Chapter 64
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
SOFIA
Their swords met, steel on steel ringing out in the clearing. Harlow’s face twisted in fury. There was a feral craze lighting his eyes, and he bared his teeth like a dog. In that moment, he was no longer a man but an animal wild with rage. And she met his frenetic energy with her own.
His swings were hard, rattling her arms with every strike, and she had to move quickly, her feet sweeping across the ground like a dance as they circled each other.
But his swings were also clumsy and impulsive, the anger flooding through him, making him less calculated than usual.
Even Sofia knew that in a one-on-one fight, he would win immediately.
Aurelia roared above, and it echoed through the air.
It wasn’t just his anger that kept him distracted. Her eyes swept to the sky where the dragons fought.
He was still controlling Eha in the battle against Aurelia and Chalia.
She wondered how much of his mental energy was going into telling Eha what to do and when to attack. He was fighting two battles at the same time.
Sofia smiled as his blade went wide, and she was easily able to step aside. Her own weapon came down and cut into his hip before he could recover and dance away. His face rippled with rage as he realized she’d struck him.
“You can’t win,” she said. “All this work to make sure we couldn’t control the dragons, but it doesn’t matter. They’re on our side.”
“Say that to the white one that’ll rip out your little pathetic dragon’s throat.”
Sofia ignored him, not taking the bait. “You realize it now, though, right? We don’t control the dragons with any special magic or powers. The dragons fight by our side as allies and friends because we respect them.”
“They are creatures without reason,” he sneered. “No different from a donkey or a horse.”
She jumped back as his blade came down, just missing her shoulder by a hair. Harlow grinned like a child as he paced forward, revitalized by the near miss.
“That’s your problem,” Sofia said, clenching her jaw tight as the next collision of their swords rattled through her bones. “You keep underestimating us. You see us as less than even as you fear us. And you don’t even see the contradiction.”
“I fear you the same way I fear fire,” he said. “Unthinking and unwieldy in your destruction. You are nothing. Anyone who looks at those beasts and sees anything but the wild creatures they are doesn’t deserve the power they can bring.”
Sofia pushed forward with her sword, slashing down toward his side, but Harlow countered, throwing her momentum to the left as he brought his sword back down to the right.
It sliced into her hip. She felt the impact a moment before the burning hot pain.
Blood splattered the ground between them as she lurched back.
Her leg gave out, and she fell to her knees, trying to catch her breath.
Above her, Chalia bellowed, and Harlow’s eyes lit with glee—so happy to see her brought low.
She’d heal. She knew that now. But the pain still radiated through her body, and her sword had fallen from her grasp at the strike.
“You are nothing,” Harlow said. “You’ve always been nothing and no one.”
“You keep saying that,” she said between gritted teeth. Her skin itched as it pulled back together, but the ache of the wound ran deep. “If I were nothing, you wouldn’t be spending so much energy trying to kill me.”
Even as she said the words, she realized the truth of them for the first time.
He didn’t just hate her. He feared her. He feared the power she held—that the dragons and the Dragonborn held.
“You hate that the dragons are more powerful than you. You hate that the Dragonborn have power that you’ve not specifically granted because you are nothing. You are the one who’s powerless. You are the one who is nothing.”
“I will not let this country be destroyed by a useless little rat!” he screamed.
Above them, Eha roared, and Harlow’s shoulders shifted in the smallest flinch. Sofia’s eyes flickered up just fast enough to see Eha thrown back with a sharp gust of wind from Chalia. Harlow’s eyes had shifted up, too, the briefest moment of distraction.
Sofia kicked out, sending her boot into Harlow’s shin.
In the moment he stumbled back to regain his footing, she was up, sword in hand and swinging.
She didn’t bother trying to overpower him.
He was bigger than her—she wouldn’t win that way.
But she moved swiftly, her swings coming down on him in quick succession, forcing him to focus on her and her alone.
His pants grew heavy, his strikes getting weaker by the second as the battle in the sky between the dragons intensified, his mind stretched thin between the two.
“You are nothing,” she said, punctuating the words with each swing of her blade. “You are no one.”
She pulled her dagger out with her left hand, sword in her right. His blade came down, the swing slow and half-wild as Eha roared in the sky. She caught it with her dagger. In the same breath, she stabbed forward with her sword, piercing Harlow’s shoulder just beneath the leather of his vest.
He stumbled back, eyes going wide, and fell to his knees.
Sofia felt the weight of decades of grief lift the smallest fraction from her chest as she saw him, kneeling in the mud.
His face creased with age, dark circles beneath his eyes.
He looked so very human and so very small.
Blood stained his shirt, and sweat dripped down his face.
The setting sun set the entire clearing on fire, painting them in pink and red, like the blood staining him—staining the ground around him.
He smiled. Not a resigned or regretful smile, but one full of triumph. And his eyes flickered to the side.
Sofia didn’t want to get distracted. She didn’t want to play into his game, but she looked, unable to stop herself as she saw the flicker of blond hair out of the corner of her eye.
Fox hadn’t retreated like she’d told him to. He was only a few yards away, locked in a battle with another soldier. He was holding his ground, too, but Sofia could see the tremble in his arms as he brought his sword down again and again.
He couldn’t have seen the second soldier in black coming up behind him, sword raised.
Sofia screamed—not using words—but Fox understood nonetheless. He turned just in time to block the blow, but he fell back, unsteady on his feet. Both soldiers advanced on him, sending him teetering backward—toward Harlow and Sofia.
Harlow moved with a speed that shouldn’t have been possible for an injured man, but then he was there, his dagger out and pressed against Fox’s throat, pulling him back farther.
He was grinning as he twisted Fox to face Sofia.
She’d taken two paces forward, but she stopped when she saw the look in Harlow’s eyes and the place where the blade met Fox’s skin. There was already a thin trickle of blood tracing down the length of his neck, red on white.
“You can kill me,” he said. “Take out your impotent rage. But if I die, so does your precious Fox.”
Her heart pounded in her chest and her body was on fire. She couldn’t look away from Fox’s pulse point, thrumming against the blade on his throat.
The two soldiers had fallen back. They watched with their swords out, ready for their orders.
Sofia couldn’t do it, and Harlow knew, the triumph clear in his eyes. After sun cycles of hunting and planning, she finally had the chance to strike him down, and she wouldn’t do it. Her sword was already hanging limply in her hand, forgotten. After everything, Harlow had won.
“Sofia,” Fox’s voice was soft, and Harlow’s dagger twitched against his neck. “Please.”
She met his eyes and saw everything she was feeling reflected in those silver depths. He was begging her. She could already see the tears forming, and she felt like her heart was tearing from her chest. He couldn’t ask this of her.
“Drop your weapons and surrender,” Harlow said, voice cold. “I’d promise mercy, but you already ruined that once. But I’ll make your deaths less painful.”
Above them, Chalia howled, and Sofia saw the claw marks across her chest as Eha circled her.
She wanted to reach out to her—wanted the reassurance—but she couldn’t distract her. And she didn’t need reassurance in the end. She knew what she needed to do.
The weight of the world rested on her shoulders, and she was sinking under it.
For an instant, she felt as if the earth itself might swallow her up under the pressure of it all.
If she surrendered, everyone was dead. Harlow would burn down the resistance and paint the forest in blood.
Some dragons might escape, but they’d be running again, just to keep their free will.
She didn’t want to make the choice. She didn’t want to hold everything.
“My captor,” Fox said, his voice breaking through the turmoil in her mind, and she looked up. He was speaking only to her. Harlow and the others soldiers, all the screaming and the blood, fell away. He knew what decision she would have to make.
“It’s not your decision,” he said, as if he could read her mind—or perhaps just the agony written across her face. “My life, my captor.”
The tears that had been burning against her eyelids fell, trailing through the mud and blood that painted her cheeks. His pulse fluttered, helpless against the cold steel on his neck, and she watched it, memorizing the cadence of his heart. One last time.
I love you. She mouthed the words, throat too dry.
She looked back at Harlow, at the way his lips twisted, and his eyes shone with satisfaction. He saw her tears, and he thought them a sign of weakness. He thought he had broken her.
But her grief and rage and love had never been weaknesses. They’d been her strength.
She felt her blood humming with power—with magic. She felt it in her fingertips. It sparked across the tether that connected her mind to Chalia’s, but it wasn’t just a part of the dragon. The magic was a part of her now, as well.
Sofia screamed, the sound of it echoing through the forest. The air crackled, and the sky rumbled as Chalia’s roar joined the sound.
Power sizzled through Sofia’s blood, and the world lit up in a fiery blaze, white and blinding.
Fire cracked down from the sky in a bolt, splitting the air where Harlow stood. The ground exploded.
The last thing she saw on his face was dawning realization and terror as his smug smile fell.