Dragon Prince 03 - Sunrunner's Fire (64 page)

Suddenly it was as it had been in the spring—an incredible whirl of power and colors merging with his own. There were no words, only emotions. But this time he felt not a dragon’s dying anguish but a dragon’s rage. Dimly, as if from a great distance, he sensed Ruval’s faltering control—and the roar of the dragon echoed in his own heart as together they broke free.

For a few moments more Pol
was
that dragon. The flush of new strength through blood and muscle was his; the powerful beat of wings, the rush of hot wind as he skimmed the flames that climbed the walls of Rivenrock. And he knew, not in words or coherent thoughts but in sheer savage emotion, what the dragon was about to do.

The next instant he felt rocks digging fresh agony into his knees. Close enough to spray sand over him, almost to brush him with an outspread wingtip, the dragon swooped across the sand with talons outstretched. They dug into Ruval’s mantle. There was a gush of blood and the sound of ribs cracking, and a single shriek. Pol tilted his head back, gasping for breath, transfixed as the dragon carried his prey up into the starry sky.

Days later, halfway across the Long Sand, they would find a charred heap of broken bones and Sunrunner rings and a half-melted gold coin bearing Roelstra’s likeness.

 

 

Meiglan freed her arm from her father’s grasp and ran headlong over the sand. She flung herself into Pol’s startled embrace, still so torn between terror and joy that she didn’t even know she was crying.

Rohan helped Sioned to her feet, ran his fingers anxiously over the crescent-shaped scar, livid against her white cheek. She gave a tiny smile to reassure him. Then she sank very calmly down onto the sand, whispering, “I-I feel a little faint.”

Morwenna pushed herself up from her knees, swearing. Her head ached as if she’d been drinking strong wine since the New Year Holiday, her fingers felt scorched to the bone, and her body hurt so much she suspected the bones would come apart at the joints. “Damned undignified position,” she muttered as she struggled to stand.

Chay had kept Tobin upright during the battle only through main strength; she was limp, her eyelids fluttering. He swung her up into his arms and rocked her, calling her name frantically until sense returned to her face.

Maarken and Hollis knelt huddled in each other’s arms, stricken, trembling. At length the agony of the assault on their senses faded. Walvis and Feylin helped them up. Maarken looked around, whispered his gratitude, and clung to his wife with what remained of his strength.

Sionell turned from the sight of Pol and Meiglan’s embrace. Tallain, holding her, didn’t notice. He was staring at the Desert. The sand was still ablaze.

Rialt, with the virtue of practicality, had the presence of mind to send Arlis and Edrel running off to see if they could collect a few horses. None of the Sunrunners would be able to walk the whole way back to Stronghold.

Barig cleared his throat ponderously and said to Miyon, “Was this legal according to the rules agreed on?”

The prince replied, “Don’t be a fool. A dragon isn’t a weapon or a person. His grace won fairly.” Though it seared the skin of his lips to have to say it.

Rohan looked up from where he knelt with Sioned cradled in his arms. He called Sionell over to tend her, then went to where Meiglan was helping Pol to his feet. The girl saw him first; she caught her breath and straightened defensively. Rohan realized that she feared him, but her trust that Pol would protect her was greater. She proved it by holding him tighter and meeting Rohan’s gaze with a kind of apprehensive defiance.

Pol looked at him then, his eyes dim with exhaustion. It was clear that until that moment, no one had existed for him but Meiglan. Rohan repressed a sigh and, in a mild voice that fooled neither himself nor his son, said, “Will you kindly do something about this?” He gestured to the flames that scoured Rivenrock. “I really can’t have you turning my princedom into a blast furnace.”

Pol gave him a shaky smile. “Sorry. But I don’t know if I
can
stop it. Or even if I should,” he added pensively.

“Won’t—won’t it burn itself out soon?” Meiglan ventured.

“I suppose so,” Rohan said. “Come to think of it, it does make a rather nice statement. Although setting your own beacon-fire comes somewhat in advance of your right to do so, Pol. I’m not dead yet.”

The young man looked stricken. “Father—I—”

Rohan was surprised, but knew he shouldn’t have been. For Pol, humor wasn’t the weapon against impossible tension that it had always been for him. So he made himself laugh.

Pol relaxed at once. He even rallied enough to say, “It won’t burn as far as Remagev—I think!”

“It’s dry a few measures out from here, if memory serves,” Rohan told him. “Not even this winter’s rains made anything grow. But if it
does
get to Remagev,
you’ll
pay to rebuild it.”

“If Walvis lets me live long enough!”

Meiglan listened to the exchange with wide, bewildered eyes. Rohan smiled to hide his resentment of her presence. Had she not been here, he might have said to his son what he needed so much to say. Instead, he was forced to keep those words to himself. There might be time later to say them—and there might not.

There was a brief silence while father and son watched each other. Pol was the one to look away. “Ah, good—Edrel’s found a horse. I doubt Meggie or our Sunrunners would make it back to Stronghold on foot. How’s Mother?”

“Sionell’s taking care of her.” When he heard the tender nickname, his objections to Meiglan—concealed even from Sioned—were resolutely locked away. Pol had made his Choice. They would all just have to get used to it.

“How’re your legs? Aside from that, you don’t seem too much the worse for your little demonstration,” he went on as casually as he could.

Pol shrugged off his concern. “I—have a few resources.”

Rohan understood. The Sunrunners had been devastated by the lash of battle; Pol’s
diarmadhi
blood had in some ways protected him. “I wouldn’t vouch for that knee, though,” he remarked. “And you’ll have a scar on your cheek as a more permanent souvenir.”

Pol touched his face, startled. Rohan wondered when he would realize that its shape and placement were almost identical to the one on Sioned’s cheek.

“Yes. Well. . . .” Rohan said, then decided to leave them to each other and return to his wife. He had never been one to struggle overlong against the obvious.

Pol looked down at Meiglan, who had undertaken to support him. He smiled at her; so little and delicate, and trying to lend him her strength.

“I was so frightened,” she whispered.

“So was I,” he admitted frankly.

“You? Never!”

He gave a rueful laugh. “Come, let’s find you a horse. And me, too—I hope a limp isn’t my other souvenir of tonight—oh!” He looked around distractedly. “Meggie, do you see it? A little gold carving of a dragon—”

“Stay here. I’ll find it for you.” He swayed when she left him, barely able to balance on one leg. At last she returned with the piece. “Is this it?”

“Yes.” He fingered it, held it up to the light. “Lord Urival gave me this a long time ago. It used to decorate the top of a water clock that belonged to my father.”

“Yes, my lord?” Meiglan’s face was all confused attention to his every word as she got her shoulder beneath his arm again.

But he could scarcely explain to her why Urival had salvaged it from the shattered remains of that elegant timepiece after Masul and Pandsala and Segev had died. Pol was now the last of Ianthe’s sons. Hollis had killed Segev; Andry, Marron. Had it been Pol or the dragon who had killed Ruval? Urival had given him the little golden dragon the day of his death. “Talisman,” he’d said with a grim smile.
Talisman and reminder.

Pol placed the carving in her palm. “Your first dragon, my lady.”

She stared at it, then at him. “First, my lord?”

“My name is Pol. You’d better get used to saying it.”

 

 

Six of the nineteen horses were found, one of them lame. All the Sunrunners stated emphatically that they were perfectly capable of using their own legs. A blatant lie; they were in such obvious need that not even Miyon made grumbling noises about the long walk. Rohan, who lifted Sioned into the saddle, told her to be quiet and be grateful. After a few measures she overruled her husband, slid from the saddle, and offered the mare to Meiglan. It was a gesture whose meaning was lost on all but a few.

Maarken, too, had recovered, and after giving over his horse to Feylin, roused himself to use the light of the newly risen moons to communicate with his brother at Stronghold. Andry’s colors were strangely darkened, and he neither asked about events nor offered any comment. He merely agreed to have more horses sent at once, and withdrew into himself.

Maarken suspected that sight of Stronghold would reveal other momentous events. He gnawed on possibilities until Nialdan and several grooms rode up with fresh horses on lead reins. Beckoning the Sunrunner aside, he asked about Andry.

There wasn’t a coin’s weight of dissembling in Nialdan’s entire soul. When he answered that all was well, Maarken knew he was lying. But the man was so obviously distressed that Maarken didn’t press it.

When they finally reached Stronghold, Andry, Riyan, and Ruala were waiting on the main steps. All three looked sick with exhaustion. Maarken was so intent on trying to read his brother’s face that for a few moments he saw nothing else. Hollis gripped his arm and whispered his name. Flung across the bottom steps was a dark, limp shape. Mireva. Dead.

Rohan dismounted and walked slowly to the corpse. With the toe of one boot he nudged it onto its back. When he turned to summon Pol with a glance, Maarken had the impression that his uncle’s bones had turned to steel, his flesh to stone.

Pol stared down into Mireva’s dead eyes. Then he backed away a pace or two, and with a brief gesture called Fire.

They all stood for a time watching the flames. Rohan was the first to climb the steps and enter his castle. The others followed. The corpse of the sorceress was left to burn in silence.

T
he seas foamed blood-red, the tide thick with bloating bodies, each wave capturing yet another corpse from the shore. The castle was in flames. When night fell, the burning stones that had been Radzyn Keep would signal the carnage for a hundred measures all around. Perhaps it would be seen all the way to Graypearl across the water.

Perhaps Graypearl burned, too.

The victors plucked their own dead from the waves—tall, broad, dark men, fierce even in death. The bodies were laid out carefully near a strange, flat ship, stripped, washed, anointed with oils from copper flasks. Gold beads threaded through long beards were polished one by one, and more added in token of this battle. Some of the dead from castle and port were given to the sea—victor’s offering of vanquished. Hundreds of them.

The horses left behind in the frantic flight from Radzyn were not the best, but they were still better than any belonging to the invaders. Saddles and bridles were studded with silver and decorated with thin, fluttering strips of beaten tin; this brave show did not hide the heaviness of their thick-haired, short-legged breed and its total unsuitability to the Long Sand. So that was why they had attacked Radzyn, he thought. Anguish stabbed his heart as he watched tack transferred to his father’s beloved horses. At least the finest, strongest stock had been freed, driven into the Desert where they could later be recaptured. But it hurt even more to see foals slaughtered so that the mares would be unencumbered by nursing.

Prisoners were marched in chains to the death ship. Their captors had no interest in questioning them; they were shoved on board and made to kneel. The dead were then placed slowly, reverently, all with their heads toward the sea. Torches were lit and flung on deck. By their light, as oil on naked flesh caught fire, he saw gold-beaded beards shrivel away to reveal, in the instants before flames charred flesh, ritual scars cut into jutting chins slack now in death.

The mightiest of the warriors put their shoulders to the task of pushing the ship out to catch the tide. Then all stood onshore to watch the flames. He knew the prisoners, the sacrifices, were screaming. He could see mouths agape, the swell and collapse of chests laboring for air enough to scream. But he could not hear them.

The port was afire, too. Three great conflagrations—castle, town, and death ship drifting out to sea—lit the dusk, rivaled the sunset blaze. Yes, they would see the glow all the way to Graypearl—if anyone was left at Graypearl to see it.

Radzyn’s dead were left to rot on the beaches. He recognized some of them. There was a heart-stopping moment when he thought he saw his eldest brother’s face, eyes staring sightlessly at the sky. But it wasn’t Maarken. The blue eyes were Sorin’s—and only then did he realize that this was but a dream. Sorin had died near Elktrap, far to the north.

Andry woke in a shaking sweat, gulping for air. The soft red-gold glow of a brazier was pale mimicry of the fires he had seen in his sleep. He watched the small, warm flames until his eyes burned, then turned over in bed and hugged the covers around his trembling body.

Andrade had had dreams, visions. So had Sioned. Andry believed in this one, this new aspect of the horrors he had seen years ago. Nine years ago today, in fact. Radzyn in flames, the hundreds of dead, the total destruction—these things were familiar. But now he could put faces and customs to the enemy. They were not sorcerers. They were only men. Merida, league of assassins, scarred on the chin—in token of the first murder, perhaps? He didn’t know; it didn’t matter. They had done—would do—this. Unless he could stop it somehow.

He calmed himself and sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. It was chilly in Princemarch, hinting at another long, rainy winter. He wrapped himself in his cloak and rose to pace the narrow room. Even his rings were cold on his fingers; he held his hands over the brazier to warm them.