Chapter 25 Tamsyn
TAMSYN
THE WORLD EXPLODED ALL AROUND ME, BUT NOT BECAUSE of anything I did.
There was no fire. I never even had a chance to release it. Crackling flames never made it past my lips.
The world was pandemonium.
I was free of the furious onslaught of boots. Trembling, I lowered my arms, blinking through an opaque cloud of snow and dirt and bits of rock raining down. It smelled and tasted of loam and minerals.
Lifting my head up higher from the cradle of my arms, I spotted Kerstin and scrambled over to where she hugged the ground.
The soldiers’ screams congested the air, thick as the swirling, choking wind.
A great whooshing sound filled my ears, shaking me where I crouched low … louder even than the warriors’ screams. I lifted myself a little higher, tentative, searching, trying to piece together what was happening, trying to identify the danger—the danger I must now fight.
The wind blew violently and there was a roar that flung back my fur mantle and cloak from my body, whipping my hair back from the roots, clawing at my eyes until they streamed salty tears from the corners.
Several loud cracks rang out.
Blood steeped the air, the coppery scent filling my nose, coating my tongue.
Weapons clanged. Pebbles and rocks stormed around us, one striking me in the cheek, and I dropped flat over Kerstin, feeling the wet slide of my blood on my face.
Gasping, I rolled onto my back, watching the debris-ridden air churn above me. A body was hurled, followed by another and another. They arced across my line of vision like arrows, leaving a trail of blood, a spray of red rain against the deepening fog.
And there … just beyond … up, up in the sky …
Great silvery wings flapped above me in deep strokes, swimming through air that was more than snow and dirt now. It was mist. Dragon mist. Thick, billowing-like-smoke mist.
A shader’s fog.
The air sawed from my lips, my body overheating as I stared straight up, snow melting into a puddle around me.
My heart lodged in my throat as I followed the slope of those wings to the body of the dragon—to the familiar and not familiar eyes the color of ice, pale frost with a ring of darker blue.
Familiar because I knew him.
In life. In memory. In dreams.
My body reacted, responding, lifting up, pulled by an invisible string, spine arching as though compelled to reach, touch, merge.
Unfamiliar because those eyes were wild and remote and stared straight through me without recognition, as though I did not exist—as though I was not there at all.
“Fell!” His name flowed from my lips like a banner on the wind, flapping with violent energy, flying free from me to get to him.
He heard me. Looked at me. Looked through me.
I stared back, but it was like I stared into the vast emptiness of an icy-white tundra. There was nothing there. No recognition. No reaction. No emotion. No heart.
Without another glance for me, he kept at his work.
And his work happened to be blood and chaos. Death and devastation.
Soldiers shrieked. Their armor and helmets offered no protection. Some tried to flee atop their mounts. Others attempted to futilely attack with their swords and arrows. They possessed no scale-tipped dragon bone arrows or other dragon weaponry. Stig’s influence clearly had not extended to them.
I pushed aside any remorse for them, knowing they only intended harm for me and Kerstin, knowing the destruction they would have wrought on innocent lives in Penterra. Still, it was a terrible, awesome sight to behold.
Amid the mayhem, Fell was there. Fell was everywhere, f luid on the wind.
His great winged body put them down with ease, picking warriors up hundreds of feet above the ground and then breaking them.
Dropping them like discarded toys. Flinging them to the earth like they were nothing. Mere toys to an invincible god.
Kerstin’s fingers dug into my hands. Clinging to each other, we watched the carnage unfold with unblinking eyes.
“How?” I gasped.
She shook her head without tearing her gaze from the spectacle. “He must have heard something … us … them. You.”
Corpses surrounded us, but Fell was not done. Not while any of them still drew breath. He overtook a pair of riders that had almost crested a hill. Plucking them from their saddles with his taloned claws, he ascended hundreds of yards into the sky until they were specks far above—then he let go.
I gaped, watching as the bodies of the warriors plummeted through the air in a shrieking tailspin and collided with the earth in a cloud of bloody snow.
“He’s amazing,” Kerstin breathed.
I nodded jerkily, my fingers numb where they clenched her hand, my heart a wild and savage thing inside my chest.
Then it was over as suddenly as it had begun.
The slap of wings came to a halt as Fell landed amid the carnage with a ground-shuddering thud that I felt vibrate up through my body, humming along every bone to the roots of my teeth.
No more screams.
A great stillness fell over the bloodied land.
He was magnificent. All huffing breaths and silvery pearl skin stretched over animal muscle and sinew.
His name escaped me in an awed whisper. “Fell.”
He heard me, whipped his head hard in our direction, his piercing gaze fixing on me like I was his next meal.
And maybe I was.
I gave a little start, and Kerstin’s hand squeezed mine encouragingly. “He’s yours,” she whispered, and I didn’t know if she was trying to reassure me or warn me.
We held very still, clutching each other as his big body advanced upon us.
“It’s fine,” I said quickly, even as I was not certain for whose benefit I was saying those words. Mine? Or Kerstin’s?
He approached slowly, scaled hide rippling all over his powerful body. His great clawed feet crunched over the snow as those dragon eyes skimmed over Kerstin and fixed on me.
“Tamsyn?” Kerstin asked softly, a wobble to her voice. “He knows it’s us, right?”
“Of course he does.”
I flexed my fingers, giving my hand a little shake to wake our connection, to rouse him, to feel the comfort of his heartbeat inside me so that I could feel as confident in my answer as I pretended to be.
I clung fast to his gaze, diving into those frosty depths. I stretched my fingers wide at my side, searching for the pulse of him, desperate to revive him, to revive us.
He was here in front of me. Desperation spread through me like a fever. Why could I not feel him once again? Why were we not joined? Where was our bond?
“Fell?” I queried, searching the face of the dragon before me—looking for the man I knew.
He stopped, still gazing at me with the cold, f lat eyes of a killer.
He’d always been the Beast of the Borderlands. Now, gazing at this dragon, I found little evidence of the man who’d married me and brought me north with him, and that moniker felt more true than ever.
I let go of Kerstin and rose shakily to my feet, my legs as insubstantial as jam as I faced him. The only fear I felt was the fear of not finding him inside this creature with its huffing breath and flaring nostrils.
The dragon pawed the ground in front of me in a way that very much felt like a warning.
Kerstin whispered my name, cautioning me.
I ignored her. I had to do this. If he wasn’t Fell anymore, who—what—was he?
We stared at each other, eyes locked for one endless moment. “Are you in there?” I whispered, the words barely audible, but they didn’t need to be heard. Not if he was in there. There was hearing and there was hearing. He should feel me and know.
With his dead eyes fastened hungrily on me, he didn’t feel like anything to me. He felt like a stranger. Worse—an enemy. An animal. As far away from me as ever—and it gutted me.
“Tamsyn?” Kerstin reached to grasp my hand, but I shook her off. I didn’t glance down at her as I stepped forward, walking determinedly toward him on trembling, unsteady legs.
He held menacingly still as I advanced, canting his head, watching me with a predatory intensity, his nostrils the only thing moving, flaring wider with heavy, panting breaths.
“It’s me. Tamsyn.” I held out my hand, palm facing out as one would do when approaching a wild animal …
but also so he could see the mark there, as though that might jog his memory into recalling we were bonded, blooded.
“Tamsyn. Remember me?” Remember you? “I’m your wife,” I said, surprised that the word emerged so readily.
It meant nothing to dragonkind, but not so with me.
It meant something to me, and with a choking epiphany I realized I wanted it to mean something to him, too.
“Remember?” I prodded, my voice cracking with entreaty.
He didn’t.
He didn’t remember. I saw that—too late—as a sudden feral gleam came into his eyes that should have had me lurching back and fleeing to escape him.
He didn’t know me.
He didn’t know himself.
He surged forward, and Kerstin cried out from behind me, her fingers circling my arm and yanking me back.
I resisted—foolishly, hopefully.
“He won’t hurt me,” I said, standing my ground, not permitting myself to think about what it would mean if I was wrong.
I resisted the urge to flinch when he came to a hard stop directly in front of me.
He lowered his head, the deadly sharp spikes shooting off his frill a mere inch away from slicing across my neck and ending me—if he so willed it.
Several of those spikes glinted with blood from the earlier melee, and I swallowed down a surge of bile.
Would he kill me as coldly as he’d killed those warriors?
He blew out a hot breath against my face, fluttering my hair.
“You know me,” I said again, my voice cracking. “We’re alike. The same, you and me.” I fought down the lump clogging my throat.
No recognition flashed in those feral eyes. He chuffed against my face, and his mouth parted, revealing the ruthless length of his fangs … so … close.
“I missed you even when I wouldn’t let myself think about you,” I confessed in a whisper, my voice a plea. I knew he was in there … somewhere. I just had to reach him.
He released another breath, and I turned my face to the side, squeezing my eyes tightly shut, waiting, ready for those fangs to sink into me, to tear through me—to end me like all the warriors whose bodies littered the ground around us.
Wind whispered over me.
I opened my eyes.
He was gone.