Stig would have implemented such weapons among his soldiers after our encounter.
His army now wielded the swords of old—the kind that had been packed and stored away after the last dragon was slain (or so humans believed) by Balor the Butcher. An entire section of the palace dungeon had stored weapons deemed outdated and far too heavy for routine use.
No more. These weapons had been exhumed and brought to the surface, returned to the light of day—a fact that displeased my companions.
In the day since we’d left Porthavn, the burdensome weight of bone swords was a frequent complaint among them, as were the shields of dragon scales affixed to their saddles.
My companions were chatty. They did not mind passing the time talking to me, sharing and answering my questions. I took advantage of the opportunity to learn all I could about this new world that my old world had become.
Frode admitted he was nervous about moving to such a barbaric place as the Borderlands, a remark I found ironic considering Stig’s practices.
Fell never brutalized innocent people. Quite the opposite.
He’d been looking out for the people of the Borderlands, trying to ease the hardship in their lives.
Stig was somewhere to the west of the coast with a regiment of nearly a thousand soldiers.
I was astonished to learn the size of the force he commanded.
He’d already brought a large force with him when he’d come north a year ago.
He’d ventured to the south for more. It did not bode well.
Why did he need so many soldiers? What did he intend to do with them?
I was afraid I already knew. He would continue delivering his particular brand of terror to the Borderlands while also pushing into the Crags—to find me and other dragons. That was his mission. To prove he was right and not afflicted by crazed theories.
To rekindle the Threshing.
The more I learned, the more I understood this, and the greater the doom that sank into me, spreading through my marrow.
“He is imaginative, I’ll give him that.” Ari rode the closest beside me. Of all the soldiers, he was the one who looked at me with speculation, as though he still halfway feared I might sprout scales and a tail. “His lordship insists that you change shape.” His gaze caught and held mine.
They all three stared at me, as though permitting themselves to consider this.
“Imaginative, indeed,” I agreed. “I am just a woman,” I insisted, pasting an indulgent smile on my face.
“Even if not the one you think I am.” I still clung to the argument that I was not Lady Tamsyn.
I couldn’t very well confess to that particular truth.
It might make them wonder what else I was lying about.
Jorgen shrugged. “If I’m mistaken, you have my apologies.” But the look in his dark gaze told me he did not think he was wrong. He knew who I was. I saw it in his eyes every time he looked at me, no matter how I clung to my denial. Thankfully, that was the only truth he knew.
Ari, however, sent me trepidatious looks. He possessed a healthy respect for magic and was not so convinced I couldn’t be a dragon.
I sent him a smile, hoping to reassure him.
He blinked, looking even more nervous. My smile slipped.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed his trepidation.
“Ari,” Jorgen said, his tone dry and a little weary, as though he had endured enough of the man’s misgivings and was quite done.
“Think, man. If she was a dragon, would she let us take her so easily?” He motioned widely at the road upon which we traveled.
“Would she permit us to merely lead her to Lord Sader and what would doubtlessly be her demise?”
Ari nodded in agreement, looking grim and, suddenly, far more shrewd than his fellow comrades as he held my gaze. “Right you are, Jorgen. Right you are.”
THERE WAS NO rest in sleep.
No peace, no ease, no relaxing of bones, no unwinding of muscle and mind and spirit. This kind of sleep, this kind of darkness, caged me like a prison.
A sealed box.
Unrelenting.
Absolute.
So complete and invasive, pooling around me like viscous blood, allowing in no light, no air, no space, no respite at all.
There was only terror. Panic climbing up my throat, knifing over skin that felt too tight for my frame, as though my flesh had contracted, screaming over my bones.
I knew I slept. Knew I was trapped in a dream. A nightmare.
I told myself this, but it offered no comfort.
I urged myself to wake, pleaded with myself to open my eyes, to sit up, to end this torment, but I could not.
I was stuck, ensnared in cloying, clinging blackness.
Cold and heavy as a wet blanket. Bitter as a wind that felt like needles on my flesh.
This was a different kind of frigid that I had never felt before.
It was the kind felt only in death, when life was slipping away, fading, gone.
Vanishing like melting snow; like the slow, dissolving ebb of smoke.
I knew this somehow, despite never being dead before.
I knew it as one knows how to breathe, how to blink, how to swallow. It was involuntary. Innate. I knew it as one knows things beyond oneself in a dream.
I should not feel a dream so keenly, but I did.
I should not be so stuck and unable to wake myself, but I was.
Corpse cold. So deep and thorough, the chill went past skin, past sinew and muscle, burrowing deep into my core, deep into the bone, sinking, marking … scarring.
This was death. A living death. I knew it. Recognized it on a primal level.
Stuck in a box. Not even space enough to shift my legs. A tomb without room to stretch my arms out at my sides.
Dark silence pushed all around me like hands folding together, clasping me tightly, clenching, squeezing, pushing the air out of me, crushing my ribs. Leaving only pain … the beat of my heart, the scratch of my breath.
The world, life, was too far away to reach. It didn’t belong to me anymore, or I to it. I belonged to this now. A merciless void.
The fingers of my mind ached, strained, joints cracking and popping as I stretched, as I reached for it, for salvation, for anyone. It was just … there. A slippery tether. A faint pulse. A sleepy hum. Distant but there. An echo. A fluttering link.
Longing choked me. Longing … and regret.
So much regret, the weight of it greater even than the darkness bearing me down.
Desperately, I groped.
And touched nothing.
No air. No light. No room to move. No escape. No rescue. Buried. Existing but not living.
I WOKE WITH a scream lodged in my throat.
I caught and held it there, keeping the sound from finding air, as though that would only fuel it.