Chapter 9
There was a heaviness that hung in the air of Flambriar’s streets.
The careful trust she had grown between her and the people in the days before her fight with Lovell had all but been erased. They looked at her with wariness again, and there was a clear divide between those magics who hated her and those who were willing to at least be on the same street as her.
Fine. She’d have to work harder than she’d hoped, but this was fine.
She’d bought a pie that smelled of goat and mint from a woman with magic in her eyes.
She hoped it would be enough.
Lovell, she discovered, lived in a quaint little house not far from the bridge where he had attacked her.
When he finally opened the door to her incessant knocking, her palms were sweating beneath the pie she held, and Lovell’s eyes looked positively murderous.
‘What the fuck are you doing on my doorstep?’ he growled at her, his left eye blue and purple, showing the cost of yesterday’s fight.
‘Before you slam the door in my face, I want to talk,’ Arla said. He looked at her as if she would attack him, which wasn’t an unfair judgement to make, but still, the pie was burning her hand. She watched his eyes flicker to it.
‘The woman at the shop said it was your favourite?’
He reached out cautiously, prying it from her hands and bringing it closer to his face. He inhaled deeply, and she was sure she saw delight light up his eyes for a handful of seconds.
‘You’ll have to try harder than asking Elsie for a pie, girl. We don’t want you here.’
He was already closing the door. It was slipping away from her, this chance at winning them back.
‘Wait.’ She wedged her foot in the door. Lovell sighed heavily and put the pie down.
‘Five minutes.’
He was committed to leaving her standing on the doorstep, choosing to step out of the house and close the door behind him.
She spoke before he had the chance. ‘Why don’t you want me here?’
He huffed and then looked at her as if she had gone mad.
‘You hunted and killed our people based on an instruction your king gave you – a king who knew about the enslaving of mages. You think that just because you broke Hark Stappen out of prison and aided him and his crew in rescuing the last of our people that were kept in Kastonia’s grip, you think we’ll forget what you’ve done?
There are people missing, girl. People unaccounted for.
My wife is dead. My daughter’s blood was taken by Elrod.
As far as we’re concerned, you were complicit in it all. ’
Ice was growing inside her. Or maybe it was darkness.
They still blamed her.
People were dead, and some still missing. They were bitter, and there was nothing she could ever do to patch that wound.
‘Tell me what you’d have me do. Please, Lovell. I want this kingdom to be safe. I want your people to be safe. Some of the…’—mages, he had called them—‘some of the mages came from Hadalyn too. Let me fix this in any way I can.’
She hated that she was begging, but she’d be damned if she let this kingdom fall because the trust and care holding it all together came crashing down. Lovell was looking at her with pain in his eyes – raw, rugged pain that slithered inside her and pressed against the ice in her stomach.
‘My daughter,’ he said quietly, looking down as if it would protect the shard of his heart he was about to share. ‘They took some of her blood. We don’t know what for. What if he does something to her? What if he can find her by using it?’
It was a question they’d gone over for hours in Claret Hall. Elrod had taken their blood and sacrificed them, and she didn’t want to think what else he had done. Thara had told her it was impossible for Elrod to use their blood against them, but…
She was a dragonhart, blessed by the gods, looked up to by the people in ancient times. She should know the answers. She should have knowledge about the magic and how it worked.
‘I promise you, Lovell, that they won’t find your daughter. Not by using her blood, not by coming here. I will stand in front of this very door and bleed out before I let them have her. Your fight is done. You are all safe here.’
It was a promise she wasn’t sure she could keep, but she had made it anyway. And it wasn’t a lie – she wanted to be able to keep it. She would indeed protect this kingdom with her life. She would die before she’d allow an enemy soldier to breach its borders.
‘It will take time,’ Lovell said softly.
‘Time for them to trust you. We see you down here. We see Hark up in the mountains. But we don’t see him holding an audience with us, listening to us, leading us.
We need the support. We need stability. The mages have suffered for too long at the hands of men. ’
He lifted a hand and extended it to her. It was a strange gesture, but she had seen it done amongst the people here before. She took his hand in hers and shook it, but she feared she would not be able to hold up her end of the deal.
‘I will keep her safe. I’ll keep you all safe. But there can’t be open hostility against me, Lovell. I have lost a family too.’
More than once.
Both times at the hands of Kastonia’s king.
‘It is done.’
She went from door to door. She listened to their stories and their worries. It was always the same: they didn’t feel safe; they feared that Elrod would use their blood somehow; they were worried about the mages that were still missing.
With every promise she made, she felt the weight of it settle on her shoulders.
Eventually, she’d pried herself out of the city and headed up the mountain to Claret Hall. Noah looked terrified when she burst into the room and requested any letters from Hadalyn.
No answer.
Halos was ignoring her.
She told Noah to send another falcon.
Spending time with the mages had awakened in her a thirst for knowledge.
She wanted to know how their magic worked, their history, and the significance of the dragonharts.
She wanted to know why the gods had once been so involved with society but had now been absent for so long.
She wanted answers to all of it, and there was only one place she might find them.
Jaz was standing at a long oak table in the centre of the library, turning between his fingers the yellowed pages of a book that was so old the leather spine was cracking. A cloud of dust hung in the air.
‘Took you long enough,’ he said without looking up to see who had entered.
The library was a vast room, and the only place inside Claret Hall that hadn’t been crafted out of huge panes of glass – in order to preserve the books, she imagined.
The floor was polished wood, and row upon row of wooden shelves held leather-bound books that made her ache for the comfort of the library of Castle Grey.
‘How did you get so many books here?’ she asked, brushing the spines of the books with her fingertips. These were important books – on magic lore and the ancient kingdoms and the gods that had governed it all. To create such a collection should have taken decades – lifetimes.
‘How often did you browse Castle Grey’s library for anything other than romance novels, Dragonhart?’ Jaz said without looking up from the text he was reading.
She wanted to laugh.
Of course.
The library at Castle Grey was extensive – so big she had never explored its entirety in all the years she had called the castle her home. Hark had lived there for two years. He must have been smuggling books out by the dozen, and perhaps from his father’s castle too, and wherever else…
It was the first time she had truly felt at home in this hall; the fact that some of these books had come from Hadalyn too was a comfort she hadn’t realised she’d been seeking.
‘I need to know—’
‘About the gods and your role as a dragonhart?’ Jaz said, turning to face her finally. He looked the most rested she’d ever seen him, his eyes sparkling in the sun that streamed through the arched windows on the far wall.
‘You’ve been expecting me, then.’
Jaz snorted and returned the book he had been reading to its place on the shelf.
Arla had never felt comfortable around him.
There was a subtle animosity that simmered beneath his skin, and it was directed firmly at her.
She didn’t know what she’d done to offend him, but he wasn’t someone around whom she felt she could let her guard down.
Despite the flowing plum-coloured cloak and his insistence on spending all of his time in the library, he was deadly with a blade, and Hark had inducted him into his personal crew.
‘I suspected you almost immediately after you woke. Dragonharts have long since disappeared from this world and the people no longer know how to act around them because they don’t understand their role. Of course, you will have questions too.’
Jaz took a seat at a reading table, pulling a chair out for Arla too which she collapsed into gracelessly.
‘Kase told me about the dragonharts,’ she began. ‘That we were once vessels for the gods and acted according to their will. We kept the mages safe and delivered messages from the gods.’
Jaz stared at her with an intensity that made her feel as though there was something wrong in her soul. Something wrong that only he could see. He narrowed his eyes before he spoke.
‘That’s true. And dragons such as Thara served the gods and their dragonharts too. But what now, Reinhart? The gods are angry. The dragons sleep beneath Castle Grey. So how, exactly, are you going to unite everything?’
Wasn’t that the question indeed?
The gods were angry because the balance of magic was off, because Elrod had been killing the mages and attempting to use the magic himself.
The dragons had fallen asleep after a battle between gods almost a century ago that had left them too weak to do anything other than go to ground.
The kingdoms were crumbling beneath the gods’ ire … and she was somehow supposed to fix it.
She’d thought she had. She’d thought that freeing the mages and stopping Elrod would be enough to bring the gods back and help the kingdoms flourish again.
Kastonia had been on the verge of falling for years, and Hadalyn was still suffering under the weight of the refugees that poured through from Kastonia.
The news came from letters written by spies that Hark had planted across the kingdoms: the kingdoms were still falling.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be long until Flambriar started to fall, too.
‘What do I need to do?’ she asked.
‘I’ve been poring over these texts since the moment we got back to Flambriar, and I still don’t have an answer yet. Speak to your dragon. Ask her what she knows.’ Jaz’s face was solemn, and she saw the worry that marred his expression. He understood the urgency.
Speak to your dragon.
Frustration roiled in her blood. She knew Thara couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her more. The gods and the fates forbade it.
‘Thara is cryptic at best, even when she is inclined to actually share information with me. She won’t speak of the gods or the fates, no matter how hard I push her.’
Jaz sighed, running a hand across the back of his head.
‘Then I will keep looking.’
Arla stood up, biting her lip against the ache in her legs after this morning’s climb. She was almost out of the door when Jaz spoke again.
‘And Reinhart? Keep an eye on Hark. He’s going to drive himself mad if he spends every waking minute hunting an invisible army.’
She could only nod.
She didn’t tell him about the man she had killed last night.