Dragon Prince 01 - Dragon Prince (72 page)

She wanted to claw his face until the blood ran. “She was mine to kill,
mine
!”

“No. Not to kill.” He sheathed the sword. “You have what you came here for, Sioned. Do you want to stay and watch the Fire take her? It’s over!”

She made a harsh, animal sound and whirled, setting the bed ablaze with a single thought. Ianthe’s long hair caught, and the hangings, and the tapestry dragons writhed in obscene mating dances with Fire spewing from their teeth and talons. Sioned hauled at one of the bedposts and it split apart at its joining, the burning weave cascading down onto Ianthe’s corpse. Curtain rods fell and Sioned screamed as one of them cracked across her shoulder, spat flames across her face, seared her cheekbone a finger-width from her eye.

Ostvel hauled her away and she shrieked at him, tears streaming down her face. “Sioned! Stop it! Do you hear me? Stop it!” His open palm cracked across her injured cheek, snapping her head around. Through the haze of smoke she saw the empty doorway and screamed.

“My son! Where is he?
Where
?”

“Tobin took him downstairs, and if we don’t follow we’re going to die here! Sioned, it’s over! Ianthe’s dead!”

She gasped for breath, struggling against his grip. Sanity was returning and she dreaded the loss of the hate that had given her such power. “Let me go! Damn you for killing her, Ostvel—she was
mine
to kill!”

“And how did you plan to tell
him
that when he grows up?” he asked bitterly, pulling her from the room where the stench of Ianthe’s burning flesh swirled up into the thickening smoke.

They ran down the hallway, coughing and stumbling down the stairs. Fire had invaded the lower hall, taken hold; tapestries in flaming tatters flung sparks on the fireborne wind. They could not leave Feruche the way they had come in; the whole castle was on fire.

Outside on the steps Sioned searched frantically for Tobin’s small, white-shirted figure, saw her running through the crowd toward the gates. The child was bundled close and safe against her breast. The courtyard was ablaze, outbuildings collapsing. Smoke billowed from the lower windows of the keep. By morning Feruche would be nothing but stark, blackened stone.

Someone reeled into Sioned, his clothes on fire. Her Fire. She would have killed Ianthe with it, laughing, but this man was not her enemy. The inferno would take Feruche, and she could do nothing about those who might be trapped within, but this man she could save from death. Save herself from having killed him. She knocked him to the cobbles, flung herself atop him to stifle the flames. Boot heels crushed her leg, smashed the tip of one finger, and she sobbed her pain into the man’s nape, begging his forgiveness, smelling his burnt flesh and her own singed hair. But he stirred beneath her, moaned, tried feebly to push her off his back. Strong hands helped her up, steadied her.

“Sioned! Hurry! He’ll be all right. I promise you he’ll be all right.”

She couldn’t seem to stop crying. Even as she hauled the man to his feet and gave him a push in the direction of the gates, saw him stagger his way to and through them, the breath sobbed in her lungs and she kept repeating, “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—”

“I know,” came Ostvel’s deep, sorrowing voice. His arms were around her in a hard embrace for just an instant. Then he said, “Come on, or we’ll lose Tobin and the baby.”

She clung to him as he shoved a path for them through this furnace of her making. The main gates were a hollow ring of Fire through which terrified people leaped for their lives. Sioned sucked in a shallow breath of smoke-heavy air and followed Ostvel, then looked over her shoulder. Flames fountained from the castle now, fierce and deadly. Feruche was dying because of her; perhaps people would die because of her.

She dragged a sleeve across her sweaty forehead, her tearing eyes, and whimpered as the material scraped her burned cheek. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought, panic tightening her chest. The mark of her own Fire set into her shoulder—that she had known would happen. But in the vision she had seen scars across her brow. Not one on her cheek.

“Ostvel, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way! Not like this!”

“What in the name of the Goddess did you
think
would happen?” he rasped, pulling her along with him away from the burning castle walls.

“Not like this!” She flung away from him and stared wide-eyed at the flames, one hand to her cheek to feel the salt sting that brought fresh tears to her eyes. “There was supposed to be Fire—but not this way! Ostvel, how many did I kill?”

He turned her around by the shoulders and then gripped her head between his hands. “Don’t start,” he ordered roughly. “I won’t let you take any of these deaths onto yourself. Do you hear me, Sioned?”

“It was my Fire! Mine! Goddess, what have I done?”

“Ask yourself that once we’re safe! Sioned, I’ll knock you out and carry you if I have to! Now
move
!”

It was a long way to where they had tethered the horses. Someone had stolen them. Tobin waited for them there, walking back and forth in the shadows, trying to quiet the fretful baby. Sioned took her son into her arms, shaking with silent tears.

It was Tobin who suggested the empty garrison below Feruche as shelter. Most of the other refugees continued along the main road, through the Veresch into Princemarch. The blazing castle lit up the night and the people around her, showing Sioned injuries more serious than her own. Ostvel asked a servant if anyone had been caught in the flames, and received a dull shrug in reply.

“Not that I’m knowing. Most everybody was out in the court, drinking to the princess and her new little one.” The woman’s face suddenly crumpled. “And now she’s gone, and the baby, and the three other boys with her—”

A man walking beside her said, “When the High Prince hears of this, I wouldn’t put the price of a day on the life of anyone who was there. I don’t recognize you, so you must be with the Cunaxan lord that rode in a few days ago. Give my advice to your master—disappear. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Sioned, who had hung back slightly, listening, reached for Ostvel’s arm. “Leave it be,” she whispered. “I’ll never know for certain.” She trod along in silence for a moment, then added bitterly, “With Ianthe, at least I would’ve known I’d killed deliberately, and taken the consequences.” She held the child tighter. “I wouldn’t have the luxury of pretending it was an accident.”

They separated from the crowd soon after that, melting into the rocks at the side of the road. When the last stragglers had gone past, they emerged again and headed down the stony trail to the garrison. It was nearly dawn before they reached it. Sheltering alone within, they stood at the empty windows and watched as Feruche burned high on the cliff. Sioned rocked the frightened baby close and would not give him up to Tobin or Ostvel, not even when the princess would have tended the wounds on her shoulder and cheek.

“No. It doesn’t hurt. Let me alone.”

Tobin was wise enough not to press her. Sioned sat cross-legged in the doorway, holding her son in her arms as he slept at last, and watched the castle burn. She could not think past the holding of her child. Let Tobin and Ostvel worry about getting back to Stronghold. She could not.

She glanced down at the emerald, back where it belonged on her hand. The clifftop flames plunged into its depths, gave it a life and fire of its own. Andrade had told her long ago that she could work to make a vision real if she wanted it enough. Well, she had wanted, and had worked, and now the child was here in her arms and there was a welt across her shoulder that would leave a deep, wide scar.

But there was another on her cheek that should not have been there, and it throbbed a stinging reminder that the power to make visions real did not necessarily include the wisdom to make them just.

Dawn was nearly as soft as spring over River Run, and as Urival wove its strands together he paused to let its gentleness caress his senses. There were tender colors to the morning, rose-gray and muted greenish gold, the blue of sky as fragile as Fironese crystal. He traveled across Syr and Meadowlord and the Vere Hills, the colors intensifying with the stronger light of day. Yet there was still a misted, almost tentative quality about them, beautiful and shy.

But the colors rising from a Desert cliffside were harsh: stark spirals of gray-black smoke stained the sky. He saw the smoldering ruin that had been the castle and his delicate weave of winter dawn nearly snapped with the violence of his shock. Casting about for signs of life, he found none. Here and there small flames fingered a few remaining timbers, but all else was charred and dead. Ranging outside the keep, he saw groups of hollow-eyed people trudging into the western mountains. Ahead of them by some measures were others on horseback. Three of those horses caught his eye, for there was no mistaking the points of Lord Chaynal’s breed. How would Ianthe come upon such animals? he asked himself—and then saw the distinctive blue saddle blankets of the Desert. Shock again threatened his control and he calmed himself, only to give a silent exclamation as he looked closer and found that the three horses were ridden by large, muscular guards, each one holding a sleeping child across his saddle.

Urival drew back, hovering in the morning stillness to quiet the turmoil of his mind. Then he returned to Feruche. He knew who those children must be, and was equally certain that their mother must be dead. Ianthe would never give over possession of her sons to anyone while she lived.

Urival again surveyed the blackened husk of the keep, circling around it. A flicker of movement caught his attention. Pale figures against pale golden sand, the trio walked in the direction of the road to Skybowl. The man was tall, broad-shouldered, his dark head left bare to the morning sun. One of the women was coiling her heavy black hair at her nape. The other woman was taller, her hooded cloak drawn close, arms crooked to carry something against her chest. Urival did not need to see her hair to know who she was. And he was afraid he knew what she had done.

He wove the sunlight south, over the Faolain and the salt marsh of Roelstra’s cruel making, and saw Rohan’s encampment well into its day’s work for all that it was only a little after dawn. He was tempted to find young Maarken and tell him about Feruche, but restrained himself. Andrade would have to know first, and she was busy at the moment observing Roelstra’s arrangements for the battle that everyone knew must come soon. The skies had cleared over the Veresch where the Father of Storms usually did his work, and for many measures out over the South Water the air was free of clouds. Pandsala would be reporting the same thing to her father that Andrade would soon tell Maarken: days of good weather lay ahead, and it was time to attack.

Returning to River Run, he opened his eyes to the silent walled garden and rested for a time before walking slowly to the bench where he had left Andrade. She sat with eyes closed and hands tightly clasped in intense concentration, the spun sunlight glowing very faintly around her as sometimes happened with powerful Master Sunrunners. Urival kept a respectful silence, considering how he would phrase the news about Feruche, remembering the cant of Sioned’s body around the small burden she carried.

All at once Andrade’s eyes opened, sparkling with mirth, and she laughed. “Urival! Come with me quickly or you’ll miss it!”

He obeyed, bewildered by her merriment that spilled over into her colors and danced around his own threads of light as she guided him. Some forty measures from River Run, well south of Roelstra’s main camp, about two hundred of his soldiers had established an outpost. But strict military discipline had utterly collapsed, for the fools had chosen a dragon hunting-ground, and the infuriated hatchlings were on the attack.

Horses stampeded in every direction as they fled sharp talons; men and women raced about with frantic speed or huddled on the ground with their cloaks pulled over them while the small dragons soared, wheeled, and darted down to chase the invaders from their territory. The plummeting green-bronze and dark gold and russet shapes were considerably grown since summer, but most of them retained the ability to spew fire enough to singe a few backsides.

It was absolute chaos, a total rout. A little gray dragon with blue underwings flailed angrily above a huge cauldron, and when the cook fled he perched daintily on its rim and helped himself to a free breakfast. After slurping up most of the stew, he lifted his head and let out a great fire-tinged belch. Two hatchlings, one nearly black and the other a dappled brown, were fighting over a violet cloak; it evidently retained enough scent from the sheep that had originally worn the wool to be of interest to dragons. Some of the little beasts had latched onto horses in the wildest rides of their lives; the horses seemed to have sprouted wings, about to fly. One dragon came up with a saddle, girth straps dangling, and let out a happy shriek, but when he craned his head down to take a bite of the cured leather, he spat in distaste and dropped the saddle right on the head of a soldier who staggered, clutched at her skull, and went over like a felled tree.

The detachment’s commander, wearing a violet cloak with a huge rent in its embroidered back, lunged desperately for a fleeing horse and scrambled up to rally his troops. He waved a hand high in the air—and nearly lost several fingers to a fierce little blue-green hatchling. Giving it up as useless, the man let the horse have its head and streaked away from the battlefield in frantic retreat, leaving the dragons in firm possession.

Back again at River Run, Urival and Andrade laughed themselves completely out of breath. “Perfect!” Andrade chortled. “Oh, the little darlings! Did you see the greenish one go for that man in his underwear?”

Urival sat on the bench beside her and wiped his streaming eyes. “That’s the best laugh I’ve had in years!”

“It’ll get better,” Andrade assured him. “We have to get word to Rohan about this. It’s an omen he can’t afford to pass up! I’ll send to Maarken and describe the whole thing while you get us ready to move. It seems our Dragon Prince has allies he never even dreamed of!”