Before he has taken five steps, he gasps and falls to his knees. Gripping his head in his hands, he moans. I reach a hand toward him just as the glass dragon bursts into flame. Flinching, I throw my arms in front of my face. Icy blue fire shoots up from the dragon’s body, reaching halfway to the sky like a pillar of light, as all of the power and magic she once possessed exits her body and then dwindles to nothing, leaving the dragon’s massive figure as dull and lifeless as stone. My arms slowly drop to my sides. I stare at the dead beast framed by ice and crimson blood, and stifle a sob. She is dead. It is done.
Golmarr moans again and slowly climbs to his feet, still holding his head. He looks at me over his shoulder, and the anguish in his eyes slowly fades until he looks like he is half-asleep. His tears stop, and he blinks as if the sun is hurting his eyes.
He takes four tentative steps toward me and then his hand darts out and cinches around my throat. For a moment he looks confused, but slowly his mouth turns down into a frown. I claw at his hand and look into his eyes, and even though I know these eyes, there is nothing familiar in them. They narrow with a hatred so intense that every bit of mischief, every bit of youth, even every bit of love leaves them. Golmarr tightens his hold on my neck and drags me to him so only the tips of my toes slide across the ice.
Glaring down at me, his lips pull back in a growl. “You!” he snarls, and throws me down to the ground hard. My back slams into ice, and all the air is knocked from my lungs. He swings his sword, and I struggle to lift my staff and block it before it pierces my heart. His weapon hits mine with so much force that my shoulders and elbows shudder with pain. He swings again, both hands gripping the sword hilt, and slams his weapon into my staff with every ounce of strength and hatred he possesses. My staff shatters, and his sword continues its downward strike. It cuts through my leather vest and lodges deep in my left shoulder. I cry out, and the broken pieces of my staff fall from my hands.
“Please, Golmarr,” I beg, and my eyes fill with tears. “Please don’t kill me. This isn’t you—this is the dragon’s treasure!”
He smirks and raises his weapon again, and as he plunges it downward, I roll to the side and shield my face with my arms. The sword slices through the back of my vest, shatters the ice where I had been lying, and sinks deep into the ground. Scrambling to my feet, I turn to run, but he dives for me, gripping the hair at the nape of my neck. I tip forward and he slams my face into the frozen ground. I feel a crack in my forehead and the world seems to tilt. Numbness seeps into my body, and I feel nothing as a hazy fog spreads from my head, into the rest of my body. I am rolled onto my back, a boot is pressed firmly to my chest, and I watch Golmarr raise his sword with both his hands cinched around the hilt, his knuckles white. As I stare up at him through my tears I can’t help but wonder—when he kills me, will he feel any type of remorse?
The sword starts to drive toward my heart just as the twang of a bowstring reverberates through the air. Golmarr’s body lurches to the side, and his sword plunges into the ground beside my arm. Not five steps away stands Evay, her bow still aimed at Golmarr, the string still quivering. Her dark eyes are round with horror, yet she pulls another arrow from her quiver and takes aim at Golmarr, waiting.
He presses on his chest, in the space where his shoulder meets his body, the space where his armor has a hair-thin gap. His fingers come away red, and I can see the black fletching sticking out of the back of his shoulder. Golmarr squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head. When he opens them again, he looks down at me lying beside his sword, and his face drains of color.
“No!” He shakes his head and slowly draws his sword out of the ground. He stares at the weapon like he has never seen it before. Thrusting it into its sheath, he backs away from me. I can feel his pain and it is tearing my heart in two, stripping me of everything I am made of but despair. “No!” He turns his face to the sky and shrieks. Looking at me, he presses a hand to his heart, then crosses his fingers. Without a backward glance, he runs.
I close my eyes as the pain from all of my wounds slowly starts to grow, merging with the horror of Golmarr trying to kill me. Tears trickle over my temples and into my hair as the thump of galloping hooves echoes against the ground. Without looking, I know that Golmarr is gone. And now, despite the people milling around me, I am alone.
I lie on the ice with my eyes closed until Enzio comes and carefully lifts me into his arms. He carries me to the wagon of dead and injured soldiers and presses a piece of cloth to my wounded shoulder to slow the bleeding. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I should never have left you. I thought, since you were with Golmarr…” I curl on my side and put my head in his lap. As the tears start pouring from my eyes, he puts his hand on my head. “I’m so sorry.”
When we arrive at King Marrkul’s house, Yerengul and Enzio help me out of the wagon. Without a word, Yerengul lifts me into his arms and carries me to the kitchen. He lays me on the long, rectangular wooden table and cuts the blood-soaked clothing away from my left shoulder.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I have been trained as a healer. I am tending to your wounds.” For the first time since I met him, there is no mischief in his eyes. I stare silently up at the ceiling as he pokes and prods my wound. While he examines me, Enzio wads up a blanket and puts it beneath my head.
“There’s water heating on the fire,” Yerengul says to Enzio. “Can you add a few more logs?” Without a word, Enzio goes to the hearth.
King Marrkul strides into the kitchen and studies me with worried eyes. “How bad is it?” he asks Yerengul.
His son looks up. “Bad. He would have hit her heart if she hadn’t blocked his attack.”
Marrkul presses his hands over his eyes and slowly slides them down his battle-weary face. “Do you know why he tried to…” He grunts, and I realize he cannot say the words kill her.
Yerengul shakes his head and his eyes meet mine. “Do you know why he tried to kill you?”
I nod and close my eyes. “It’s not what you think,” I whisper, and fresh tears spill over my temples. “The glass dragon…Her treasure was hatred. Especially hatred for me.”
King Marrkul runs his hand through his tangled black hair. “I’m sorry, lass.”
“Do you know where he went?” Yerengul asks. I shake my head the tiniest bit.
When the water is hot, Yerengul washes my face and frowns. “Her forehead is split, too,” he says. “Enzio, will you hold her down while I mend her shoulder?”
Enzio nods and his warm hands press on my arms. Hot water is poured over my wound. I gasp and whimper at the pain and try not to writhe. A minute later, I moan as a needle is stuck through my skin and pulled beneath the cut and out the other side. Every time the needle stabs, I moan, and Enzio flinches and pushes me down a little harder, holding me immobile.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, Princess,” Enzio whispers.
Through a fog of pain, I hear Marrkul ask, “What think you of the fire, son?”
For a moment Yerengul stops stitching my shoulder. “You mean the one that didn’t burn her, or the one that consumed the dragon?”
“I mean the one the she used to save Golmarr from the dragon. The one that burned her without burning her. Everyone saw it! It is all our soldiers whispered of on the ride home.”
“I will tell you what I think,” someone calls as booted feet thud on the wooden floor. Seven dark and strapping horse lords stride into the kitchen. They gather around the table and stare down at me—some with pale hazel eyes, some with dark. They are still dirty from battle and dressed in bloodstained armor. Silently, they study me, laid out on the table, and my heart starts to pound—a weak, tired flutter befitting my ravaged body.
After a drawn-out moment, Ingvar breaks the silence. “She is a witch. That is what I think,” he states, eyeing me.
“And as such, she will be sought after by every king and queen in the world,” Jessen says, folding his arms over his broad chest.
&n
bsp; “Wars will be waged over her,” another brother says, narrowing his deep brown eyes and studying me further.
“Men will die to own her,” Yerengul adds.
“Or they will try to buy her,” Olenn says.
“Or steal her,” King Marrkul muses.
“And dragons will seek to destroy her,” Nayadi’s aged, grating voice rings out. Two brothers step aside, letting the hunched, withered hag join the circle. She stands beside my wounded shoulder. Reaching out a bent, gnarled finger, she touches the half-stitched gash. Before I can open my mouth to protest her closeness, all the pain is whisked away from the wound, and muscles I didn’t realize I was clenching relax as I sigh and sink against the hard table. “Stitch the rest quickly,” Nayadi instructs Yerengul. “I, unlike some, do not have the power to bring one back from the brink of death, let alone heal a small wound. The pain will be back before long.” Her unseeing eyes meet mine, and she licks her pink gums.
Yerengul bites the side of his cheek and leans over my shoulder, deep in concentration as he finishes stitching. I feel nothing but a light tugging on my skin.
“So, what shall we do with this Faodarian princess, who is pledged to your youngest brother?” King Marrkul asks. His troubled eyes meet mine.
Yerengul, still intent on my shoulder, says, “We fight for her.” When no one answers, he looks up at his brothers’ solemn faces.
Ingvar draws his sword and holds it forward, blade centered above my heart and pointed toward the ceiling. “Agreed,” he says. Yerengul firms his shoulders and stands. With a hand stained red by my blood, he draws his sword and holds it beside his brother’s. Steel hisses all around me as every man, even Enzio, draws his sword and holds it above my prostrate body. Last of all, King Marrkul adds his well-worn sword to the others and smiles a grim smile.
“It is agreed upon, then,” King Marrkul says. “Princess Sorrowlynn of Faodara, we pledge to thee our lives, our protection, and our kinship. We will fight for you. We will keep you safe until Golmarr finds his way back to you.”
Despite the horrors of the day, a tiny smile tugs at my mouth, and my throat constricts with the desire to cry.
All of the men gathered around me repeat the words three times: “We pledge to thee our lives, our protection, and our kinship.” As the room grows silent, I can feel their pledges bind to me, and my eyes fill with tears yet again. King Marrkul leans forward and presses his lips to my forehead. Ingvar does the same. And then Jessen and Olenn. One by one, all of Golmarr’s brothers kiss my forehead before leaving the kitchen. When they have gone and only the king, Yerengul, and Enzio remain, I peer at my stitched, swollen shoulder and cringe.
“You know, Princess, in Anthar, scars are a badge of honor,” Yerengul says as he wraps my shoulder with clean, dry rags. He sounds just like Golmarr. “They are proof that you’ve experienced pain and overcome it.” His words, so like his brother’s, hurt so much that I start to sob. He puts his hand on my hair. “You’ll overcome this, too.”
I press my hands to my eyes as I gasp giant breaths of air and shake with the power of emotions wracking my body. Warm, gentle hands lift me off the table and I am cradled against a massive chest.
“There now, child,” King Marrkul whispers as he carries me up a flight of stairs. “Things will turn out all right. They always do. Have faith. Have hope. One day you will look back at this moment and see that you have grown far more than you did when things were easy. And then, when you get so many of these hard and trying days, these days that test you to your core, they will refine you, beat out your weaknesses, and turn you into the best version of yourself that there is.” He lowers me onto Golmarr’s bed and pulls the blanket up to my chin. “Sleep now, and when you wake, things will be easier to face.”
He walks out of the room and shuts the door, so I am alone in the dark, and all I can hear are the sound of his receding steps and the sound of my breathing. After a moment, the darkness recedes as my door is opened again. Enzio, carrying a candle, steps inside and shuts the door. He reaches under his leather vest and pulls out a folded piece of paper. “This is from Golmarr,” he says. “He told me to give it to you if things turned out this way. I will be sleeping in the hall outside your door, so if you need anything, just call.” He places the candle and the paper on the bedside table.
“Thank you,” I whisper as he leaves the room. Taking the paper, I open it and stare at Golmarr’s handwriting. It is polished and precise, just like everything else about him. By the light of the flickering candle, I read his words and fresh tears fill my eyes.
Dear Sorrowlynn,
If Enzio gave you this letter, it means I have killed the glass dragon and we both survived. It means that our plan didn’t work and I was unable to simply wound the beast. Thus, I made the choice to save your life in spite of the consequences that have obviously followed. Please believe me, if I could have defeated the dragon without killing it, I would have. Now my only consolation is that you are alive, and I am alive. That is the least I could hope for.
You need to know that I have been thinking about this day since the time we were sitting in Edemond’s wagon eating porridge, and you told me what the dragon’s treasure was. Every single time I looked at you from that moment on, I drank in the sight of you. Every time I touched you, I savored it like it might be the last. Every word you spoke, I memorized for when we would be apart.
I chose hating you over watching you die. That was the less painful of the two outcomes. If you’d died, it would have been the end of us. At least now there is hope that one day I will learn how to overcome the dragon’s treasure and we will be together again. There are myths about an Infinite Vessel that holds all the history of the dragons. As surely as you are reading these words, know that I am, at this very moment, on a quest to discover the Infinite Vessel. I will find out how to beat this. Until that day, know that I will always love you. Even while I hate you, I will still love you.
Golmarr
I have the grain of the lacquered wood ceiling memorized by the fifth day. It is the only thing I see from Golmarr’s bed, lying on my back, trying to deal with the pain, hardly eating. Some of the pain is from my stitched and healing shoulder, but most of it comes from missing Golmarr and not being able to do anything about it.
I hate it. The ceiling, not the pain.
So, on the sixth day, I decide to stop wasting my life studying the cursed wooden ceiling and do something about missing him. I roll out of bed before the sun rises and walk barefoot, hair a mass of tangles, cradling my left arm, through King Marrkul’s giant wooden house and out back to the stables. All I need is a horse, and then I will find Golmarr.
I open the stall housing Dewdrop and walk up to the magnificent animal. A brand-new saddle is hanging by a hook on the wall. I grip the edges of the saddle in my hands and lift. My arms tremble, and then sharp agony steals all the strength from my left shoulder. I groan and hug my left arm to my chest. Fresh blood seeps through my nightgown a hand span above my heart, and tears form in my eyes.
Slowly, I lift my hands before my face and turn them back and forth, palms, backs, palms. They look like the hands of a princess who never dresses herself, never brushes her own hair, never cooks her own food or even pulls her bedding back at night before she slips under her covers. They look like hands that never hold anything but the sides of a fancy skirt for a curtsy.
They are my hands. And I do not like them. They are my hands, and I need to make them into something formidable. I spin around and stomp out of the stable.
A light glows in the kitchen window of King Marrkul’s house, so I hurry across the yard to it. I crash into the house like a wave of fury, slamming the door open so hard it bangs against the wall. King Marrkul, Yerengul, and Enzio are sitting at the massive table, bowls of food in front of them. They all three stop chewing their breakfast and stare at me.
Marrkul wipes his mouth with a napkin and stands. “Princess Sorrowlynn. You’ve finally decided to get out of bed.”
Walking over to me, he gently moves me farther inside the house and shuts the door. His gaze lowers to the blood on my nightgown, and worry tightens his eyes. “Yerengul.” He nods toward my injury.
Yerengul and Enzio get to their feet and stop in front of me. Yerengul gently loosens the laces that hold the neck of my nightgown closed. He slides the fabric aside so my wound is exposed and wipes away the blood with his napkin. “She tore one of the stitches, that’s all,” he tells his father. “How did you do that?” he asks me suspiciously. When I stay silent, he looks at my feet, covered with straw from the stable and wet with dew, and understanding lightens his eyes. “You were going to run, weren’t you? Take one of the horses? Ride off with nothing but your nightgown? You were going to find my brother.”
I close my eyes and nod. “But I’m not strong enough to lift a measly saddle.” I open my eyes and look between Enzio and Yerengul. “I want to be strong. Make me strong.” It is not a request.
A slow smile spreads across Enzio’s face, and Yerengul laughs.
“I will make you strong, but only if…” Yerengul trails off and leaves the end of his sentence hanging like a piece of bait. I grab it.
“If what? I will do anything.”
“You have been in bed for five days. That is not okay. You have to get out of bed every day, when I say. No more lying around feeling sorry for yourself. And you can’t go chasing after my brother in nothing but a nightgown. You wait to leave until you’re strong enough to defend yourself, and then you leave with money, food, shoes, and weapons.”
Strong enough to defend myself. How long will that take? I wonder. The thought of staying here when all I want to do is find Golmarr makes me feel like I am locked in my skin and cannot move. But I nod. Yerengul is right. I need to be strong enough to survive.
“I will do it,” I say.
“I have a request,” Enzio adds.
“Yes?”