The dragon continues its struggle upward, passing the edge of the balcony and flying above us. It lurches its mass onto the very top of the bell tower, just above the four windows exposing the tarnished bell. The dragon curls its tail around the black stone so the end of it, a massive, weapon-like spike, is resting on the balcony. In its talons the creature holds a young woman with hair as pale as flax and skin like cream. The woman is arched back, her body limp, and she is wearing the uniform of a castle servant. My focus moves from the woman to the dragon, and I take a step back, pressing my body against the balcony’s railing. I do not know how to fight such a massive beast.
Two sets of eyes are blinking down from two separate heads. One head is covered with gleaming purple feathers, and its eyes rival the beauty of the bluest summer sky. The other head is misshapen and covered with bulging lumps that ooze yellow liquid. Beady, sunken eyes the color of dried blood glare from that head, and long yellow fangs jut out of its lipless mouth. It is so repulsive, I can hardly stand to look at it.
The female finds me hideous! a voice shrieks in my head; it sounds like the high-pitched grate of metal scraping against metal. The ugly head looks at me and hisses with its forked tongue, then lurches forward. In horror, I watch as it opens its mouth and eats the flaxen-haired girl in one gulp.
“No!” Reyler shouts.
Treyose curses and asks, “What is that monstrosity?”
I wade through the memories in my head, and just as I start to glimpse the creature, my mind seems to hit a solid wall. “I don’t know,” I say.
Golmarr groans and pushes on his left shoulder—the one that is bleeding. “Those are two sisters,” he says.
Of course it is the handsome one who recognizes us. Let’s eat him first, says a deep, silky female voice.
No, let us sizzle the woman! I cannot stand to see her judging me, shrieks the other voice.
“Move!” Golmarr slams his foot into my hip, throwing me sideways. I twist in the air and land on my hands and knees just as a spear of lightning strikes the balcony where I had been standing. The floor explodes, and heat fills the air. Energy crackles against my skin, and I know it: it is the same source that fire comes from. Without standing, I pull the energy to me the way I pulled the fire from the library shelves, and turn it into a dancing, orange flame the size of a man. With a thrust of my arms, I throw the fire at the dragon, but the beast stretches its wings—one beautiful, one hideous—and flaps. A gust of wind scatters the fire, whipping the heat back at us. My companions scream and throw their arms over their faces.
She can wield fire! Sister, she is the one who killed Zhun, the silky voice says, slithering through my thoughts like oil. She killed him and stole his treasure. She is the one we have been seeking. Kill her!
I climb to my feet and stare up at the two-headed monster pushing its words into my conscience. “For a person to steal something, she has to want it first!” I yell. “This power, this curse, was forced upon me, and I want nothing to do with it.”
Golmarr steps up beside me and asks, “How do we break the curse?”
For an answer, the dragon swings its tail. I jump away as the spike slams into the balcony railing, shattering stone and leaving a gaping hole.
I adjust my grip on the reforged sword, grasping the hilt in both my hands, and run the two steps to the tail. With all of my strength focused in my shoulders and torso, I slam the sword down onto the creature’s tail, just above the giant spike on the very end of it. The blade carves through scales, glides through flesh, melts through bone, and comes out on the other side, ringing against the granite floor. The end of the tail rolls away from the beast and falls through the wide hole in the railing.
Treyose steps up beside me and swings his sword at the dragon’s tail, where it connects to the beast’s body. When his blade hits scales, it ricochets off them, and he is thrown backward by its momentum.
The beast shrieks and whips its tail away, splattering Treyose, the balcony, and me with hot crimson blood.
She can hurt us! wails the ugly dragon. Now we are even uglier than before! She made us even uglier!
You will all die for that! The beautiful dragon opens its mouth and pulls back its neck. I prepare to leap out of the way of lightning, but a jet of water sprays from the creature’s mouth. The beast doesn’t aim for any of us, but simply covers the ground with warm water until I am standing in a puddle tinged pink with dragon blood and seeping into the seams of my leather boots.
Yes, sister! Yes! There is nothing tastier than sizzled human for lunch! the ugly head says, its thought so loud my skull vibrates.
“No!” Golmarr shrieks, sprinting toward me. “Run! Run! Onto the railing!” He slips once in the water and then reaches my side, gripping the fabric of my dress, yanking me off my feet, and placing me so I am sitting on the railing. I start to fall backward, so I grab the edge of the stone as Golmarr jumps up onto it. He grips my shoulder to keep me upright. Across the balcony, Enzio leaps for the railing, landing on his stomach, feet flailing. Treyose climbs up beside me, balancing on the balls of his feet, and Reyler is one step behind.
I stretch my hand out to the Trevonan nobleman, and as he reaches for it, lightning forks out of the ugly head’s mouth and hits the soaked balcony with a glaringly bright explosion that deafens my ears, rattles my bones, and nearly blinds me. Golmarr kicks my hand away from Reyler just as the tips of my fingers touch his. The nobleman’s body turns hard and stiff, and spasms midstride. Treyose reaches out for Reyler, but Golmarr screams, “If you touch him, you will also die!”
I close my eyes against the sight of Reyler dying and feel the power of the lightning as it crackles the very air around me. I pull the energy to me again, every bit of it, until my skin feels like wax on the verge of melting, and then I focus it on the bell tower. I push the heat from me, as hard as I have ever pushed anything in my life, and white flames burst from my fingertips, slamming into stone.
The granite explodes, and chunks of it liquefy from the fire’s heat. Melted rock flies through the air, and one giant piece lands on the neck of the feathered dragon, conforming around it like a black molten collar. The ugly head shrieks, the pretty head roars a deep, throaty sound, and the top of the bell tower snaps beneath the dragon’s weight, collapsing onto the balcony and pinning the beast beneath it.
“Give me your sword,” Treyose says, and I place the reforged sword into his hand. He jumps off the railing, but when his feet touch the balcony, it creaks and shudders. Treyose freezes and stares at the stone floor as a vein shaped like a jagged piece of lightning cracks its surface, dividing it in two. The dragon, still pinned beneath the top of the bell tower, is writhing and struggling, thrashing its stump of a tail from side to side, flapping its mismatched wings. The balcony makes an audible crack and splits wide open, dividing the floor into two halves. The half where the dragon lies, where Enzio is still gripping the railing, starts to tip and break away. Enzio leaps and sprints up the wet, tilting floor. He jumps over the stump of the bleeding dragon tail, and then catapults his body across the crack between the balcony’s two halves. His arms pinwheel through the air, and it is obvious he isn’t going to make it to our side.
Golmarr jumps from the railing, takes three steps, and then slides across the granite on his knees. Just as Enzio’s head disappears beneath the balcony’s broken edge, Golmarr thrusts his hand down. His shoulders strain beneath his tunic, and he starts sliding forward. “Treyose!” Golmarr shrieks.
Treyose presses the hilt of the reforged sword into my hands and flings himself to his stomach beside Golmarr, reaching below the balcony. In one giant heave, they drag a pale, trembling Enzio up.
With a gust of wind, the other half of the balcony breaks completely free and drops from sight, carrying the dragon with it. The bell’s thick rope speeds past us as the bell, still inside the tower, plummets with the dragon. When the
whole length of rope has zipped past, a hollow gong fills the air, followed by the distant screams of the people below.
I jump from the railing and freeze, staring at my feet. The floor is crumbling.
“To the stairs!” Treyose screams. He bends and picks up Reyler’s body, swinging it over his shoulder. I run to the gaping hole, where the door leading into the bell tower used to stand. Five feet below the missing doorway, the stairs start, as if the top of the bell tower took a chunk of stairs with it when it fell. I leap to the stairs and start descending, but the tower tilts, throwing me into the wall.
“Go, Sorrowlynn!” Golmarr cries. I push off the wall and run down the stairs, skipping three at a time as rubble rains onto my head. The tower tilts again, to the other side, and my feet stumble, tipping me toward a fall that would mean certain death, but just before I plummet, the tower starts swinging the other way.
“The entire tower is going to fall! Go faster or we all die!” Treyose screams.
“I am going as fast as I can!” I scream back just as loud. I am sprinting, leaping and flying downward so fast my bones shudder every time I land. When I am almost at the bottom, I forget the stairs and launch myself over the side of them, landing so hard the wind is knocked from my lungs, and my knees buckle. Treyose, Golmarr, and Enzio land around me. Someone drags me to my feet, and together we run into the castle as the bell tower moans and crashes to the ground with an explosion of wind and debris that slams against my back and throws me to the floor.
I lie there, eyes closed, body paralyzed with fear. “Suicide Sorrow,” Golmarr whispers. I open my eyes and find myself face to face with him. A smile graces his beautiful, dust-covered face. “I think it is time for us to go from this castle.”
“What about the dragon? The people?” I whisper, unable to find my voice.
He shakes his head. “It is going to hide away and lick its wounds before it comes for us again. And wherever you go, there the dragon will be.” He sounds so certain.
I blink the dust from my eyes and look at him a little more closely. “How do you know?”
His eyes slip shut. “Just trust me for now. When we aren’t lying on a hard stone floor, covered with pieces of an ancient tower, I will tell you.”
I nod and simply breathe the dusty air. Even dust-filled air is a pleasure after thinking I might never draw breath again.
Inside my chamber, I brush the remnants of the bell tower from my face, my dress, my hair, even my eyebrows and eyelashes. Enzio yanks his shirt off and shakes his head from side to side, flinging rubble from his dark curls. Golmarr stands in the doorway and stares at nothing, his eyes far away. The blood on his tunic, from his sword wound, is caked with dirt. I walk to him and reach for the strings of his tunic, but he catches my fingers in his. “What are you doing?” he asks.
“Checking your wound.”
“I’m fine,” he says gently, giving my fingers a squeeze before letting them go.
I step in front of him, so close he can either back himself up against the shut door or physically move me to get by. He backs himself against the door and stares at me with suspicious eyes. “Golmarr, I watched King Vaunn stab you in the chest. You’re bleeding. Let me at least check it.”
He shakes his head and scowls. “Please do not worry about it. I have seen hundreds of injuries—enough to know mortal wounds from flesh wounds. I assure you, I have nothing more than a flesh wound.” He puts his hand on my shoulder and moves me aside, then steps away.
I open my mouth to insist he let me check it, but booted feet echo in the passage. Golmarr cracks the door open and peers out, then swings it wide. Treyose enters. Every step he takes, small clouds of dust rain down around his feet. “The tower destroyed the library,” he says.
“I know,” Golmarr replies, dropping into the chair that has been moved beside the bed. Rubble topples from his shoulders and hair.
Treyose’s filthy eyebrows rise. “You know?” he asks.
Golmarr leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “The tower was built beside the library. Of course the library is destroyed.”
Treyose narrows his eyes and nods.
“Treyose, we need to leave tonight,” Golmarr says.
Treyose nods again. “Where will you go?”
“Ilyaro.”
“The capital city of Ilaad? They do not like foreigners in the desert. Not even I dare go there, and they are my neighbors.”
Golmarr laughs. “Of course you can’t go there. Your grandfather conquered a large portion of their land. You are their sworn enemy. I am an Antharian prince—they should have no quarrel with me. And I need to go to their famed desert library,” Golmarr explains.
Treyose takes a step closer to Golmarr and quietly asks, “Is the Infinite Vessel worth dying to find? Because the ancient Ilaadi library is located in the middle of the desert, where the sandworm rules. It has been abandoned for two centuries. There is probably nothing left of it.”
“The Infinite Vessel is worth dying to find,” Golmarr whispers.
Treyose throws his hands up in the air. “I don’t think you should go to Ilyaro. My grandfather’s library…my library is the largest in the world.” He scowls. “Was. If you didn’t find what you were looking for there, I guarantee you the Ilaadi won’t have it, either. In the desert, death, knives, and poison are ranked above wisdom and knowledge. I would like to invite you all to stay here as long as you like, as my honored guests.”
Golmarr’s eyes briefly shift to me. “I thank you for the offer,” he says, “but I need to go. As far as I am concerned, our deal has been met. Your grandfather is dead, and now you are king. I am no longer bound to you.”
A small, sad smile touches Treyose’s mouth. “You did not meet the terms of our deal.” His eyes shift to me. “But Sorrowlynn, by her actions, has made me king, and I accept that in place of our deal. And, since I am now the king, I have the authority, by Trevonan law, to break marriage vows. It is finally within my power to annul my marriage to Sorrowlynn.” Treyose crosses the room and stands before me. Taking my hand in his, he says, “Sorrowlynn of Faodara, wife of Treyose, King of Trevon, with the power vested in me, I absolve our marriage wholly and completely. Any vows that were spoken to bind us—no matter where or by whom they were spoken—I break with my authority as king. From this moment forth, you are wed to no man, bound to no man, betrothed to no man. You are no longer my wife and are free to pursue whatever and whomever you choose henceforth. I hold no power or authority over you, save that of King of Trevon, and I swear I will never use that power to take away your freedom. Neither do you hold any claim or power over me. We are free to pursue separate lives.”
I close my eyes and laugh. When I inhale, my body feels lighter than it has in days. “Thank you.” I glance at Golmarr and feel the sting of tears even though he is unaware of my gaze. He is still leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the floor, deep in thought. Finally, I am free to love him and act on it.
“There will be a brief ceremony declaring me king this evening, and I would be honored if you would all attend,” Treyose says. “You can leave after the ceremony, if that is the course you choose.”
“Though I cannot speak for my companions, I would like to attend,” I say.
Enzio nods. “If you can promise me a bath and find me something presentable to wear, I also would like to attend. I shall represent the people of Satar.”
Golmarr stands. “You’ve proven to be a good man, King Treyose. I am glad to know you. It would be an honor to attend and represent the agreed-upon peace between our kingdoms.” Golmarr grins. “I can perform a few feats of magic, too, if you’d like, to prove that Trevon once again has a wizard backing it.”
Treyose grins and claps Golmarr hard on the back, making a cloud of dust billow out from his clothes. “Thank you…friend.” Treyose holds his hand out to Gol
marr and they clasp wrists. “I will have travel supplies ready for you before the sun sets. And a hot bath and meal for each of you, and fresh clothes.” He turns to me and holds his hand out so we can clasp wrists—a warrior’s salute. I wrap my fingers around his wrist.
“You are a commendable fighter, Princess,” he says.
I inhale to thank him, but my vision clouds over. I am seeing the world through the eyes of King Vaunn as my mind opens up to one of his memories.
“Why can’t you be more like your brothers?” I ask, but the words come from King Vaunn’s mouth. I pace in front of a younger Prince Treyose, my hands clasped behind my back. “Your brothers always did whatever I asked of them,” I snarl.
“I am not my brothers!” Treyose yells, and I wonder how he can have so much passion when it comes to defying me, his king and only living relative, and yet abhor war. War is what makes a boy into a man. War is what has built Trevon into the largest kingdom in the world.
I step up to my grandson and look at his mutilated hand, the nub of his pinkie still scabbed over. I threatened to cut off his whole hand if he did not do my bidding, and he has not. But without a hand, how will he lead my army to victory? He needs that hand to wield his weapons. “A pity. I hoped removing your finger would buy your loyalty, as nothing else seems to. Since it has not, I will be taking something else of yours.” Giddy excitement tempts my mouth to smile, but I force it to remain neutral as Treyose clenches his hand into a fist.
“Are you truly going to take my hand?” he asks.
I shake my head, and he sighs with relief. “No. I have something infinitely more precious than a hand at my disposal.”
Treyose’s face pales. “What are you talking about?”
King Vaunn’s mouth pulls up into a smile despite his best efforts to control it. “If you fail to lead my army to victory against the Antharians, your wife dies a slow and painful death.”