This was what I was focused on, absorbed in, when another familiar soul blotted out the first, saturating my senses, soaking me in dread. I floundered, trying to clear my mind and defend myself, but a hand was already around my throat, slamming me into the wall behind me.
“You shouldn’t have come, Lira,” Madoc said. “Now you’ve forced me to kill you again.”
CHAPTER 12
REYKER
Reyker dozed atop the horse’s back as the mare crossed the Green Desert. He’d not bothered to change clothes, still wearing his bloodstained jerkin and half-burned tunic. Soon he would return to Stony Harbor, to ensure Draki upheld his part of their bargain and released the captives, but first, he had to ride to Stalwart Bay—Dragon Bay. Draki had summoned him upon word of his victory in Selkie’s Quay, and Reyker wanted to take stock of the port’s survivors, to save as many as he could.
He’d cut through the center of the moorlands, riding over rocky hills and scraggly brush, before the desert spit him out into the verdant fields beyond. The horse had displayed otherworldly endurance, never faltering, rarely needing to rest.
Reyker really should stop calling his mount it or she or horse. He should give the animal a name.
He was thinking on it when he spotted something odd in the air over the field in front of him, a shimmer that made it seem like the landscape shifted. The kind of thing most people would never notice unless they’d seen it before, as he had in Ghost Village, and again in Selkie’s Quay. It was the sign of a spell, a veil meant to hide something.
Eathalin. She was here.
He dismounted and snuck closer, crawling across a hilltop, ducking behind trees until he was at the edge of the veil, pushing his way through.
What the spell concealed was a mass of people, some on horseback, others in horse-drawn carts, all carrying weapons and dressed for battle. At the front, he spotted Zabelle. Beside her was a brown-haired warrior who wore Torin’s face, but it was twenty years younger.
Garreth, the Ghost Prince. Leading his nomad army.
Gods aflame. There was only one place they could be heading. If they attacked Dragon Bay, the warlord would crush them.
Reyker considered going to Garreth, trying to talk him out of this, but he’d gotten an inkling of the kind of man this warrior was from Lira’s stories. Garreth’s homeland had been invaded, his entire clan wiped out. Reyker knew the sort of vengeful madness that came from losing everything. Garreth would not be dissuaded.
That left only one option—help the nomads win. The best chance he could give them was by thwarting the Dragon from within, a thing he’d done many times, to his own detriment. A thing he’d risk again, if it meant keeping Lira’s brother alive.
He crept back to the other side of the hill, keeping out of sight. “Vengeance,” he called to the horse, and she whickered. It was a good name, an apt one.
Reyker climbed onto Vengeance and rode hard for Dragon Bay.
Vengeance gained on the scout’s mount, legs flying, mouth foaming. Reyker hurled his axe across the gap between him and the Dragonman. It spun, end over end, and found its mark. The man went down. It was the third scout he’d killed. Though Eathalin’s spell was strong, it wasn’t impenetrable. Reyker would not risk the message reaching Draki that a nomad army was marching in his direction.
He arrived at Dragon Bay far ahead of the army, and Dragonmen met him at the bridge. The guards let him pass, directing him to the beach.
Three piers jutted from the shore into the bay, and Draki stood in the bow of a caravel tied to one of them. It was the same ship Madoc had sent to run Reyker down when he sailed to Iseneld, the spur that sank his cog still attached to the caravel’s prow. Dragonmen milled about on the other ships, inspecting them.
When Draki saw Reyker, the warlord grinned. “What do you think of my armada, brother?”
Reyker dismounted and walked onto the pier, eyeing the twenty-odd ships—some falling apart, others so new the wood gleamed, some tiny fishing vessels, a few big enough to sail the world.
“Inferior to those of Iseneld,” he said. True for some of the ships, untrue for others, but it was meant to force Draki into a corner in front of his men, to admit his stolen fleet was middling or insult his own country’s shipbuilders.
The Dragon only laughed. “Then it is good you will soon sail them to Iseneld, where our shipwrights can adjust them to our superior standards.”
“I will sail them?”
Draki vaulted out of the caravel’s bow, landing on the pier beside Reyker. “The Fjull Uprorsmund are here in Glasnith, attacking villages that belong to me. You will take this fleet and a contingent of Dragonmen to hunt them. Once the Renegades are dead, you will join me in Iseneld to celebrate our victories.”
Home, home, home.
“I can’t,” Reyker said, to himself as much as to the warlord. He’d made a vow to protect Lira’s people, and he wasn’t about to break it now, with her brother on his way here. “Find someone else.”
Draki frowned at Reyker’s burned tunic, his blistered arm. “We’ll discuss this later. I won’t have my Sword looking like he’s been roasted on a spit. Go to the infirmary. Tell my pretty healers to treat you well.”
Reyker didn’t bother arguing. He mounted Vengeance and headed back toward the village infirmary. He felt Lira’s presence here, stronger than it had been before, as if her ghost was calling out, trying to tell him something—to save her sister magiskas at all costs.
The bone-healer wasn’t under Draki’s control. None of the Daughters of Aillira kept inside the infirmary were. Though they gazed off into space, their features neutral, Reyker was all too familiar with what compulsion looked like. These women were pretending.
If Draki found out . . . he could not let Draki find out.
The healer had already erased his burns. He’d felt the blisters dissolve, more unsettling than painful. Now she worked on his knuckles, melding the cracks in his bones from when he’d punched Draki’s unbreakable skull. “Are you all right?” he asked her. She didn’t respond, but her blank expression slipped for an instant. “You don’t have to be afraid. I’m not like the other Dragonmen. I promise I won’t hurt you.”
The healer’s eyes darted to the table behind him.
“What has you so frightened?” There was a bloodstained bandage on her wrist. “Who did this to you?”
She snatched her hand away. “Please. Just leave us alone.”
Besides the healer, there were seven other magiskas here. He needed to go—it wouldn’t be long before Garreth’s army arrived—but when several of the women glanced at the same spot the healer had been looking at, Reyker couldn’t stand it. He went to inspect the table, pushing the plants aside.