Chapter 13
Thara dropped Arla near to where she had seen the rogue woman, and Arla relied on the silent feet of her assassin training to track her movements.
‘Hark is going to kill me if I end up dead,’ she sent Thara’s way.
The dragon replied instantly, huffing down the bond, ‘The boy keeps his own scouting secrets, Dragonhart. It is time we had ours.’
Ours. Like they were a team.
Her fingers drifted to the brooch above her left breast, the metal hot beneath her touch as a wave of solidarity washed through her.
The redhead stood between the trees eyeing the clearing from which Arla should have emerged.
She’d never been predictable.
The dragon had grumbled when Arla had requested that Thara fly her to the far side of Flambriar and then loop back, but once she realised that Arla intended to sneak up on the woman undetected, the dragon had gone silent.
Arla palmed the blade at her waist, twisting the one she held in her hand in a practised move that spoke of hours in dingy alleyways and on the rooftops of brothels. She moved like a wraith, slipping between trees and floating across the ground as if her feet had been gods-blessed.
She lifted an arm into the perfect position to slide her blade down the side of the redhead’s neck to rest lightly on her throat…
The girl spun before Arla had the chance to draw a breath.
Their blades met in a clang that rattled the forest and startled the birds.
The blades clashed between them, the strength of the girl enough for Arla to feel her muscles have to work to hold her at bay.
There were not many who could hold her with a blade.
With her left foot she kicked out, swiping the redhead’s ankles from beneath her. The girl fell at Arla’s feet and the top of Arla’s blade puckered the creamy skin at the girl’s throat.
‘That wasn’t very friendly,’ Arla drawled.
The girl’s eyes flashed, and she swallowed against the steel at her throat before she spoke.
‘Neither was sneaking up on me.’
She spoke with an accent that had to have come from the continent. She was beautiful, with round green eyes and a heart-shaped face, and hair that fell as pin-straight as Kase’s.
‘Don’t pretend you haven’t been sneaking around us. You’re lucky I haven’t killed you just for merely existing in these woods.’
‘Always so violent, Dragonhart. I’m beginning to like it.’
When the girl reached for the blade she had dropped beside her, Arla struck forwards, pinning the girl’s wrist beneath her booted foot. The girl hissed, bucking beneath Arla’s hold.
All she achieved was a blooming bead of crimson at her throat.
‘You know,’ Arla tsked, eyeing the girl who had the sense to look up at her with the first inklings of fear, ‘most people, when they have a sword to their throat, prefer to remain still.’
‘Most people don’t survive contact with you by remaining still, Arla Reinhart.’
Something flared in Arla’s blood. Challenge. Entertainment. It might be fun to go to war against a new female opponent. They always were more entertaining.
‘So, you know my name – though I go by Dragonhart now – and you know my reputation, but I don’t know yours. It seems I’m on the back foot already.’
The girl looked like she might laugh – for a split second, there was a sparkle in her eyes and the beginning of a widening of her lips. She didn’t, though. ‘I don’t think there are many people that haven’t heard of you and the things you’ve done. You’re known even on the continent.’
She’d thought as much.
‘Semantics. Now tell me what you want and what the fuck you’re doing in my kingdom.’
She pressed the blade harder, relishing in the bead of blood that ran down the column of the girl’s neck.
‘I don’t mean any of you harm—’
Arla pressed harder. ‘I don’t take kindly to liars.’
‘Don’t kill her, Dragonhart. I prefer my meat fresh.’
‘I promise. We don’t mean any of you harm.’
‘I’m getting bored, Red. I suggest you start speaking because a very hungry dragon won’t stay out of my head and is reminding me that her teeth are even sharper than mine.’
The girl’s face paled in the moonlight.
‘We’re a resistance – the Red Blades. We started it as a way to take down Elrod. Some of the mages he took are with us now.’
Lovell’s words echoed in Arla’s head – that there were mages still unaccounted for.
Bile rose in her throat as that primal need to protect the mages reared in her blood.
‘Settle yourself. We will burn them all to ash if they have harmed them.’
‘If you have touched a hair on their heads—’
‘They’re safe, I promise you they’re safe,’ Red said.
‘Then why do you keep them?’ Arla growled.
‘They want to fight. What Elrod did to them … well, you can understand why the mages wish to fight back.’
She thought her heart had stopped beating. Her voice lethally soft, she demanded, ‘Explain, now.’
‘We’re no different than you, I swear it,’ the girl choked out. ‘We rescued them only to keep them from the king, nothing else. It was only when more and more of them gathered that the idea of the resistance formed – an army to take down Elrod of Kastonia and make him pay for what he did to them.’
Arla blinked slowly. ‘You aren’t a mage, though.’
The girl smiled. ‘Neither are you.’
A frustrated sound growled free of Arla’s throat. ‘I’m a dragonhart.’
‘But you didn’t know that before. It didn’t stop you rescuing them, did it?’
No. It didn’t.
How had this resistance been formed without Hark or his crew’s knowledge? Why … why were they here?
She was shaking, the sword digging further into the girl’s skin. ‘Then why have you been spying on us?’
The girl swallowed, the lump in her throat bobbing against the tip of Arla’s sword. ‘Because I want the chance to speak to your people. To see if they wish to join the resistance too.’
Arla scoffed before she could stop herself. ‘You aren’t getting within a hundred yards of my people. You think I’ll let you convince them to join you in what is suicide?’
‘Don’t you think some of them will want to?’ the girl snapped.
No!’ Arla laughed in disbelief. ‘No, I do not. And even if they did, it would be foolish to march on a king and his army, especially when they’re being led by a pathetic girl who’s currently at the end of my sword.’
The girl’s eyes narrowed. ‘They won’t be led by me. I’m just a soldier. Please. Give them the choice. What Elrod did was heinous. He deserves to die for it.’
‘I’m not disputing that,’ Arla said, her anger already dissolving because she could …
she could understand the motive. Could understand the anger and that need for revenge.
She’d harboured it within her heart for years after Elrod killed her parents.
‘But I won’t allow my people to be sent to their deaths. ’
The girl sighed. ‘We have long despised the kings and their methods. We have always believed in the old religion, in the dragons and the gods and the dragonharts. They are safe, and we will keep them safe whilst they march against the man who wronged them. It would be better with you on side.’
‘Never,’ Arla said softly. ‘Never will I ask them to fight.’
‘You won’t give them the choice?’
She considered it for all of three seconds. ‘No. Not yet. Not whilst they’re still afraid. In time, perhaps, but not now. They deserve the peace they had ripped away from them for years.’
‘Two months then. Let me come back in two months and speak with them.’
Against her own instinct, Arla let the girl stand, keeping the blade gripped firmly in her hand. She didn’t know why she capitulated.
‘I will consider it. But you are not to spy on my kingdom again.’
The girl nodded once, a sharp incline of her chin, before she met Arla’s gaze again. ‘My name is Sylvie.’
Arla tilted her head, studying the girl’s face as if it would betray something sinister lurking beneath the surface.
Arla sighed. ‘You’re a fool. But I understand your need for revenge. Tell your leader not to send you in their place next time. It’s cowardly.’
Sylvie nodded again in that sharp, jerky movement before breaking into a run and disappearing into the trees.
‘You don’t trust her, Dragonhart.’
Arla began the walk through the forest to where she knew Thara was lurking and listening.
‘No, I don’t, and I won’t risk the safety of this kingdom until I do.’
‘I knew I picked you for a reason.’
It was as close to a compliment she thought she’d ever get from her dragon.
She hadn’t been able to sleep for the remainder of the night.
Which was why, when the sun finally rose and she wandered to the training rooms to practise with Seb, she forced the Red Blade out of her mind.
She couldn’t trust them, and if she made a decision so soon after they had met, she was at risk of damning Flambriar.
She’d push it out of her mind, let herself come to terms with it and decide whether they could trust what the girl had said before she broached the topic with the court.
‘You’ll have to start sleeping, Dragonhart,’ Seb called across the room to her when she finally arrived to train. ‘You look like you got into a fight with death.’
It was true – she was pale and her head pounded from the lack of sleep. ‘Death wouldn’t last five minutes with me,’ she grunted, pulling a blade from the rack bolted to the wall. ‘She tried, remember?’
‘How could we forget,’ he said, chuckling lightly, already bracing himself for the attack she would launch on him.
‘Indeed,’ she said, ignoring how the scar at her side still bothered her.
How the tightness of the tissue restricted her movement and how she’d had to learn to adapt around it.
Not that it made her any less deadly; she’d happily take on Hark’s poorly constructed group of soldiers and have confidence that she’d beat them all.
‘Let’s go then, dragon girl. Show me what you’ve got.’