Dragon Forge: The Draconic Prophecies - Book Two (9 page)

She glanced over her shoulder at him with a grin. “You have a way of making everything sound so momentous.”

“Don’t you think it is? How many people have even seen this land, let alone walked into its heart?”

“Perhaps I’ve grown jaded. You and I spent years venturing into caverns far below the earth where no one had ventured before. Somehow that never seemed so … weighty.”

“It turned out to be, though, didn’t it? That’s where I found that nightshard, the Heart of Khyber.”

Rienne’s face clouded. That single moment had set world-shaking events in motion—from speeding along the schism of
House Thuranni, to Gaven’s sentence in Dreadhold, and ultimately his confrontation with the Soul Reaver. It had caused them both a great deal of pain.

“We were so young,” Gaven added. “Too young to appreciate the significance of what we were doing.”

“Or perhaps now we’re inclined to exaggerate the importance of our tiny quavers in the voice of the Prophecy.”

A surge of anger rose in his chest. “You think I’m being arrogant? Is that what you think this is about?”

Rienne turned and leaned back against the bulwark. Gaven expected her face to mirror his own anger. Instead he saw sadness. “I still don’t know what this is about,” she said.

Her calm demeanor did nothing to soothe his anger. “How many times do I have to explain it to you?”

“Just until you find an explanation that makes sense.”

“Saving the world doesn’t make sense to you?”

“Saving the world, Gaven? Listen to yourself.”

Gaven was completely dumbfounded. “You think that’s pride.”

“I think the world doesn’t need saving. You said it earlier—this place is eternal, and the world with it. Nations and empires will come and go, we mortals will live our lives struggling like mad to leave any kind of lasting mark on it, but the voice of the Prophecy continues. Like the drums and the drone, unchanging beneath the melody.”

“Eternity doesn’t make that struggle less important. Maybe this isn’t about saving the world. But it might very well be about saving everything we know as the world—all of Khorvaire, for example. I think that’s important enough.”

“And you think you can do that.”

“I think I have to.”

Rienne turned back and looked out over the glassy water. “I’m sorry, Gaven. It seems my heart’s just not in this yet. I don’t know what I’m doing here, what my part in all this is.”

He put a hand on her back. “I’m glad you’re with me, anyway.”

She gave a slow nod. Then something caught her eye, and she pointed. “What’s that?”

Gaven’s gaze followed her pointing finger off to port and upward. Two dark shapes wheeled in the air—dragons. There could be no doubt.

“The dragons are back,” Rienne breathed. “Sovereigns help us.”

“We’d better tell Jor—”

The voice of the lookout cut him off. “Dragons!”

“Do you have a plan?” Rienne asked.

In answer, Gaven stretched out his fingers, feeling the wind that drove their ship toward the cove. His dragonmark itched again, and the wind gusted briefly, then grew steadily. He felt the wind move through him, felt the storm gathering in his mind. The brilliant blue drained out of the sky, and a veil of gray draped the sun.

“What are you doing?” Rienne said. “They’ll think we’re attacking!”

Dark clouds gathered above them, responding to the surge of anger he felt. “I’m trying,” he said, “to get the ship into the cove.” Speaking was difficult. Every word sparked a gust of wind.

Rienne looked toward the cove, then back at the panicked crew. “I’ll get the crew below.”

The dragons were coming in fast, adjusting their course to account for the
Sea Tiger’s
burst of speed. They would be upon her before she reached the cove. Gaven couldn’t read their intent—they might have been coming to parley, or purely out of curiosity. But the sunken ship they’d passed in the channel suggested otherwise. Gaven growled in frustration, and thunder rumbled in the clouds overhead. The winds grew stronger, and the clouds roiled in a great maelstrom.

They were close enough to identify now. One was the same dragon that he’d seen before, at the sentinel pillars. Its wings didn’t so much flap as undulate along the length of its serpentine body, and it managed to ride the wind better than the other. Sunlight shone gold on its scales. The new dragon was a bit smaller, but its white body was thicker. It flapped its wings furiously in the wind.

They weren’t too large, by dragon standards—both were smaller than Vaskar had been, but Gaven would barely reach the shoulder of either one. The gold dragon had two sharp horns
sweeping back from its brow, and a number of small tendrils extending like a beard from its cheeks and chin. A thin crest started just behind its horns and ran the length of its neck, matching the twin membranes of its fanlike wings. Where the gold gave an air of wisdom and subtlety, the white dragon was all predatory hunger. A short, thick crest topped its wolflike head, and thick plating started at its neck and its heavy tail.

The gold circled above the ship, and a moment later the white landed heavily on the deck, right in front of Gaven. The deck creaked as the galleon keeled forward, and Gaven stumbled backward to avoid sliding right into the dragon’s claws. The dragon growled deep in its throat, and it took a moment for Gaven to realize that it was forming words in Draconic.

“You should not be here, meat,” the dragon said, prowling a few steps closer to Gaven. It ran a blue-white tongue over the teeth on one side of its mouth.

Meat
—dragons sometimes used the same word for humanoids as they did for food. A vivid memory sprang to Gaven’s mind: Vaskar’s bronze-scaled mouth closing around the neck of a wyvern. He shook the memory from his head. He would not be meat, and neither would any other person on the
Sea Tiger
.

“I’ve come to learn the wisdom of the dragons,” Gaven said in Draconic.

The dragon pulled its head back, evidently surprised to be answered in its own language. Then it snarled and snaked forward again. “Then you’ve made a fatal mistake, meat.” It bared its daggerlike teeth and started padding toward Gaven.

“You’re the one who has erred,” Gaven said.

Thunder rumbled overhead as if to underscore his words, and Gaven thrust his arms forward. A ball of lightning formed around him then hurtled at the dragon as a mighty bolt and a resounding clap of thunder. The force of it knocked the dragon back and over the bulwark. It thrashed about for a moment before catching air under its wings again.

Gaven watched as the dragon flapped up and away from the ship, clearly both hurt and daunted by the blast of thunder and lightning.

“Gaven!” Rienne’s voice behind him jolted him around just as a great gout of flame washed over the deck.

The gold dragon flew above the highest mast, blowing a stream of fire from its mouth to cover the whole deck with a blanket of fire. To his surprise, Gaven didn’t see any of the crew—just Rienne, standing near the main hatch, surrounded by leaping flames. She cried out.

Drawing a quick, deep breath of the searing hot air, Gaven thrust his arms out to the front and back, and a great blast of wind swept the fire from the deck. Rienne fell to her knees.

Gaven cursed, and lightning flared in the clouds. A flashing bolt speared through the gold dragon, knocking it into the water with a great splash. He ran to Rienne and bent to help her stand.

“Never mind me,” she gasped. She pointed weakly behind him.

Gaven spun around just in time to catch the full brunt of a blast of frozen air streaming from the white dragon’s mouth. Frost crusted on his eyes and mouth, ice formed in his hair, and a layer of rime coated the deck. He staggered backward a few steps and slipped, landing hard on his back.

“First you dare trespass in our land.” The dragon landed on the deck again and prowled toward Gaven. Its voice was a low growl. “Then you have the audacity to
hurt
me. Now I plan to eat you alive.”

Gaven struggled to get his feet under him again, but the deck was too slippery.

“Is this dragon
talking
to you, Gaven?” Rienne stepped over him and took up a stance between him and the dragon. She didn’t speak or understand Draconic, and Gaven wasn’t sure whether the dragon understood Common. But it didn’t matter. “What a waste of time,” Rienne said, and she and Maelstrom began their deadly dance.

Gaven spoke a quick spell to sheath his body in a shield of flickering violet flames that warmed his body and turned the frost beneath him to water, and then to steam. He sprang to his feet, sliding his greatsword from the sheath on his back. Another arcane word made crackling lightning spring to life along the blade,
sparks flying off into the air. He edged forward to stand beside Rienne.

The dragon reared up, batting at Maelstrom with its front claws but unable to stop its incessant whirling. Rienne had already scored its hide with several long gashes, and fear was in its eyes. It spread its wings and flapped them hard.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Gaven said in Draconic. He sprang forward and slashed the muscle where the dragon’s wing connected to its body, and that wing crumpled at the dragon’s side. The dragon roared its pain and fury, then brought its front claws down hard on Gaven.

The sword clattered from his hand as he fell to the deck. The dragon’s weight on his chest knocked the wind out of him, but then the beast roared again and drew back, seared by the flames around Gaven’s body. Gaven swung his arms and brought his hands together in front of him, and a boom like thunder knocked the dragon backward.

This is harder than it should be, Gaven thought. Have I led these people to their deaths?

The ship rolled beneath him, and Gaven found himself sliding toward the gold dragon on the tilted deck. His sword slipped just out of his reach.

Gaven got to his feet once more. “I’m finished lying on my back now,” he growled in Draconic. “Get ready to see what the Storm Dragon can do.”

The gold dragon recoiled at that, and the white was still reeling from the blast of thunder and Rienne’s unrelenting assault.

“That’s right,” Gaven growled. “I am the Storm Dragon.”

Wind swept around the ship and gathered quickly into a whirlwind that pinned the gold dragon in place, tearing at its wings and snatching the breath from its snout. Lightning flashed within the walls of howling air, searing the dragon’s scales. The wyrm opened its mouth, but it had no breath to roar.

With only a glance in its direction, Gaven thrust a hand toward the white dragon and pierced its body with another blast of lightning. It crashed to the deck, and a final slice from Maelstrom made sure it didn’t move again.

The gold dragon beat its wings furiously against the whirlwind. Gaven snarled, and a thunderous crash exploded inside the swirling air. The dragon’s wings crumpled, and another crack of thunder crushed it. With a wave of his hand, Gaven sent its body hurtling off the deck and into the water.

P
ast Greenheart, the trees that gave the Towering Wood its name grew taller and broader—older, Kauth realized. An ogre couldn’t circle one of their massive trunks with its arms, and one of the giants of Xen’drik couldn’t reach their lowest branches. Their broad leaves were larger than a soldier’s shield, and their gray-blue bark could have served as armor. At times he felt as though he walked through a grand cathedral, the trees supporting a soaring roof, a place of sacred beauty. In other places, where the trunks grew closer together, it felt more like a labyrinth, when the farthest he could see in any direction was straight up. There the beauty became something awesome and terrible, daunting him with the sheer age of the forest and its trees. It seemed unearthly—strangely enough, considering that it must have been the place in Khorvaire where the worldwas most like it had been before goblins and humans built their cities and empires.

Sevren led their party along a course as straight as the forest allowed. No paths wound among the trees, excepting places here and there where deer or other animals had trampled the soil and dead leaves down into something like a trail. Still, Sevren’s sense of direction seemed unerring—whenever Kauth was able to determine the direction they traveled, they were still heading northwest, the shortest way through the forest to the Shadowcrags and the Demon Wastes beyond.

The woods teemed with life, but the animals kept a safe distance from Kauth and his party. Squirrels scampered up trees at their approach, rabbits broke cover and hopped away, birds fluttered up out of reach. Larger animals stalked just at the edge of their vision, appearing only in glimpses between distant trees.
Kauth found himself most aware, though, of the favored creatures of the Children of Winter—the spiders and scorpions crawling at their feet, hunting their own tiny prey among the detritus of the forest. A centipede the size of a viper writhed its way alongside Kauth’s path for a few unnerving moments, and he shuddered at the memory of their confrontation with the druids on the road.

At night they pitched their tents wherever they could find space. Kauth repeated his nightly ritual beside the embers of their small fires, cementing his identity in his mind to make sure he didn’t slip out of it while he slept beside Vor in their little tent. His focus grew stronger each night, the unwelcome memories of Kelas and his early training intruding less often into his thoughts. Each night he hardened his heart to the impending death of his comrades, only to find himself warming to them again as they walked through the days.

On the fourth day of their journey, as he laughed at Zandar’s latest quip, he wondered how and when he had become so weak.