Chapter 16
Malkin shouldn’t have even been in exile.
Soon Roiven tells me to hold on again. I ignore him.
Sava dives, and Roiven holds me against him, forearm across my stomach and large hand splayed across my hip.
We don’t approach from the rockfield like I’d planned, but instead swoop past the castle—or the remains of it.
The structure, once five stories tall, has been blasted down to just two levels, with a ruin of rubble around it.
It doesn’t look like dragonfire, but it must be. A Hellion could be confused and attack the wrong ship, but not our castle. We sweep past it and skim lower as we reach the northern edge of the rockfield.
A jolt slams through my body as we land. The dragon tucks her wings back.
“Come,” Roiven says, and swings down off her back.
The witch scales her leg without problem in the moonlight.
My head is reeling, but I follow, picking my way down by feel and by the pale light glinting off the black spikes and scales that decorate Sava’s body.
When I reach the familiar rocks of the Bluff, my legs wobble.
I stand shoulder-width apart by habit and command my mind to shut up. Panic gets you killed on the seas.
But my mind won’t stop spinning. Someone else has to have been on the Governor’s ship. Rancor wouldn’t have destroyed our own people. What was Harfor even doing so close to the Bluff, so long after she left it?
“It was your people, right? On the ship?” I ask. My voice shakes. “That’s why…?”
“No,” Roiven says quietly, shivering as he folds his arms. “Sava says three of ours survived, and they flew. On the other dragon.”
“But that’s not possible.” I shake my head violently and stare in the direction we came from. “Harfor must not have realized. She must have thought your people…”
But Harfor never should have been here in the first place.
I pace away. Roiven stands silently, Sava behind him. I keep seeing the ship vanish in a burst of blue.
Harfor said she was headed to the council in Barivum, to convince them to release more funds and consecrate more Enchanted.
Even if they were in a hurry, and traveling at Rancor’s full speed, they’d never reach Barivum and come back fast enough to be here now.
Which means they must never have left at all.
Was it because she didn’t trust me? Because she wanted to keep an eye on me? But why leave the witch with me at all, if she was just going to linger offshore? Why not take him somewhere deeper in the Empire, somewhere safer?
I hug my arms around myself. The council. More funding. Roiven being brought here, and the witches attacking, and Rancor sinking the survivors. It’s all connected. I’m going to be sick.
I turn on my heel and stumble back towards Roiven.
“Your dragon found you here,” I say. My legs feel too heavy, my mouth numb, the world unsteady.
“Yes.” In the moonlight I can see the worried look on his face, eyebrows knitted.
“Through the enchantment.”
“Yes,” he agrees again, uncomfortably. “She’s my familiar. Nothing can get in the way of that.”
“When I asked, could she sense you through the barrier, and you said, why else would they have brought you here… you meant they knew. You mean they knew she could follow you, and they brought you here not just in spite of it, but because of it.”
Roiven doesn’t answer. I rest my hands on my head and turn, surveying the island, hoping another answer, any answer, will occur to me.
“How could they know that?” I burst. “No witch can get through the barrier. It’s impenetrable.”
“They captured one of my warriors a year ago. Her familiar followed her in,” Roiven tells me softly. “They saw it happen. She died, but the familiar escaped, and told us.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. Of course the War-Father has gained new knowledge in the time I’ve been in exile.
But why would Harfor bring Roiven here, knowing he would be followed by the most powerful of the witches’ dragons, knowing the Bluff had no real defenses but a rusty knight with no enchantment to draw on, as if Harfor were inviting the island to fall?
Because she wanted the island to fall, my mind answers, but surely no knight would slaughter her own people—except, of course they would. After all, we kill the Enchanted. Necessary cruelty. If the deaths furthered the war…
“They need more weapons,” I whisper, my voice so high and thin it could shatter at any moment.
“They… they need more Enchanted than the council was willing to spare, in order to win the war for good. That’s why Harfor brought you.
That’s why she waited here, isn’t it. But why not let the other exiles escape? Why not let someone escape?”
“They wanted a tragedy,” Roiven says quietly. “It’s not as sad if there are survivors. Especially if those survivors could figure out the truth.”
A frantic energy in me threatens to boil over. Even if some of the other knights would do that, Harfor wouldn’t. Not to me. How can she hate me that much after everything we went through?
I won’t forget you. That was what she’d said. And I thought it meant she wouldn’t abandon me here. But instead, she was imagining me as nothing more than a memory already.
My hand curls around my sword hilt. Flexes. Loosens. I pace, walking faster. Those people died. Malkin, Angar.
I’ve killed so many I’ve lost track. I’ve held my sisters and brothers and siblings-in-arms as they died.
I’ve watched whole Hellions go under on the front, swarmed by dragons and their riders, as the War-Father bellowed orders, his whole body glowing blue from Rancor’s power as we knights charged, slashed, slaughtered, driven by Rancor’s exultant glory.
But this. Killing our own people, behind our own borders, just to gain political leverage. That is nothing I have seen before.
That is not the glory of the Empire I was raised to love.
I halt in front of Roiven.
“Harfor must have known you’d fly away with Sava. But surely killing you is worth more than any number of Enchanted. You’re the strongest witch they’ve got.”
“Your familiar determines the size of your magic,” Roiven says. “If I died, Savasaeirn could bond with someone else, after a time. Whoever she chose would be the new king, or queen, since she’s the strongest of the remaining familiars.”
“So killing you has been pointless all along.”
“Not… pointless…”
“Just not as useful as gaining the council’s support from this attack,” I mutter. “Because as deadly as you are, someone new could take your place.”
Roiven nods.
They deliberately let the king of our enemies go, the man who sank my entire ship and killed nearly my whole crew, not to mention how many other Hellions he’d sunk before.
They caught him, and they released him here, just so we could kill our own people, so they could justify strengthening the military's resources.
I start pacing again, shorter laps this time, back and forth in front of him.
It makes a sick sort of sense, but my mind can’t latch onto it.
Harfor. Harfor. Of all people. And did the War-Father know?
He must have. He moved ships. He put her on Rancor.
He would have ordered this. My adopted father didn’t just abandon me at the Bluff—he ordered my death?
They weren’t testing my loyalty. They were just giving me a reason to stay here with the witch without me realizing something was wrong. My whole body shakes as I walk. This can’t be happening.
“I’m supposed to be dead. Everyone who lived here is supposed to be dead. Because we’re expendable,” I mutter.
The explosion’s glow has faded from my eyes, but I can still picture it perfectly in my mind.
“I’m sorry. I don't like watching civilians die, but she ordered me not to say a word.”
I freeze as his words slowly sink into my head. And then, I wheel on him.
“You knew?”
“They mentioned it in front of me.” He shrugs.
“Fuck. You,” I say, the words practically a growl as hatred and fury kindle towards an inferno.
“I’m Enchanted. I tried to tell you, truly. A few times. But I couldn’t. The magic wouldn’t let me.”
“Then you should have tried harder,” I snap. Sava growls.
“I couldn’t.”
“We could have stopped this!” I throw my hand out towards the ocean.
It’s like Harfor has shoved a gauntleted hand into my chest and ripped my heart straight out.
And all along, this bastard knew it was going to happen, and if I can go on hating him for it maybe I can blame myself a little bit less for being such a blind idiot that I let it all happen.
Malkin is dead. Angar is dead. Trisven and Vrisekan and Olva and Crain and everyone else are dead, and this useless scum knew it was happening, and maybe if I knew… maybe, if I’d known…
“I did what I could,” Roiven tells me.
“Why didn’t you do more?” I lunge forward to smack the side of my metal fist against his chest. Roiven twists away from me. Sava roars and paces towards us.
“I couldn’t save everyone.”
“You didn’t save anyone!” The words come out ragged and my fingernails cut hard into the palm of my left hand.
“You’re alive, aren’t you?”
“Well, I fucking shouldn’t be!” My throat is hoarse.
I know he can’t fight back, but I want him to, desperately.
I want a bloody, drawn out brawl. I want my physical pain to match the way my thoughts are clawing through the fabric of my soul.
I shove Roiven hard, and he stumbles back away from me, arms splayed to catch his balance.
The dragon growls and lunges, her head snapping down toward me as heat bellows from her mouth.
Roiven curses and tackles me to protect me from her, still tied by the enchantment. On trained instinct I throw him off, roll, and rise with my sword drawn in my hand.
“Savasaeirn!” Roiven bellows.
I brace myself for the dragon to finally kill me and end this. But the attack doesn’t come.
The dragon shrieks as she slides back away from us. Her claws dig into the stone, screeching as they furrow and chip into the rock. She writhes, twisting. Something has her. Something is pulling her away.
Roiven takes two steps forward, then stops abruptly and falls to his knees.
The ocean is a dark, monstrous thing, and under the glow of the moon, a beast emerges from the water to wrap its tentacles tighter around Sava’s hind legs.
A beast even bigger than the ancient dragon.
When it rises a wave smashes out and splashes so hard against the rock a mist of disgusting fucking ocean splatters on me.
I will not suffer you to hurt what is mine, Savasaeirn, the voice in my head whispers.
All at once my panic goes quiet and my whole body stills in cold terror.