Chapter 19
There was something in the air at Claret Hall over the next two weeks – in Flambriar, too.
Arla’s steps felt featherlight as she wandered the corridors of the hall, and when she trained with Seb or Hark or any guard that would risk it, gone was the angry, dangerous streak that slightly terrified her, and in its place was a skill that she had honed and perfected over the years.
Her moves came easily, and the pain in her side was just a memory.
She spent evenings flying with Thara over the mountains, pushing Sylvie’s request to the back of her mind.
Everything here was too good – too happy – for her to ruin it by bringing it up with the court.
Besides, she still had more than a month before she had to meet with the Red Blade again.
There was nothing to say she must make a decision by then, no matter what she had told Sylvie.
She didn’t know why she still kept it from Hark and the rest of their court, only that it felt too late now.
She should have said something weeks ago.
Perhaps, if she were lucky, Sylvie would disappear and never come back, and Arla wouldn’t have to make any difficult decisions regarding letting the redhead converse with Flambriar’s people and convince them to go to war.
The rest of the court had been filled with a joyful energy too, and Arla wished it could stay like this forever, that she could be allowed to live in this suspended peace far away from the other kingdoms.
But she couldn’t, could she? Because whilst the mages and the court might be the most relaxed they’d been since Flambriar had been founded, Jaz had been holed up in the library, and Arla knew she couldn’t avoid it forever.
It was why she found herself heading there following a particularly hard duel with one of the guards after Noah’s falcons had returned to Flambriar without a single scroll bearing Hadalyn’s crest. She entered quietly, careful not to scuff her boots on the wooden floor as she wandered between the shelves to find Jaz sitting beside the window with a pile of books resting on the floor beside him.
‘Nice of you to join me,’ he said without looking up.
‘Stop being so miserable,’ she huffed, collapsing into the chair opposite him and earning herself a scathing look. ‘If the gods want me to unite the kingdoms, they should make it a little easier. I can’t read every single book in this library.’
‘Who said the book is in this library?’
She stilled. ‘You don’t think it’s here, do you?’
Jaz sighed heavily, closing the book he held and leaning back in his chair.
He looked tired – as if he had spent every second available in this room looking for anything on the gods and the dragonharts.
‘I think the only way you’re going to find out anything about the dragonharts is by reading the ancient texts, many of which we have here.
But there’s nothing to say there aren’t still books hidden in Kastonia and Hadalyn.
And there’s nothing to say there aren’t books that have been lost to time.
It’s been a century since the dragonharts walked the land, Arla.
If your dragon won’t give us the answers you seek, then the books have to. ’
‘Tell him I will scorch his skin and rip the flesh from his bones—’
‘Thara is bound by the gods and the fates. She cannot speak of what she is commanded to keep silent. I may be a dragonhart, but Thara’s loyalty lies first and foremost with her masters.
’ The venom that dripped from her words was enough to have Jaz looking sufficiently wary, and Arla didn’t know if it was Thara’s anger or her own that simmered in her voice.
She had begged the dragon so many times to help her, to tell her what she needed to do, but even the news that entire streets of Kastonia were succumbing to wasting sickness and there was no medicine left to help did not change Thara’s mind.
Thara’s turmoil had been a wild, thrashing thing down the bond, begging Arla not to force her to speak of such things.
Arla wouldn’t blame Thara for not speaking of it, and she wouldn’t allow anyone else to either.
‘We keep looking. There will be answers somewhere,’ she muttered.
‘Why?’
Arla looked up at him. Jaz’s arms were crossed over his chest and he was looking at her as if she were the most boring thing he had ever seen. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Why are you still looking? The people are safe here, you said so yourself. You’re the happiest I think I’ve ever seen you, and so are the rest of this court. So why unite the kingdoms?’
It was a question she’d been asking herself for days now.
‘Because I won’t let Hadalyn fall to the same poverty and ruin that is taking over Kastonia.
Cyrus may have betrayed me, but Hadalyn is still my home, and they are still my people.
They don’t deserve for the kingdoms to fall, and who’s to say it stops there?
The gods are angry that the balance is off, Jaz.
They won’t stop once Kastonia and Hadalyn have fallen.
The people will flee, and they will end up here and then Flambriar will be punished too.
Gods, the continents themselves will fall if we don’t find a way to right what Elrod did! ’
‘That’s my point,’ Jaz said. ‘This was Elrod’s doing, not yours. Why should it be up to you to fix it?’
Had there not been animosity between the two of them from the very moment they had met, Arla might think Jaz was defending her – that he was trying to find a way to keep her from having to be the one to unite it all.
But she could see straight through him. He was intrigued by her.
He still didn’t believe that her loyalty lay anywhere other than to herself. It made her want to stab him.
‘Because I’m a dragonhart. Like it or not, the gods chose me, and I have to restore the balance that bastard upset by sacrificing the mages. I don’t think the gods are going to accept me asking them not to kill us all, even if I say please.’
It all sounded ridiculous when she said it like that. Even more so considering the fact she hadn’t believed in any of it mere months ago.
Save the kingdoms…
She was close to watching them all burn.
‘Then I suggest you pick up a book and start reading, Dragonhart.’
Her eyes had to be bleeding, surely.
As the clock signalled the fifth hour of her being curled up in the library with only Jaz’s relentless sighing for company, she was ready to stab herself with her own blade.
That was when she found it.
Hidden at the bottom of a torn page stained yellow with age, sharp handwriting gave her the first promising piece of information she’d found in weeks.
‘You’ll want to read this,’ she said, surprised how dry her mouth was and how heavy her tongue felt. Jaz came around the wooden table to peer over her shoulder and read the words on the torn parchment.
…magic they are gifted is enough to break and make worlds. The gods have gifted them well, and the harts are a gift to us…
‘Do you think this is about the dragonharts?’ Arla breathed.
Jaz nodded, turning the page to see if the passage continued. It didn’t, the book too damaged and old to offer anything else on the history of the dragonharts. ‘I think it speaks of them having had gods’ magic once. That they were gifted it in order to protect the mages,’ he said.
‘But I don’t have magic,’ Arla said, and all too quickly her chest was tight. What if she’d done something wrong? What if she was supposed to have magic and keep them all safe? What if—
‘I think this speaks of a time before even the dragons were here,’ Jaz said, his eyes fixed somewhere far away. ‘It says the harts were a gift to the people, but it doesn’t mention the dragons.’
‘But the dragons were here when the gods left the earth centuries ago. They became the only way the dragonharts could contact the gods.’
‘I think things were very different from what we have been taught,’ Jaz said solemnly, rubbing a hand across his brow.
‘So what then?’ There was a storm brewing inside of her, threatening to topple this entire hall if she couldn’t work it out. She had come to the library for answers on how she was supposed to unite kingdoms. Now … now she had more questions than when she started.
‘I don’t know,’ Jaz said with a sigh. ‘I don’t know in what order the dragons and the gods and the harts came, but I think you all had magic once – gods’ magic, strong enough to shatter worlds.
I don’t know what happened or where that magic went, but wherever it disappeared to the gods followed.
And now it’s only the dragons and you left. ’
The dragonhart brooch felt hot through the fabric of her shirt, as if it was teasing her, goading her into finding something more…
The doors to the library swung open, but the click of feet across the wooden floor belonged to an unfamiliar person. When Noah’s head peered around the bookcase, a scroll clutched tightly in his right hand, it took everything she had within her not to vomit.
‘Forgive the intrusion, Dragonhart. This came for you. The falcon landed a little less than half an hour ago.’ Noah held out the scroll to Arla and she snatched it so violently it was embarrassing.
But she had been waiting for this, hadn’t she?
This was going to be the last piece of her that would feel whole again, and Halos would be the one to fix her.
Later, when she had calmed down and considered the fact that Halos would never seal a scroll with wax, Arla would realise that the crest melted into the seal was not that of Hadalyn, but of a kingdom she had visited only once before.
Her eyes scanned the letter quickly, skipping over words as if she could absorb them just by glancing. She couldn’t help the way her heart sank the more she read, nor the feeling that the knot in her stomach was going to suffocate her when she finally read who the letter was from.
Her voice was small when she looked up at Jaz and said, ‘It’s from the Princess of Malarye. They want me to visit them.’
No one was particularly keen on her travelling to Malarye, and they were vehemently against her going alone.
She stormed out of the sitting room and away from the five concerned faces blinking at her and decided to dissolve her anger the only way she knew how: by punishing her body until she collapsed.
She recalled what Jaz had said in the library: ‘Only the dragons and you left.’
Right, because it was too much to ask that she be given some sort of explanation, wasn’t it?
‘Patience, Dragonhart. You humans are too quick to resort to anger.’
‘I’m angry because I’ve been left flailing in the dark by gods and fates who obviously find this all very amusing.’
A rumble rattled down the bond, raising the hair on Arla’s neck as she climbed the highest point of Claret Hall. Her arms were burning; she needed to train harder.
‘I assure you no one, least of all the gods, finds this amusing. The fates have tied the gods’ hands. They cannot help you, Dragonhart, and I am even blinder than they are.’
One day, if she ever got to meet the fates, she’d stab them one by one. Into tiny little pieces. And scatter the pieces across the kingdoms. Maybe set fire to them.
She tried to summon the anger in the bond, but that too was failing her. Now she was just confused and tired and desperate.
‘What do you think I should do?’
Thara didn’t answer her until she’d made it to the highest window ledge of the hall and her limbs trembled with the effort as she pulled herself through it.
Arla thought, for a brief moment, that Thara had shut down the bond, and the plummeting, sharp feeling in her stomach was utterly embarrassing.
She’d come to find the bond too much of a comfort.
‘You will go to Malarye and learn what it is they wish to tell you. Queens and princesses don’t invite guests to their shores for pleasantries, Dragonhart, as you well know.
There will be knowledge worth gaining on the continent.
The gods are reluctant to tell me anything anymore, but they speak of patience, and they speak of your strength especially.
I hope in time it will all become clear. ’
Arla could hear the sorrow in Thara’s voice, the sting of betrayal that gods who had once cherished their dragons were now keeping secrets.
It made her angry. Not just for her but for Thara too.
Thara, who had woken and left the rest of her kind sleeping in Hadalyn in order to help a girl who didn’t have a clue how to do anything.
‘I chose you for a reason. Don’t ever doubt my belief in you, Dragonhart. Know that I do not.’
She blinked the tears from her eyes before they could fall.
Patience. Strength. She could do that – she had always done that.
But time…
Time she did not have.
‘Do you think I’ll ever meet the gods – or the fates? I’d love to have a word with them.’
Thara huffed a laugh down the bond. Having worked out her anger, it didn’t seem too bad.
She could do this. Hark had stepped up and addressed his people, and now it was her turn.
She could step up and be patient and strong and whatever else the gods wanted whilst she waited for everything to play out.
‘I think if the gods ever meet you, they will have met their match.’
She hoped so. She hoped that all of this had made her strong, but that it hadn’t turned her into something sharp and unforgiving.
She still felt those bursts of anger, the almost primal urge to kill and hurt anything that stood in her way or threatened the people she loved.
She hoped she wasn’t too far gone. She hoped there was a way back for someone who had done horrible, wicked things.
She hoped she hadn’t ruined herself.