Realm of Dragons

The truth was that Bern didn’t care. A dragon’s egg was enough to be worth the risk, and a princess… well, she could go missing as easy as a peasant girl in a forest this size.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

The creatures continued to circle and Devin didn’t know what to do. How long would it be before they leapt at him and the others again? Halfin, Twell, Lars, and Rodry were all fine fighters, but they would die just as quickly as he would. Devin swallowed at that thought. He was about to die; they were all about to die.

He found himself thinking about the moment in the House of Weapons when he had stopped Vars from killing him. He’d done that accidentally, but could he do it deliberately? Could he actually use magic on purpose?

Devin found himself thinking of all the things he would lose when the creatures tore him apart. It was a shorter list than he wanted. He’d already lost his place in the House of Weapons. His parents… well, his father was angry all the time, and his mother anything but kind. He tried to think of the things he might now have though. He would never go on to have a family of his own, never see any of the world, never…

“No,” Devin said, shaking his head. “No.”

The creatures’ jaws slavered with the prospect of the kills to come. Their eyes focused with hatred, and Devin could see one of the beasts’ muscles bunching to leap.

He wasn’t sure what happened then. It was like something in the fear, the certainty of his own death, flicked some kind of switch in him, changed something in him in a way that seemed familiar. Devin recognized this feeling, because he’d felt it once before. He tried to reach down into it, tried to remember the sensation of it. In that moment, looking at the world, he could see something close to another world layered on top of it, a place composed of writhing energies, and with things there that moved like shadows on the edge of sight.

Devin understood in that moment how to pull the energy of that other place through himself, knew how to do it the same way that he knew how to breathe. He reached out, and, as easily as if he were pulling aside a curtain, he ripped aside a fragment of the barrier between the two places.

In that instant, power spilled out into the world, in a wave of force that rippled out, sending the wolf-things reeling back. They toppled over one another, and they weren’t the only ones, because Rodry and the others were also knocked from their feet. Only Devin seemed to be able to stay standing there, perhaps because he’d been the one to do this.

He looked at his arms, and he could see something that looked like black fire flickering around them, down along his limbs to the tip of the blade he held. The wolf creatures rose and stared at him, then turned as one with a whimper and ran, back away from the stream. Devin couldn’t understand it, couldn’t begin to guess what was happening, but he watched them run nonetheless, and he knew they wouldn’t be back.

As suddenly as the flames had come, they were gone, extinguished with a whoomph of inrushing air. Around him, Devin could see the world as it was, with no sign of that other place, just the thickness of a thought away. All that was there was Rodry and the others, who were finding their feet again after being knocked flat.

“What,” Rodry asked, “just happened?”

He and the knights were staring at Devin, Rodry’s expression caught somewhere between shock and awe.

“What just happened?” Rodry repeated. “What… did you do that?”

“I… don’t know,” Devin said, because he wasn’t sure that he could explain it all to the prince. “I… maybe.”

“Those things were there one moment, and we were all knocked flat with them running the next,” Halfin said. “They just ran. Twell?”

The other knight shook his head. “I’ve no idea.” He looked over at Devin. “How did you stay standing? Did you do something?”

“I don’t know,” Devin said. He realized that they hadn’t seen what he’d seen. They hadn’t seen him rip through the world to grab power, hadn’t seen the black fire around him, only felt the effects of the force he’d called.

He could have tried to explain it, but somehow he knew that it would be a bad idea to say too much. Sorcerers like Master Grey were rare and feared, and men like this might not react well to the idea of suddenly traveling with one who didn’t know what he was doing.

Rodry stared at Devin with something like awe. “You did magic.”

“I…” Devin shook his head. “I didn’t do anything.”

The others stared at him, and in that moment, Devin fully expected them to back away from him; to fear him now that they knew what he could do. Instead, they looked at him with something like awe.

“That was… impressive,” Sir Twell said. “Whatever it was.”

“Very,” Sir Halfin agreed. “Can you do it again?”

Devin shook his head, even though the feeling of what he’d done was down there in him now, buried away and there to touch. He didn’t know enough about what he was doing to risk even trying.

“Then there’s no time to keep standing here,” Rodry said. “We need to get moving again in case those things come back. We still need to find the star metal. Devin, mount up.”

Devin nodded, only too grateful for the distraction, and more grateful that Rodry didn’t seem to be treating him like some kind of freak. Of all of them, he was the one whose opinion mattered most.

The others seemed grateful for the chance to put some distance between themselves and the things that had tried to kill them. Gathering himself up, Devin found his horse and managed to mount it. The five of them set off again.

They kept riding until they found a space where the ground fell away even more sharply than it had, and as they rode, the landscape around them was curiously quiet. No more animals came out toward them, or even watched them. It was as if everything there had seen what Devin could do, and was staying back.

He still didn’t understand it. How could he do something that powerful? He wasn’t some trained magus, like Master Grey, or someone who had made a pact for power. He was just a smith, who knew about steel but not about magic.

“There,” Rodry said, pointing, and breaking Devin’s chain of thought.

Devin saw what he meant at once. A large rock sat in the ground, in a crater obviously caused by its fall from the heavens. It shone with a silvery tint, and the stream washed around it. From where he sat on his horse, Devin could see that the stream was ordinary above it, but had a faint shine to it downstream of the rock. This was where the oddness of the place came from, everything around the rock twisted and changed by its presence, so that there were flowers taller than their heads, and furred things with butterfly and dragonfly wings that flitted around their heads.

“We’ll need to gather the metal,” Devin said.

“I have a pick,” Twell said, taking one from his saddle and passing it across to Devin. By this point, it wasn’t even a surprise that he did.

“We’ll watch for dangers while you gather what you need,” Rodry said.

That seemed fair to Devin, since they were the knights and he was just a peasant boy. Even so, a part of him wanted to point out that he’d been the one to drive off the wolf-things. Then again, Devin was the one who had worked with metal enough to know what he was doing. He got down from his horse and headed to the sky-fallen rock, seeking the spots where he would be able to get the most metal ore for his efforts.

He set to work, striking at the rock. It was hard work, even for someone who had worked in the forges for so long, and before long, Devin was sweating.

“Here,” Rodry said after a while, “let me take a turn with that pick.”

He did, although Devin would never have thought that a prince would work like that. Rodry chipped away at the stone, and soon, there was enough ore to fill a sack, and more. Devin lifted it onto the back of his horse, feeling the weight of it. Now that he had the ore, he had a sword to make, and then he had to decide who to give it to, and who to anger.

Then there was the question of the magic. Devin could still feel the connection bubbling within him. He’d always wanted to be a swordsman, a knight, but he knew that this power had other ideas. He needed to understand it, needed to learn about it, and for that, he would need to seek out Master Grey.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

The tower that housed King Ravin’s throne room had taken a thousand men and women three years to construct, along with the finest minds to come out of the south’s schools. He had employed not one, but three architects, so that no one of them would understand the whole picture of it, with its passages and its secrets.

Of course, he’d ensured that everyone involved died shortly thereafter. The servants had been easy, because they were bond slaves and bought things. The architects… well, he’d accused one of treason, ensured another slipped from a high spot in the building, and the third had apparently choked on a fish bone a year after the completion. King Ravin was a thorough man.

It had been worth the effort, towering over any who entered, with the individual symbols of the lands he claimed arranged high above, a map of the known world covering the ceiling. There were galleries for the higher nobles, a vast expanse of mosaic floor for those who were lesser, and guards arranged by every pillar of the hall to ensure that they remembered their place.

Ravin’s place was the one he had carved for himself with blood, the throne sitting at the head of it all a thing of pure white and gold that matched the robes he wore. At thirty, he filled that throne with a muscular frame, his crown of platinum sitting atop close-cropped dark hair. A darkly curling beard went down to his chest, his great sword, Heart Splitter, sat in its sheath beside him, while the purple robes of state did little to disguise the fact that he was a warrior, and more than a warrior. He’d had the symbols of the old magic woven into the hem and sleeves as a reminder to all that he’d spent as much time with the scholars as the warriors, that he was not the same barbarous fool his father and his father’s father had been.

There was no second throne beside his for a wife. Instead, the latest of his concubines knelt in the finest silks beside his throne, a slender chain from her ankle running to his hand. Before, she had been the daughter of a noble house, given to him as an honor. Maybe he would even keep her for a while.

For now though, there was the business of running the Southern Kingdom and its possessions across the sea.

“Is there any news on the latest expedition to the Western Continent?” he demanded, looking to the spot where the admiral of his fleets stood.

“Not so far, my king,” the man said. “But perhaps the messages are just delayed.”