Dragon Prince 03 - Sunrunner's Fire (63 page)

It sprang to life in grass and flowers baked dry by the hot spring sun. It filled the mouth of Rivenrock Canyon, fountained up the sandstone watchspire, spread across the dunes. The sea of sand became a sea of Sunrunner’s Fire until it seemed the sand itself caught and burned.

Ruval conjured Air to bend the flames back toward Pol. It only fanned them higher. So great was Pol’s control, so sure was his power, that he appeared to glow in the perilous brightness.

“Illusion!” Ruval bellowed. “Unreal!”

Pol laughed. “Walk into the flames and see!”

“You’ll die by your own Fire, Sunrunner!” Ruval leaped for Pol. The physical attack was so unexpected that Pol went down in a tangle of limbs, feeling his knee wrenched nearly apart with the awkwardness of his fall. A long tongue of flame reached out nearby, licking across a growth of gray-green cacti, close enough to singe the two men as they wrestled on the sand. Pol felt beringed fingers lock around his throat, cutting off precious gulps of searing air. His vision began to go black around a raging wildfire. He tore at Ruval’s hands, then took a terrible chance and rolled them both toward the blaze.

Ruval scrambled away with a howl of pain. He dug his right arm into the sand to quench the flames that had caught on his shirt. Pol tried to gain his feet but his knee collapsed, sent him sprawling once more. They were encircled, caught in a tiny space of sand and rock as the inferno raged all around them.

Pol ripped off his shirt and wrapped it tightly around his knee, hoping the support would be enough. He swayed up on his good knee, glaring at Ruval. “Illusion?” he mocked, bruised neck muscles making his voice a rasp. Gathering himself to take advantage of the shock he was about to give, he forced a tiny smile to his lips. “Would you kill your own brother?”

The flames etched Ruval’s suddenly white face in red and gold.

“My brothers are dead!”

“What, no loving welcome? I distinctly heard you swear revenge on the High Princess for ordering your youngest brother’s death. I’m hurt, Ruval. Deeply wounded.” He summoned the words of the Star Scroll to mind. So simple, really, when one didn’t consider their implications or intellectualize over right, wrong, and justice. Power was there to be used; why else possess it? His father’s policy of acting only when action was necessary was a waste of resources. But then, Rohan had never experienced this kind of power. “I am Ianthe’s lastborn, Ruval. Sunrunner and
diarmadh’im.
How else would I be able to do this?”

The fire he called this time came from the stars, sweeping cold and white down Rivenrock Canyon. It mantled his own body in brilliant silver—and struck Ruval down in a flash of lightning.

What he had kindled exhilarated and terrified him. The way power should, he thought remotely. He watched with breathless fascination, caught between exultation and fear, between the thundering heat of Sunrunner’s Fire and the chill silver silence of a blaze called down from the stars. Having ignited flames across the Desert, he did not have to work to sustain it as with his dragon illusion. But neither did the sorcery require thought. Each came naturally to him, destruction from two opposing forces that met and merged within him. He throbbed with power and the terror of power, not knowing which kind and source of power he feared most.

Ruval lay writhing on the rocky ground. His screams split Pol’s skull like spikes.
“Would you kill your own brother?”
Pol could do it; he had only to twist starfire a little more tightly around Ruval, and the man would die. He would not even be breaking the Sunrunner’s oath he had never taken—never to kill using his gifts. For it was not a
faradhi
skill he used.

The grandson of Roelstra would have done it. The son of Rohan and Sioned could not.

Pol let the Star Scroll spell fade. He felt no exalted sense of his own goodness or righteousness or nobility. All he felt was empty, and grindingly tired. And something of a fool for not silencing his scruples and killing Ruval outright. He rubbed his torn knee, waiting while Ruval caught his breath. When there was sense in the man’s eyes again, Pol said simply, “Yield.”

Fright competed with fury in Ruval’s eyes. Then his head bent. “Help me,” he whispered.

Pol snorted. “Life you may have. But trust? Stand on your own or stay there, I don’t give a damn which.”

“Don’t you know what that spell does to
diarmadh’im?
I can’t feel my legs, damn you! Look at the Fire—if we don’t move, we’ll burn to death! Help me up!”

“Do it yourself or not at all,” Pol replied stubbornly.

The attempt was made, and Ruval toppled over on the sand, facedown. Pol swore and approached cautiously. His knee stabbed with every slow, suspicious step, repeating the fever pulse of his cheek wound. Ruval was barely breathing. His distress looked genuine enough—but Pol did not get within reach.

“Get up!” he ordered sharply, and coughed with the harshness of fiery air in his throat. He tossed his head to clear the sweat-thick hair from his eyes.

Ruval tried once more, pushing himself up onto hands and knees, head hanging as he fought for breath. Pol took a wary half-step back. His knee went out from under him and he fell with a gasp of pain.

Ruval was on him. And the face grinning ferally down at Pol was blond, pale-eyed—his own.

“Say ‘please,’ little brother.” Ruval tugged Pol’s injured leg to an excruciatingly painful angle. There was no need for any other restraint; the grip at his knee immobilized Pol completely. He moaned with the agony as bones ground together and tendons stretched to their limits.

“I’ll keep this shape just long enough to kill your father,” Ruval informed him, laughing softly. “Or maybe I’ll wait until tomorrow, let them believe you won, and tonight celebrate victory between Meiglan’s thighs.”

He
was
a fool for allowing Ruval to live. Too late to flay himself over it now. Pol ordered every muscle in his body to go limp. “Quick death—don’t torment me—” He interrupted this craven speech with a hacking cough.

His own face laughed with Ruval’s voice, his own eyes shone with Ruval’s triumph. “I told you to say ‘please!’ ”

“Just tell me—why this way—you’re my brother—would have given you—”

“By the Nameless One, are you really that stupid?” Ruval stared at him, and Pol felt the grasp on his leg ease a little. “You have many things that belong to me,” Ruval explained as if to a particularly slow-witted child. “Titles, honors, Princemarch—”

“Don’t kill my father! Spare him—and Meiglan—” Time, he needed time. . . .

“It’s a thought,” Ruval admitted. “Worse than death to him, seeing me as High Prince. But she’d be happy to exchange a puling princeling for a real man. Yes, I might just let them live for a little while. If you beg nicely enough.”

Steeling himself, Pol whispered, “Please.”

Ruval grinned. “Again.”

“Please!” It tasted of acid, but he said the word a second time.

“The sweetest thing an enemy can say!” Ruval reached up to brush the sweat from his brow, chuckling.

Pol twisted his body as fast as he could, slamming his good knee into Ruval’s chest. The breath whooshed out of him and he pitched backward. Pol groaned and tried to stand, ungainly as a newborn foal. He couldn’t. He crawled away from Ruval, staring at the flames encircling their narrow battleground. Hauling in a deep breath and telling himself that his knee must support him or he would indeed die in his own Fire, he lurched through the blaze and went sprawling.

He never knew how long he simply lay there, stunned. He wondered vaguely why no one had come to help him. Didn’t they understand that it was all over? Where were his father, his mother, Meggie, Sionell? Why didn’t they help him?

His hearing returned before his vision. Someone was screaming. He frowned, knowing something was wrong but unable to figure out what. Struggling to his good knee, he turned and beheld himself. The mirror was still ablaze, but the image was perfect. Two of him were outside the flames. Scant wonder no one had come to his aid. Which was really him?

It was a question that pierced him in unexpected ways. But he had no time for it now. Ruval was still alive. He glanced back to the half-circle of pain-ravaged Sunrunners and horrified nobles, finding his father’s face with surprising difficulty. But Rohan was not looking at him. He stared up at the firelit sky. Pol turned, searching, at last feeling the subtle flicker that should have alerted him long before this.

Dragon.

A real one, the color of the body dark and indistinguishable but the underwings shining reddish-gold by the light of the flames. A sire, come down from the Veresch for mating, huge and magnificent and thundering out his rage—and flying straight for them across the fiery sands.

Another scream was nearly lost in the shrieks of panic-stricken horses. They had turned skittish when Fire came, but dragons were something else entirely. Frantic hoofbeats told of their headlong rush for safety. Pol could not look away from the dragon. It was as if the legends were true, and those eyes had speared him from a distance, immobilizing him.

A prickling at the edges of his senses warned him too late. Ruval was at work on the dragonsire. Pol cursed, torn out of his fascination, and wove his own colors into the light blazing from the sky and sand.

Starfire and groundfire, barely controllable as they raged through him, made the sear on his cheek a caress by contrast. He flung his thoughts toward the dragon. Ruval got there first by spells the Star Scroll never mentioned. But this was different from what he had done in early spring. The dragon did not fall helplessly from the sky. Pol saw the great wings fold slightly into a controlled dive, then spread to correct the angle of flight. The talons reached out—for him. He flattened himself to the ground and writhed into the sand for what little protection it could offer. He felt something in his knee tear completely apart and muffled his scream of agony in the sand.

The wind of the creature’s passing brought a gust of heat from the canyon fire. But the talons missed him. He scrambled up onto his good knee and stared skyward, breathing heavily, astounded. No dragon would have been so clumsy in snatching prey—and no dragon would have attempted to make prey of a man. However imperfectly, Ruval must be in possession of the dragon, controlling its flight.

And that made Pol so angry that the Fire-gold night around him turned the crimson of blood.

The dragon cried out, talons ripping at the wind as he fought for flight. His wings spread, folded, beat a desperate drunken rhythm to gain distance. But he could not break free. Compelled, faltering, he swept over the flames that singed his belly and came for Pol again, screaming.

Pol wasn’t even afraid. He was too furious for that, or to feel the torture of his wounds. If Ruval could do this to a dragon, so could he. He had touched dragon colors before. He knew what the fierce, primal minds felt like. He marshaled his strength and a rage that should have crippled him. He lashed out toward the dragonsire that had missed him again and was wheeling upward on angry wings, bellowing his fury to the stars.

It was something like making the link that allowed him to speak with other Sunrunners—only there was nothing delicate or precise about the way his mind slammed into Ruval’s and into the dragon’s. It was questionable which of the three was the more enraged: Ruval at Pol’s survival after the initial attack, Pol at Ruval’s use of the dragon, or the dragon himself at these two puny beings who fought for control over him.

Hues no one had ever seen or named spun in an explosion of color that had the nearby Sunrunners screaming. Pol hung on. He and Ruval battled for the dragon as if it, too, was part of the victor’s spoils. But as they fought, Ruval lost control of his shape-change, Pol’s stolen features fading away to reveal his own.

And suddenly, faced once again by the “true” Ruval and not himself, Pol realized that this was all wrong. He was forgetting everything taught him by his father’s example of wise patience. He was fighting the enemy on the enemy’s own terms. He was
becoming
his enemy: using power for its own sake. And worst of all, he was using the dragon as his tool.

The beast screamed again, circling erratically above the Fire-strewn Desert as if his wings were not entirely his to command. The night spun in conflicting, burning colors, as if three blazing whirlwinds fought above the dunes and filled Rivenrock Canyon with unbearable light. Two of these had nearly merged, were nearly one. Pol was still apart, and knew he was about to lose this battle for possession of the dragon.

Ruval hungered for possession—of land, wealth, power. All would never be enough; for a man like that, there was no such thing as “all.” There was only “more.” He was not even like their grandsire, who had only amused himself with power. Ruval was as Masul had been: an embittered outcast, dedicated to exacting grim payment for perceived wrongs done him. But the pretender had been only a man. Ruval was a sorcerer. If he won this battle, Pol’s would be only the first death.

Andry would be next—the only other person who could oppose him on his terms. Goddess only knew what he would then do to Rohan and Sioned and those Pol loved—and Meggie—

He shifted his mental and emotional stance, deliberately stilling fear that could only distract and harm him. It was the calm his father had taught him to seek at the
Rialla,
a patience that allowed him to hear meanings within meanings. But now he listened to his own mind, his own heart.

Into the place where fury had been he summoned his lifelong awe at the sight of dragons. He called up childhood memories of standing on Stronghold’s ramparts as dragons filled the sky with the wind of their wings. He remembered that first ride into the valley of Dragon’s Rest, how his mother had “spoken” with the dragon she’d named Elisel. He filled himself with dragon wings and colors and voices, his soaring joy at watching them, his delight when they flew in to Dragon’s Rest and partook of the feast he gladly offered. He gloried in their strength and beauty and freedom, and even as the dragonsire swept down in another attack, Pol was smiling. Perhaps it was true that a dragon-sense had been passed down from Zehava to Rohan to him, that his line truly deserved the title of
azhrei;
he only knew that he loved the dragons for reasons beyond himself. He belonged to them as surely as they belonged to Desert skies.