It was a nice change to wake up warm and comfortable. Iris shifted under the blanket as consciousness slowly returned to her, enjoying the thick fabric over her and the soft cushions beneath her. Kayla wasn’t pestering her yet, so she thought it must still be early.
No, Kayla wasn’t there at all.
This wasn’t her bed. The blanket was too thick; the cushions were too soft.
And she was too alone.
“Morning.”
Suddenly, she was wide awake, heart racing with fear as it all came rushing back. She wasn’t alone. She was a prisoner to two dragons. This was their lair, and she didn’t know what they wanted with her.
She kept her eyes shut and lay perfectly still. Maybe Char hadn’t been talking to her.
He yawned, and then he asked, “She still asleep?”
She almost let out a sigh of relief.
“Yeah.” Rath’s voice was much closer to her. “What a lightweight. One glass of wine, and she was out cold.”
“She’s been running since Sunday.” Char’s voice stretched as he spoke, as if he were physically stretching, and then he sighed contentedly. “Probably hasn’t gotten much sleep since then. What do you want for breakfast?”
“Anybody but you to make it.”
Char snorted. “As if you’re any better at cooking. Come on. She isn’t going anywhere.”
They sounded like brothers, she realized, and they looked like brothers, too. And as she listened to their footsteps fade away, she thought they didn’t sound so frightening this morning.
But then again, they didn’t know she was awake.
She sat up carefully, tucking her hair behind her ear as she scanned the room. There were two lounge chairs across from her, separated by a coffee table from the sofa where she sat. Rath must have been sitting in one of those chairs, watching her.
A chill ran down her spine at the thought. They had been watching her all night, and she was sure they were discussing her right now.
She needed to get out of here.
Three doorways broke the smooth stone walls: two behind the lounge chairs, open and separated by a length of wall and a bookcase, and one off to her left, sealed with a large stone. That one was probably the exit, she thought with disappointment.
She twisted around to examine the rest of the room. There was another open doorway in the far end of the wall behind the sofa, and from it, she heard muted voices.
If she couldn’t escape, maybe she could learn something useful.
She stood and crept quietly toward the door, hugging the stone wall. A savory aroma filled the air and made her stomach growl. Something was sizzling in a pan. This must be the kitchen.
“You dragged me into it, and I’d like to know what’s going on before we report back and both get in trouble,” Rath was saying. “It was supposed to be a simple mission. Scout things out, get back to us with the information, and then we attack. That’s it. So, what went wrong? And no dancing around the truth anymore. I want a straight answer.”
She heard an irritated sigh.
“The mage wasn’t supposed to be there,” Char said. “That changed everything.”
“It didn’t have to. We could have hit that night or the next morning before he got organized.”
“He was staying in the middle of town. We were under orders to minimize civilian casualties, remember?”
“Okay, fair point. But what about slitting his throat? That should’ve been easy enough.”
Suddenly, Iris felt nauseous.
“He had a barrier up at his door. I took a huge risk just staying at the same inn.”
Another sigh. “You took too many risks. Period.”
“The king’s mage coming to a little town just before the start of the war? That seemed off to me. The soldiers were only there because it’s the kingdom’s westernmost point, and he wasn’t even staying with them. He was looking for something. I figured we should know what that was.”
“And you think it was that girl.”
“Yeah, I do. There was something off about her, too. She was a barmaid at that inn, and when she took him his dinner that first night, she felt the magic at his door.”
“Now, how could you possibly know that?” Rath asked sarcastically.
“I had a seat with a clear view of his door. She wasn’t flighty or nervous at all until then, but she stopped in front of that door like it scared her, and she was inside his room too long. When she came out, her face was white. He did something to her; I’m sure of it.”
“Maybe he just raped her.”
The casual way Rath said that made Iris’ stomach clench. She had to force herself to stay put and keep listening. There was nowhere to run, anyway.
“She wasn’t in there that long,” Char replied, an edge to his voice. “He had men asking around town about her the next day, so I did some digging, too. From what I gathered, she’s just an orphan. Nobody knows who her parents were or where she came from.”
He had been following her. The realization washed over her like ice cold water. When she saw him in the marketplace, he had been following her. And the mage had been asking about her, too.
Why?
“But it turns out she’s a mage,” Rath said.
“I didn’t know that until a bar fight that night. She was right in the middle of it, and I figured the noise would bring the mage out of his room, so I grabbed her and pulled her outside. He put a stop to the fight with magic, and she sensed it before it even happened. Before I even sensed it. If the mage had seen that, I’m pretty sure he would have taken her that night.”
“Why?” Rath asked, echoing the single most important question in Iris’ mind.
“I don’t know. But I know she didn’t have that amulet before I left town.”
Her heart pounded an erratic beat in her chest. Everything made even less sense now. Her world was crumbling around her. Nowhere was safe. Not back in town, where that mage was looking for her for unknown reasons. Not here, where any apparent kindness had an ulterior motive.
Char hadn’t pulled her out of the bar fight to help her. He’d done it to keep the mage from getting his hands on her. That was why he’d wanted her at the river during the attack, too. He’d probably planned on snatching her up after the battle to bring her back to the dragons so they could figure out how to use her.
She felt sick. Sick and dazed.
“Somebody’s been eavesdropping.”
Rath’s voice snapped her back to reality. He grabbed her wrist and yanked her into the room, shoving her into a wooden chair at a table Char was setting with breakfast. She couldn’t even look at the food, or them. They took seats on either side of her—Char on her right, Rath on her left—and she fixed her eyes on the table’s wood grain, but she still felt the weight of their combined glare.
“Start talking,” Char said coolly.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, “but I don’t think I can help you.”
“Where did you get the amulet?” he asked, lowering his voice to sound even more threatening, as if that were necessary. She was already terrified.
“Father John gave it to me.”
“Yeah, right,” Rath scoffed. “A priest gave you a powerful magical artifact. How dumb do you think we are?”
She winced at the venom in his voice. “But he did,” she said softly, curling her fingers into her skirt under the wooden table. “He said it had been left with me at the church.”
“When you were a baby?” Char asked.
She nodded.
There was a brief silence. She didn’t dare look up at either of them. They weren’t touching her, but they were close enough to do so easily, and she had a feeling the wrong answer would end up with someone hurting her. Or worse.
“Had you ever encountered magic before all this started?” Char asked.
She shook her head. It felt safer to speak as little as possible.
He sighed. “We have to take her with us.”
“What? No. Absolutely not. I say we just kill her and take that amulet. That’s where the power is, right? Why do we need her?”
She froze at Rath’s words. Even her fingers stopped fidgeting with her dress, as if she could disappear by just holding still.
“We don’t know how it works,” Char argued. “It might be useless without her.”
“Then we leave her here and report back. I don’t want to be flying around with a mage in my talons. Who knows what she’d do to us?”
“That mage may be tracking her.”
Rath groaned. “Great. So we lead him straight home? You’re losing it, Char.”
“She got here in, what, two days? If he finds her trail, he’ll be here before we get back, and then she’s as good as his. That may be worse for us in the long run. The shields are stronger back home. It’ll be harder for him to track her there.”
“I don’t know how this human magic works,” Rath grumbled.
“Did he ever touch you?” Char asked, returning his attention to Iris.
She swallowed and nodded hesitantly. “Friday night, he… he grabbed my wrist.”
“What else happened?”
She bit her lip nervously. “He… he was upset about the ale. He thought someone poisoned it, and he made me drink it first to prove it was fine.”
“What about the magic?” Char asked insistently. “You felt it, didn’t you?”
“Th-the air… stung,” she said falteringly, unsure of how to describe it. “O-outside his door. It was… snapping? Like a… a crackling noise I could feel instead of hear? And it got worse the longer I was inside until… until it almost felt like my skin was burning.”
“Did he say anything else to you? Ask anything?”
She shook her head.
“What about your name? He didn’t ask your name?”
His tone had gradually become less threatening. She ventured a look up at him, and his green eyes weren’t angry or hard anymore, but troubled.
“I-I told him my name when I came in. I always do.”
“So he can track you.” He frowned and pushed back from the table. “We need to go. Now.”
“I’m not finished eating,” Rath replied, his words garbled by a mouthful of food.
“Thought you didn’t like my cooking.”
“It’s better than nothing. Are you going to eat that?” Rath pointed at Iris’ untouched plate.
She shook her head, but Char snatched it away.
“We don’t have time.”
“What, so now you’re an expert in human magic?” Rath complained, but he stood and yanked Iris to her feet again, dragging her after Char into the living room.
“The snapping and crackling are his signature,” Char explained, crossing the room to the stone-covered doorway and shoving it open with ease. “He was using a probing spell, searching for somebody with magical ability. Pick her up. We can’t have her slowing us down.”
Rath threw her over his shoulder again before she could protest. Not that she would have bothered. They wouldn’t care.
“It was a constant spell he had up around him, which was why I couldn’t get close. If he knows a person’s name and establishes physical contact with them while he’s using that spell, he can track them, to a degree. It only works if he’s close enough, so we should be fine once we get to the mountains.”
“How close are we talking?”
“I don’t know exactly, and I don’t want to find out. Iris, the bar fight. What did you feel then?”
Answering questions while dangling over Rath’s shoulder wasn’t really comfortable, but there was no point in complaining.
“I-I felt his magic again, and then I heard a loud, high-pitched sound, a-and I felt the ground shake, like there was an explosion.”
“You covered your ears before the sound. How did you know before it happened?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“I’m not carrying her while we’re flying,” Rath interjected. “If you want to risk getting yourself killed, that’s on you, but I’d like to make it home alive.”
They were already on even ground again, their footsteps hurried, and Rath had made no move to put her down yet. No chance of escaping, she thought miserably.
“Why didn’t you stay at the river like I told you?” Char asked her.
The frustration in his voice triggered an answering frustration in her.
“You didn’t tell me. You told me to go, not to stay. And it sounds like that would have done me no good, anyway, even if Kayla hadn’t taken off.”
“Kayla?” Rath asked. “Was that the stupid little girl running across the battlefield?”
Frustration turned to anger in an instant.
“She isn't stupid!” Iris snapped. “She just can’t fathom anybody trying to hurt her!”
There was a brief pause, and then Char commented, “That was a pretty impressive shield.”
Iris didn’t respond. She remembered Kayla’s blonde hair streaming behind her as she ran excitedly to the church, and tears pricked at her eyes.
“And that’s another thing,” Rath said. “You could have gotten yourself killed when you pulled that dive.”
“But I didn’t.”
“That explosion just missed your tail! If you were going to make a dumb move like that, you should have at least grabbed her.”
“Then the mage would have shot at me instead of her, and I would be dead.”
“He was shooting at you!”
“He was aiming at her. We’re close enough. Give her to me and get out of here. I’ll be right behind you.”
“You’d better be.”
Rath tossed Iris at Char. She had no time to regain her footing before Char’s arms were around her, pulling her away from the sudden shift in the air. The temperature dropped to a winter freeze. It was too dark for her to see anything, but she sensed the change, felt the massive creature looming over her. Talons scraped across stone, heading toward the crashing of the waterfall. A gust of wind would have knocked her to the ground if Char hadn’t held her upright.
“Iris.”
His voice had softened. He pulled her closer, his breath wafting across her ear, and her frightened heart began to race for a completely different reason.
“I won’t let anybody kill you.”
But she couldn’t forget his unforgiving grip the previous night when she thought he would suffocate her—when he nearly did. Or the things she’d heard him say to Rath.
She tried to push back from his chest, and just like before, he didn’t let her go.
“I don’t believe you.”
He caught her chin and tilted it up, sealing her lips with his before she could react. The kiss was warm and tender, and it only confused her more. She shoved him even harder.
“D-don’t do that!”
Then his embrace was gone. She stumbled back into the dark as the temperature dropped again. Cold, hard talons grabbed her and lifted her off the ground, helpless in his grip. The roaring of the waterfall was getting closer. She squeezed her eyes shut and managed to work one hand up to the amulet, clutching it to her heart as water misted her hair and skin.
He launched into the air with a lurch of her stomach, the powerful strokes of his wings tossing her hair in all different directions as he climbed higher. She was getting lightheaded. The cold tore the lingering warmth of his kiss from her lips. She didn’t want it there, and she didn’t want to think about it, either.
Darkness encroached on the edges of her consciousness as the air thinned. She welcomed its embrace.31Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6yV9tA04qf
