I had been taught to read the stars when I was younger, but had not taken the time to truly examine them in years. There were enough seers in the castle without needing to use the skill myself. My mother would have been appalled if she had known. But Einhen and I scanned the stars from the ogres’ beach and I thought of Penelope. She was all alone in that castle, being ground to a pulp beneath Michelle’s thumb… And my wife, I felt people failed to realize, was quite resilient. She would not be ground to a pulp, and if she would not be ground to a pulp… she might be returned to the dungeon, to see what the manacles might make of her.
And I couldn’t lose her. I couldn’t lose my father, and Altair, and Penelope, all in the same month. I was resilient too, but not that resilient. I needed something left in my world.
Beside me, Einhen sketched out the patterns of the stars and examined them more closely with a ruler and a magnifying glass, etching little dotted lines between them to show their trajectories. In the sand alongside him was a telescope. I was too lost in my thoughts to be of any help. Perhaps that was the real reason I had never closely consulted the stars, instead, consulting a court-appointed seer. I couldn’t be troubled to concentrate for that long on the series of silver speckles.
My mind continued to wander to Penelope. What if Lethe thought he could take advantage of Penelope? He certainly still loved her. She was my wife… and if he laid so much as a hand on her, I would be forced to take measures of my own. Things would certainly get ugly. Very ugly. What if he—
Off to my left, Einhen’s writing utensil scratched harder and faster on the surface of his yellowed papyrus scroll.
“Dear gods,” he breathed, distracting me from my worry. “Theon!” Einhen tore his eyes from the scroll, darted them to the stars once more, and then turned them to me. They were wide with alert, with panic. “The stars!”
“Yes, they’re…” I wasn’t sure quite what to say. I didn’t want to make a fool out of myself. Sighing, I asked, “What are they?”
“They have not changed position!” Einhen clapped a hand on my shoulder. “They remain with us still!”
“What?” Without thinking, I snatched the scroll from beneath Einhen’s hands and examined the crude map he had been drawing.
He was right. I couldn’t see a single star out of alignment within the sky which had always hung over The Hearthlands every night of my life until the day that I had departed for Earth.
“The gods,” Einhen cheered. “The gods will give us an advantage in war, in travel, in luck… though the weather remains unfavorable.”
“Unfavorable?” A sharp note crept into my voice. “Einhen… we require the storms to relent, lest they extinguish our fire and drive us from the territory. We need a window of clarity in the sky.”
Einhen’s shoulders sagged. “Perhaps unfavorable is not the word,” he corrected himself. He scooped the telescope from the sand at his side and examined the mottled sky over Everwinter yet again. “Unpredictable. The clouds move too quickly… some are dark, some are light… it’s impossible to be certain when or where the next storm will begin in Everwinter, and impossible to tell how long it will last. I can say it is not snowing right now. And at night the storms seem to abate, to at least soften. Perhaps the astrolabe machinists retire in the night hours, and the sky clears for a precious few hours.”
“So the weather is uncertain, but the gods will grant us… luck.”
“The ice people appear to have not changed every disc of the astrolabe. And we did not notice. We never mapped them again after seeing their new positions. They changed back right over our very heads.” He looked away from his telescope, breathless with relief, with excitement. “We must strike now. Tonight. The ice dragons surely know this folly, and are working to repair it.”
“We were always going to strike tonight, to tell you the truth,” I admitted to him, pushing up to a stand and turning toward the waiting camp of fire soldiers—the loyal remainder. “One never knows if they shall live or die. Even now, we cannot be sure.” I looked away from Einhen and again thought of Nell. “The gods do not decide everything.”
* * *
The night sky over Ixwane Ocean was filled with fire dragons, all in brilliant shades of gold and crimson and bright, flame orange. As we approached our distant shore—now a silvery crust, where it had once been a verdant series of hills much like the ogres’ beach—my eyes shifted from one bank of cloud to the next. As long as those snowy mists held their loads overhead… we would be able to travel onward, toward the city itself, with our weapons and ammunition strapped to our necks. My emptied satchel had been packed with driftwood, reeds, and other dried materials from the ogres’ beach. It was highly flammable, and it would do what I could not. It would cover the city itself, sent forth like an arrow.
We traveled through the frigid air, eyes half-closed against the dry atmosphere. At least, being as dry as it was, it would help the fire to burn. And it would need to be a lot of fire. It would need to overwhelm them.
For almost an hour we flew onward toward the city as fast as we could. The time was precious. There were only a few dozen of us left. If it started to snow…
“Heading into a flurry!” Einhen announced.
“We have to turn back!” one of the smaller red dragons cried below me.
“No!” I rebuked. “We can make it! It won’t last for long.”
Our wings beat the air, and one, two smaller dragons spiraled out of the squad, down to the ground below with wings cramped and locked in the cold. “They’ll be all right,” I exclaimed, fixing my eyes straight ahead as we pushed through the thin sheet of snowfall. “We have to keep going!” I could see the walls of the city on the horizon. It wouldn’t be long now.
Descending to the city entrance and frozen moat, we landed in the deep snow. I wondered if the ice dragons had been made aware of our presence yet. Knowing how lazy and overconfident they were, it was possible that the patrols had been slackened after the shelter had been raided. But it was impossible to say. We had no time to waste.
I shifted into my human form in order to use my hands, and the other fire soldiers followed suit. As it had been before, the city was left open, a vulgar display of the perceived superiority of ice forces. I unsheathed the satchel from my neck and dug inside for the salty wood and foliage, dried to the bone in the sun of the ogres’ beach. “Show no mercy,” I instructed my men. It was a phrase I never would have uttered before. “We are not trying to save anything. No ice dragons, and no structures within the city. Let it, and let them, burn.”
At the entrance of the city was the same abandoned inn where Nell and I had spent our first night as husband and wife. I gazed at it with longing and remorse for only an instant before exhaling a plume of white-hot fire into its windows.
Posted nearby were horses and donkeys, draped in heavy quilts, attached to bridles, awaiting their owners. I unbridled one horse, loosely attached a bundle of kindling to its tail, and breathed some sparks into the mass. The horse neighed and took off into the city, but before it lost the bundle attached to its tail, the snow that it kicked up extinguished the flame.
I extracted a quiver and bow from my satchel. The quiver was stuffed with arrows whose feathered fletching had been replaced, wrapped in dry reeds instead. I exhaled some sparks again and took aim at a distant building. It had once been our cobbler’s shop. But now… now it was just an empty building, or perhaps the hideout of some lowly ice dragon who hadn’t the courage to remain on his or her own land, the Obran peninsula.
The arrow arced into the sky like a teardrop of fire, descending perfectly onto the cobber’s shop.
Archery was a lesson I’d never missed.
A dim flicker began in one window. Too slow. If our fire all started with natural speed, the ice dragons would have plenty of time to extinguish them.
“Men,” I commanded. “Our sparks will not progress at the speed we require!”
“What of our fireballs?” Charis called b
ack.
“They are exhausting,” Einhen replied.
“War is exhausting. The fireballs it is. The thicker, the better!”
Einhen sagged—not a warrior by trade—but acquiesced. The lot of us heaved and belched, vomiting streaks of white lava into the depths of the city.
They landed and exploded, creating immediate wildfires amid the kindling of our town square. The temple sparkled like a firework, its bejeweled statues and fountains, fed with the gaseous ground waters of The Hearthlands, shooting into the sky. The apothecary’s station fumed with the smoke of sage, while the physician’s office was practically vaporized by the variety of chemicals harbored therein.
I stared out across the blanket of destruction… so many of our buildings, our landmarks, gone in an instant… one of the fireballs slammed into a statue of my grandfather, melting it almost instantly into the snow below…
Wild-eyed ice dragons, still half-asleep and half-naked from their beds, came staggering out into the snow. Some of them ran in their bare feet or stockings toward the open exits of the city wall. Some of them transformed into dragons, all shades of blue and white and silver and black, then fled into the sky and over the walls. Some of them yodeled from within burning buildings they had taken to inhabiting, spewing shards of ice out windows in an attempt to blanket the blaze. But the assault was too fast, too much, too unexpected.
It wouldn’t be too long before a discerning ice dragon stepped from his or her abode and scanned the streets, not for the flaming horrors around them, but for their cause. And when that happened, we would be forced into ground combat. Soon. But it would be too late. By the time we were targeted and forced into defensive mode, forced to relent and even recede, the entire city would be aflame. Even now, we had fanned out at a distance of several blocks from one another, and our fireballs assaulted different quarters of the city. And when we fled, then… then we would tap into the gaseous moat and set it aflame, encouraging the remaining ice dragons to flee rather than walk the full length of the moat, extinguishing its waters to resuscitate a ruined city.
My gaze panned to the castle.
My only fear was not the condition of my childhood home, but Penelope.
As the fires of the city crackled and spread from building to building, creeping ever closer to the palace itself…
As the warm, yellow light played across my features, relaxing and warming me…
I worried. I worried at how the royal family would react, and prayed that they would be thrust into a panic too deep and wide to consider revenge on a lowly slave girl. They did not know that she had become my wife. Not unless she had told them herself.
All around us, a gentle snow began to fall. At first, I couldn’t even see it, as the flakes melted as soon as they came close to the fires. But then I realized that my face kept feeling sharp little prickles. Ice.
I winced. Even though it would be smart to fall back now, to save my men from the damage of the coming storm… I could not abandon Nell.
Nell
When the bombing began, I had already been “returned” to Michelle. I was aware of the resurgence of fire dragon power before Michelle had even awoken. I saw the strange flares of orange, yellow, and red light, illuminated on the opposing wall, and stood to investigate. That was when I knew. Balls of fire like white plasma filled the sky, streaking and exploding gracefully through windows. Homes stood like black skeletons in the wake of the dancing flame, and people were in the street—fleeing and grabbing what little they could. From my vantage point, three stories high, I could also see fire dragons moving through the streets, but the ice dragons could not. Unable to track the source of the fire, they were surrounded by a hedge of flame, and relented. Many of the buildings were consumed, and those that were extinguished by the ice of a dragon still smoldered, blackened, useless. I swallowed. Soon, the castle would be alerted, if they weren’t already. Soon, Lethe would know. Michelle would know. I shuddered at the thought of vicious Vulott being made aware of this development.
But my heart quickened with both terror and anticipation. Theon was somewhere in those streets, advancing toward me.
Shouts emanated through the heavy wooden door of Michelle’s bedroom. Footsteps thundered down the hallway, not stopping here. A smattering of jewel-toned lights, a reflection of a jeweled statue exploding somewhere near the castle, flared across Michelle’s sleeping face, and she stirred. I was no longer playing my barrel organ. I had stopped several minutes ago.
“What are you doing over there?” Michelle demanded sleepily, shoving herself into an upright position as if it was the most heroic task of her nineteen years. Rumpled and drowsy, she still looked annoyingly sexy.
“Watching the bombs.” Though my heart was stampeding in my chest, there was nothing else to say. Where could I go? Out into the snow, like a mad woman?
Poetically, a soft snow began to fall outside the window.
“What bombs?” Michelle bellowed, flinging herself out of the bed and ambling to the window. She shoved me out of the way to thrust her face against the glass. “Oh, my God,” she whispered to herself. “They came back.”
Righteous vindication throbbed in my heart. “Of course they came back.” The words popped out of my mouth with no thought at all, steely and passionate and firm.
Michelle cast a glare in my direction. “Did you know this was going to happen?”
I forced my face to stay in line. “Anyone could have guessed,” I replied. “It was their land, originally. The ice dragons didn’t kill everyone; they didn’t follow them across the ocean. It was entirely possible that they just reassembled elsewhere. I mean, either perspective—that they would or wouldn’t return—would have to be an assumption. I just assumed they would.”
Her eyes narrowed, but the bed chamber door was thrown open just then, and we both whirled at the sound, uncomfortable eye contact broken.
“Queen Michelle.” The person standing in the doorway was Dorid, strangely; not Lethe. Interesting. It said a lot of a man who would not come for his wife as another imminent battle hung over the land, encroaching on their own castle. “Your presence is requested in the throne room.”
Michelle strode toward the door, and I stayed behind. If she forgot about me… I certainly would have stolen some furs, a pair of boots, and tried to find the astrolabe before striking out into the streets of Everwinter in search for Theon.
But Michelle probably knew this. She had always been smarter than she looked—her emotional intelligence would’ve been off the charts, if her ego didn’t get in the way.
“You,” she commanded, pointing at me and jerking her finger into the hallway. “Come with me, or face the consequences.”
Grim, I trundled after her.
The throne room was a tizzy of panicked gesticulation when we arrived. My heart went to Lethe, as he was bone white and manic. “Nell, you’re okay,” he blurted upon sight of me. Michelle shot him a poisonous glare. “Michelle, darling.” Lethe went to Michelle and embraced her quickly. “They’re destroying the entire city. They’ve gone blazing insane.”
“I should have known that this was coming,” Vulott muttered. It was he and not Lethe who sat on the throne, massaging his temple tiredly. “I don’t know why I didn’t think that they would be capable of such an atrocity.”
“What should we do?” Lethe asked. “What are the people in the street doing?”
“I watched from the window for a while.” I spoke up. “Most of them fled. There are just too many buildings on fire, and the ice people… They don’t seem to care that much about the land. Not as much as they care about themselves…”
“Typical,” Vulott sneered.
Lethe abandoned Michelle’s arms to continue his pacing.
“Then forget the people,” Michelle called after him. “What about us? What will we do?”
Spoken like a true ice dragoness.
“The fire encroaches,” Vulott announced, having moved to the window. “The snow fall
is too light to extinguish the buildings, and I see fire soldiers moving in the streets. We have been abandoned by the people, but the fire dragons remain. Even in the snow.”
Damn right, I thought, my mind turning to Theon with a swell of pride.
“What about our guards?” Michelle demanded, her voice pitchy with despair. “There has to be someone here who can protect the castle for us!”
“Sometimes you are so beautiful and cold, I forget that you are human, my dear,” Vulott grumbled. “And then you say something like that and I’m reminded.”
“What? The guards themselves aren’t loyal?” Michelle shrilled. “Then what the hell is the point of having them?”
“It’s your knowledge of Everwinter which is truly lacking,” Lethe explained to her, more gently than Vulott would have. “The castle is surrounded by a thin band of gaseous water, now frozen. It means nothing to us in its frozen state, except to be an object of beauty. However… the fire will melt it quickly. And the natural pockets of gas in the creek will explode into a ring of fire. The castle will be slowly engulfed from every angle, except in the event that an ice storm rages down onto us. But if it does not—even with a team of fifty ice dragons, should every guard stand beneath their pledge of allegiance—the fire will overpower the manpower in the castle. We would sustain massive damage to certain wings. The castle is simply too large.”
“We can’t just leave it!” Michelle wailed. “This is our castle!”
“Darling, they will destroy it,” Vulott explained to her acidly. “They would rather destroy their own palace than allow us to dwell in its walls.”
“Then what are we going to do?” she cried.
“Hurry,” Lethe answered. “Send word to the guards. Abandon the property. We must think first of our own safety, mustn’t we?”