60. Lucy
Lucy
A dragon raising a child is a sight to soften stone. Only fools mistake the tenderness for softness. There is nothing in this world or the next that loves so gently and guards so murderously as a dragon with something small to protect.
Ihave to find Emrys. I was already running before the thought finished, down the cave path with the wards gone and the whole mountain breathing differently around me. Baylor took him. Riot, I have to—
Go. No hesitation in him. None. There are dragons in the sky that have never had sky. I’ll keep them looking up. They won’t touch the ground while I’m in it. A beat, lower. Find your friend, Lucette. I have the air.
I didn’t say thank you. He’d have hated it. I just held the warmth of him in my chest like a hand on my back and ran. The jeweler’s shop hung open when I reached it, the door swinging on one hinge, and the smell hit me before the sight did. Copper. Which meant blood. And it was everywhere.
Across the counter where I’d first followed a Moonborn in like a fool.
Up the wall in a long dragging smear that ended at nothing.
Pooled black in the seams of the floorboards where the light didn’t reach.
Too much of it to belong to one body and still leave that body walking.
My mind did the math I didn’t want it to and I shoved the answer down because… no.
A note sat on the counter. He knew I’d come. He knew that without the panic of dying, his breaking of the wards would give him away. He knew I’d figure it out.
My Moonborn for your friend. I’ll be on the island.
The island. I knew it before I’d finished reading. The moon beach. The stretch of dark sand on the far northern reach where the Moonborn were to be delivered before the Erelith that sliced the place in half.
I went out the broken door at a dead run and let the shift take me before my feet left the path. I had never flown like that.
Every instinct disciplined out of me came back at once, no thought between wanting and doing, and I poured everything I had into the air.
Wings I’d been taught to be ashamed of. A body I’d been told to hide.
I didn’t care. I would gladly be every terrible thing they’d named me if it bought me one more minute, because Emrys was bleeding way too much, and I had already let them carry one person I cared for away from me this day.
Tavian… Lyric. A Guardian whose identity had been stripped from him.
And he might be gone already. They’d taken him to the Underworld with a blade in him and a promise I had no way to hold them to, and I’d let go of his hand because Syn told me to.
Because she said they knew how to save him, and I’d believed her because believing her was the only way I could leave.
I could not do that twice in one morning.
I flew until the mountains broke and the cold gray sea opened out beneath me, and I turned toward the cave Riot had made our home. I landed at the mouth of it and stopped.
Inside, the thirteenth Moonborn was where I knew Riot had left him, and I could trade him. One life handed over for another. I stood there on the cold stone with my own heart going wild and made myself look at what I was about to do.
But Emrys was going to die. That part was certain.
I’d seen the blood and I’d heard Baylor and I knew it in my bones.
And the Moonborn, well I didn’t know what Baylor wanted with him, didn’t know if it ended in death or something less.
Two unknowns against one certainty. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t clean but it was the only logic I had.
So I made the choice. I took him up in my claws, and when the screaming started, that thin high wail clawing at the inside of my skull, I shut it out, and I flew.
I saw the island long before I reached it. Backlit by the purple Erelith and figures standing in a loose ring near the waterline. Twelve. In the center of that ring, large but crumpled and not moving, was a light blue dragon. Emrys.
I came down so hard I threw sand twenty feet.
I dropped the thirteenth from my claws, letting him fall and roll and right himself in the sand, no longer my concern.
I didn’t shift. I didn’t go down among them on two legs.
I stayed dragon, stayed armored. I reached past the ring with as much care as something my size could manage, closed my claws around Emrys and lifted back into the sky.
I didn’t go far. I wouldn’t, not with him broken in my hold and every wingbeat a risk to him. Just across the water to the next stretch of empty sand, far enough to be away, close enough that I never had to climb or dive or jostle the fragile weight of him more than a breath.
I set him down on the sand as gently as I knew how, and the shift left him slow, scales giving way to skin until it was just Emrys lying there, smaller than a dragon and somehow heavier to look at. I shifted and dropped to my knees beside him.
The wound was bad. I knew it would be, from the air, from the way he hadn’t lifted his head when my shadow crossed him.
Baylor had done nothing for it. No cloth pressed to it, no salve, no water within reach.
He had taken him and kept him exactly as long as he was useful and then left him to bleed out.
I could feel the tickle in my nose. The lump in my throat holding back the sob as I whispered, “Emrys? It’s me. Open your eyes.”
It took him a moment to find me, and when he did, the corner of his mouth moved but the words were slow and far too quiet. “You came back.”
My huff was half a cry as I whispered, “I couldn’t let you see the ocean without me. Look. It’s right there.”
Through what seemed like great effort, he opened his eyes. The sea was black and silver under the moon, the waves folding over and sliding back, the same sound over and over, and he watched it the way I had never seen him watch anything.
“Sounds loud,” he breathed.
I couldn’t hide the sob tangled in a laugh. “Unbearably.”
“Knew it.” The faintest curve of a smile as he kept his eyes on the water. “I’d have hated it.”
“That’s a lie.”
He didn’t argue.
I held his hand. I didn’t say anything else, because I couldn’t trust sound. Or time. Or my heart not to betray me.
“Tell me about the rest of it,” he managed. “The parts I can’t see from here.”
So I told him. I told him about the way it goes on past where you can see, all the way to the edge of everything, and the boats that go out on it, and the towns that grow up along the side of it, where people wake every morning to that same sound and stop hearing it after a while.
I told him you can taste the salt in the air before you ever reach the shore.
I kept talking, because he was listening.
And as long as he was listening he was still here, and I would have told him about every coast in the world if it kept his eyes open.
His hand had gone loose in mine. I held it tighter.
“Emrys?”
“Mm.”
“Stay awake. Keep looking at it. You don’t get to stop looking. You waited too long to see it.”
“I’m looking,” he said, and his voice was further away than it had been. “Lucy.”
I couldn’t breathe past my growing fear. “Yes?”
“It was worth it. Seeing it.” A pause that went on too long. “Thank you for the ocean.”
“I didn’t give you the ocean,” I said. “You’re going to walk into it yourself. Tomorrow. When the sun’s up and you can see how far it goes. I’ll take you in myself, I swear it, just… stay awake. Look at it with me.”
He didn’t answer.
Something tore loose inside my chest. I’d failed.
My breath lodged in my throat, sharp and unbearable, and when it finally broke free it came out as a sound so raw I didn’t recognize it at all.
My beautiful friend, the dreamer, blurred in my vision a second before the tears burst free and heat flooded my face.
Another breath dragged in, ragged and desperate, and hurt so badly it felt like I’d swallowed broken glass.
No.
No. No. No.
I squeezed his hand until my knuckles ached.
Nothing.
The realization landed all at once.
There would never be another sentence.
Never another laugh.
Never another honey cake.
Never another anything.
My stomach folded inward. I doubled over, still clutching him, my body trying to curl around a wound it couldn’t reach.
Every breath came apart before it left me.
My ribs spasmed. My throat burned. Sobs ripped through me hard enough to make my teeth ache, each one leaving me emptier and somehow hurting more than the last.
I couldn’t stop.
I couldn’t breathe properly.
I couldn’t think.
The world had split cleanly in two: the version where he existed and the version where he didn’t, and I was stranded on the wrong side of it.
Still, I held his hand.
Because letting go would mean admitting he was gone.
And I couldn’t survive that yet.
He’d wanted one thing. One. He had wanted it before he ever knew my name, dreamed it up out of a place he was never let out of, and I had told him I would be the one to give it to him.
I’d believed it. I’d made him believe it.
And in the end the closest he came was the cold edge of it, lying down, with my voice in his ear telling him about a world he would not get to stand up in. He hadn’t even stood.
I didn’t know how long I stayed there with him.
When I finally lifted my head, the light had changed.
A wash of violet had spread across the water, and I turned toward the island I had carried him from.
The thirteen still stood in their ring on the far sand, and behind them the great wall of fire that had closed off the dark was coming apart down its center, splitting open.
The Erelith had fallen.
The thirteen were gathered and whole and now I knew why. Carrying the last Moonborn across the sea had been the final turn of a key I’d put in the lock myself. Whatever that wall held back, it was loose now, and I had done that.
But I remembered my own fire. The violet that had come out of me at the altar, the color no dragon was supposed to make, the same fire as the wall.
If it was Erelith, then maybe the wall wasn’t gone for good.
Maybe I could answer it. Maybe I could put back what I’d let them tear open, undo one thing tonight instead of failing at everything.
It was the only thought that wasn’t grief, so I took it. I shifted and left Emrys on the cold sand because there was nothing left I could do for him, and flew for the breaking wall, heart racing, desperate to get one thing right.
The seam widened as I flew, peeling back with every wingbeat, and as I got closer to the flame I could finally see what was behind it.
A city. Black to its bones, every spire and street of it dark in a way nothing natural ever was.
I knew this place. I’d heard it described in Riot’s quiet voice.
This was where Aureth had died, the place a demon had been sealed away from the world behind a wall that had held since before anyone living could remember.
Riot!
There was no response and I knew it was because we were too far away and our bond was still too new.
I pulled in a breath that went all the way down to where the violet lived and I breathed Erelith back into the seam, pouring it over the breaking edge, trying to lay flame back across flame and close what I'd opened.
Please. Please, I can fix this, I can put it back, just let me put it back.
The wall fought me. My fire slid off the broken edge and guttered and I dragged in another breath and gave it everything, building it back one desperate sheet at a time, and for one second I thought it might hold.
Then the dark hit me.
It came up out of the city like a hand closing, vast and cold and heavy enough to fold my wings before I knew I’d been struck.
The sky tilted and I hit the ground hard enough to lose the air and the fire both.
I couldn’t move. The power forced me down, flat against the cold stone of a city that should have stayed sealed, pinning me with no effort at all while my fire died in my throat.
The strange power ripped the dragon away, forcing me back into a woman’s body.
The dark held me down, and from the edge of the black city, a man with clear demon marks on his neck came forward, slow and certain, in no hurry to reach someone that could no longer run.
Heat bloomed from behind me. The unmistakable crackle of fire magic gathering in the air, close enough to raise the hair along my arms. Fire.
Syneca. For one blind, soaring second I was certain of it, certain the Phoenix had come, and something in my chest cracked open with relief so consuming it hurt. She’d saved me again.
But the witch stepped over me, and when I saw her face, I couldn’t manage a single sound.
Vitoria.
She planted herself between me and the man with fire already gathering in both hands. Her smoky voice came out low and lethal and absolutely certain. “No, demon. You don’t get to have her too.”
The fire erupted, a wall of it thrown straight into the man’s path, and for one blinding second the black marble of the whole city lit up, every spire and tower throwing the light back at once. The dark grip on me faltered. Only a fraction, but it was enough.
I shifted, scales tearing back through skin, wings snapping wide against the stone.
I threw myself into the sky while the woman I had every reason to doubt bought me those seconds with her own body.
I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. If I looked back I’d go back, and going back meant we both died in that city.
So I flew. Away from the black spires and the broken wall and the witch burning behind me so that I wouldn’t have to.
I owed my life to a traitor, and I would carry that forever.