Chapter 36
The next week was filled with training and arrows from sun-up until sundown. At that point, Arla would drag herself back up the cliff to her rooms and begin leafing through the pile of books that had been delivered to her from the libraries.
Hyacinth was there too, every night, bringing cakes and pastries and sweet wine that they chatted and laughed over as they scanned the ancient texts for any mention of the prophecy or how to fix the mess the gods had bestowed on the kingdoms.
By the seventh night, she was ready to throw herself off the side of the cliff.
‘Always with the dramatics, Dragonhart.’
‘There’s nothing here,’ she whined, slamming the leather cover shut and choking on the cloud of dust that erupted from it.
‘There will be, I’m sure of it,’ Hyacinth said softly, reaching across the end of the bed to unravel a scroll sealed with scarlet ribbon.
She didn’t know when she fell asleep, only that when she woke, her room was nothing but inky darkness. Hyacinth had left her sleeping, the books stacked neatly by the desk, and a thick blanket had been laid over her shoulders.
Why was she having to blink back tears?
She fell back asleep dreaming of dragons and swords that were too heavy to carry.
Malarye’s army was slowly becoming a formidable force. Arla left each session with new admiration for them – the way they listened to her, the way they wielded swords on the ground and arrows in the air … it was a sight to behold.
She had improved, too. For the last three days, every arrow she fired had met its mark on targets so far away she had trouble making them out. It lit her chest with an elation she didn’t think would ever dim.
Despite her lack of progress with the library books, she felt better than ever. She was still grinning from a particularly spectacular training session in which she had hit the target from so far away she had relied on pure instinct to aim the bow.
Hyacinth was aiding Crea tonight – the priestess was seen about less and less these days and Arla could only suspect her sickness had taken hold with a new vengeance – and the thought of dragging those heavy books onto the bed and painstakingly studying them on her own elicited a disgruntled groan.
She forced herself to do so anyway – the kingdoms would fall without it, after all – and before long the hours had slipped away, the small clock in the corner of the room informing her that she had been reading for almost three hours when Hyacinth’s small frame slipped through the door and climbed up onto the bed.
‘It’s late. You should be in bed,’ Arla murmured, not looking up from the book in front of her.
Something had drawn her to it, the leather so worn and smooth it felt alive beneath her fingers.
The dragonhart symbol – a flame inside a heart – had been carved into the leather and she couldn’t help but run her fingers over it.
She hadn’t taken her own brooch off since the moment she had been gifted it by a strange woman in Vorstrum all those months ago.
‘So should you,’ Hyacinth said, dragging another book onto the bed as she settled against the headboard next to Arla.
‘I’m busy. You know I can’t stop until I have answers. Crea isn’t sick because she happened to catch a wasting sickness. Diath can’t heal her so it’s not exactly hard to figure out that the gods are responsible, is it?’
She didn’t mean to snap – not at Hyacinth who was only ever gentle and kind – but she couldn’t keep the bite from her voice. This was serious. She couldn’t go home until she knew how to fix this. There was a pull here, a feeling that her answers would be given freely if only she knew where to look.
‘Crea has been utterly unbearable, you know. Ever since the court dinner…’
Arla didn’t hear what the princess said next because she was so focused on the passage before her, the ink so worn she could barely make out the words. But they were there all the same.
‘Shut up, I’ve found something.’
Hyacinth’s incessant chatter ceased immediately.
Arla read the passage to herself again, and again, and again, until she was certain she had committed the words to memory, and she could begin to understand them.
‘You’re pale. Should I call Diath?’ Hyacinth was already making for the door.
‘No,’ Arla said quietly. ‘No, I’m all right. There’s something here, and I think it’s important.’
‘What is it?’ Hyacinth climbed back onto the bed, her body warm and soft as she leaned across to see what was laid before them in ink so old the gods must have made it.
‘It speaks of Damon,’ Arla began. Hyacinth pressed closer, her face solemn in the low light of the lanterns Arla had lit. She could feel Thara there too, waiting, listening through the bond. ‘It says he was corrupted by his own greed for magic stronger than his own, but … it wasn’t his fault.’
‘What do you mean?’ Hyacinth asked.
‘It wasn’t Damon’s greed that caused his death. It was a god’s.’
Silence stretched between them, an electric thing that had the hairs on the back of her neck standing tall.
She cleared her throat before she continued.
‘It speaks of the gods, how they worked with the dragons and their harts until … until one god became so hungry for power that he began turning mages against one another.’
Hyacinth had gone utterly still.
‘The gods still walked the earth back then, still spoke and lived with the people. That god, in his quest for power, caused a war between mages that nearly wiped out their existence. The dragons and the dragonharts were split between the sides of the war, and it nearly ended the world.’
She was reading quicker now, her eyes jumping over the words and sentences that looped together in handwriting so old she struggled to decipher it.
‘The gods eventually defeated him with the aid of the dragons and the magic of the dragonharts, but it left them weak enough that the gods left the earth, leaving only the dragons and their harts behind. The world settled again for hundreds of years until Damon…’
She was shaking, her fingers barely able to turn the pages.
Hyacinth hadn’t moved an inch, her eyes glued to the book.
A lump of ice settled in the pit of her stomach, a warning, maybe, that she wouldn’t like what was coming.
She had known it the moment she’d picked up the book, the moment she’d seen the dragonhart symbol carved into the leather spine.
‘Carry on,’ Hyacinth whispered, her voice haunted and shallow. At least the information was new to her, too.
‘That fallen god was never killed, only stripped of his power,’ Arla explained, her voice hoarse as she scrambled to make sense of it all.
‘So when Damon came along and began his life as a dragonhart, so kind and meek, the god saw his chance and corrupted Damon’s nature.
The greed, the killing of other dragonharts and mages came next, the fallen god acting through Damon’s body. ’
‘It’s no wonder it drove him to madness,’ Hyacinth said softly, her eyes fixed on a point in the corner of the room, no longer trying to keep pace with Arla’s scanning of the text.
‘Every now and then, Damon managed to regain control of his mind and understand what he’d done, but he couldn’t live with it and killed himself with his own blade.
The dragons disappeared not long after that, leaving behind a prophecy from the gods.
That one with a heart of flame would unite this world and end the killing of those with magic in their blood. ’
The prophecy still elicited the same reaction from her as it always did. Always a flutter in her chest, the overwhelming sense that the world was pressing in on her. And yet the words that followed had her hurling herself into the bathing chamber and heaving into the toilet.
Hyacinth’s voice reached her from the bed as the princess muttered the words that had sent Arla vomiting up everything she had consumed that day.
‘But not before history will repeat itself.’
The forest floor cut and tore at the bare flesh of her feet as she sprinted through it, her hair loose and streaming behind her, her nightgown tearing on stray branches and thorns.
Bile still burned her throat, her eyes sore and streaming as she bolted through the trees, not caring that she was bleeding and couldn’t breathe, not caring that she’d left Hyacinth shouting after her as she’d fled the bedroom and its pressing walls.
She had to get out. Had to get out. Had to get out.
Because she knew. Had known for a long time now that there was something corrupting her soul.
It wasn’t that old, familiar slice of wickedness that she had nurtured from the age of nine, it wasn’t the violent assassin that lay beneath her skin, ready to be called at a moment’s notice.
No, because with those things she had always been in control.
As deadly and dangerous and wicked as she was, she had always kept her concentration reserved in that calm, unfeeling place of her mind where she could switch off that violence as quickly as breathing.
But recently…
Those moments where she had descended into violence and bloodshed…
A heaving sob ruptured from her lips as she tripped over a gnarled tree root.
Her ankle rolled, but she kept running. Kept fleeing the inevitable because …
because she knew that the sharp handwriting in that ancient book was right.
History was repeating itself. And there was nothing she could do to stop it.
She was snatched from the ground before the next sob spilt through her lips.
And then she was flying.
There wasn’t time to scream, and no air to breathe either, because her chest was too tight, and she couldn’t stop the heaving panic that had sunk its claws into her when she had understood what would happen: she would become evil and corrupted and make all the wrong choices because of a god who couldn’t accept he had been stripped of his status, his privilege and his power.