Master of Dragons (25 page)

“The magic beats
in your heart, Ven,” Marcus told him. “It pulses through your veins. It mixes
with the air in your lungs and throbs in your fingertips. It sparkles in the
sunlight like the scales on your legs.”

Ven closed his
eyes and clenched his fists. His body shuddered. The battle that raged inside
him was as desperate as the battle he was waging for his life. For they were
both the same.

“Human!” called
Lysira. “Marcus! You can’t fight Grald. Go back inside your room! Lock yourself
up safe!”

Now it was Marcus
who hesitated. He didn’t want to be trapped in another horrible dream. One from
which he might never escape.

“Melisande’s
sons—both her sons—will avenge her,” said Marcus.

Gripping his
courage in his empty sword hand, Marcus left Ven’s mind and flung himself
headlong into Grald’s.

The dragon had
hold of Ven’s ankle, the same place where, when Ven was a child, a bulldog had
bitten into the scaled flesh. Draconas had saved Ven, then, but Draconas wasn’t
here to save him now. Ven had to save himself. He stared at the scaled leg, the
leg he had stared at with loathing every day of his life since the day he’d
first realized that he was different.

He had a choice.
He could die—worse than die—writhing helpless in the grip of the father who had
made him what he was.

Or he could fight.
And make him pay.

Ven looked up at
Grald, at the leering face bending over him, at the wings starting to spread
wide, filling the darkness. The old catechism that Bellona had made him recite
on his birthday came back to him.

“
What is your
name?
”

“
Ven.
”

“
Your true
name.
”

“
Vengeance.
”

The magic roiled
and bubbled and surged up from some pit deep inside him. The magic seethed and
burned and twisted. Raw and unformed, mingled with pent-up rage, the magic
spewed from Ven’s mouth. He vomited fire and spit acid. The fire seared Grald’s
eyes, and the acid sprayed over the claws that held Ven’s leg. The dragon
roared and reared back his head. Scales bubbled in the acid, his eyes burned.
Grald snatched his claw away.

Ven rose to his
feet. He reached out to the past and seized hold of the power. He took hold of
every sneer, every averted glance, every pitying gaze. He seized his mother’s
pain, Bellona’s twisted love, Evelina’s mockery. He grabbed his own fury and
his siblings’ pride, and he bundled all of it into a crackling, blazing ball.
He hurled that ball with all his strength at his father.

The magic struck
the dragon full in the chest and sent him crashing back against a solid stone
wall. The building shook, the ground trembled. Ven collapsed.

His strength
flowed from him like blood from a pierced heart. He’d given it all, everything,
nothing was left. He was weak and helpless as the squalling babe lying
alongside his twin, lying in his mother’s blood, except that now he lay in the
blood of his father.

It seemed to Grald
that he’d been struck by the sun.

The molten fire
that had been conjured of Ven’s very soul smote the dragon full in the chest.
The magic melted the armorlike scales, seared through to the flesh, burned away
the flesh to attack the bone and pulsing organs beneath. The magic splashed
onto Grald’s eyes and head, blinding him, and sprayed over his wings, which
were yet emerging, causing holes to open where the fiery blobs hit the fragile
membrane. What human flesh still remained on the dragon dissolved, bubbling
horribly, like fat on a hot skillet.

The full impact of
the blow fell on the dragon’s breastbone, right over the heart, jolting it out
of its centuries-old rhythm. The dragon’s heart lurched and thumped wildly,
erratically. Grald could not catch his breath. Air rattled and whistled in his
chest. Looking down with his half-blind eyes, he saw shattered bone and a mass
of charred and bleeding flesh.

Grald was in
unbearable pain. He was dying. Slain by the son. Slain by the mother.

Vengeance. Grald
has always known Ven’s name and been mightily amused by it.

“Not now!” the
dragon raged, staggering. “Not yet!”

His son’s living
heart. It would keep him alive.

Grald lurched
toward Ven, who lay unconscious on the floor. Grald’s own heart hammered and
shook. He was finding it increasingly difficult to draw a breath. He fixed all
his concentration on his son. Lunging forward with a claw that yet had the
strength to rip open Ven’s human chest, he bent to pluck out his heart.

A human blocked
his way. Grald struggled to see through the smoke that was drifting from the
fire of the magic into his mind.

The prince. The
brother. He stood over Ven’s body, blocking the way.

The sons of
Melisande.

Human flesh and
bone. Fragile and soft.

Grald swiped his
claw at the prince, intending to smash the puny frame to bloody pulp, cleave
him open, cast him to one side, then get at his prey.

The dragon’s claw
passed through air, whistled through darkness, touched nothing.

The dragon’s heart
thudded and began to slow. Grald toppled to the floor, landing with a thud that
cracked stone walls and sent tremors through the ground. The dragon never knew
he had fallen over. He stared at the human, who wavered in his sight, and he
kept staring into death and beyond.

THE DRAGON’S
AGONIZED RAGE BURST AGAINST MARCUS, SEEMING to boil his blood. And then the
darkness of death began to rush in like a rolling tide, swallowing up the rage,
thundering down on Marcus, crashing, churning, and crushing.

“Run!” Lysira
warned him. “Don’t get caught inside Grald’s mind!”

Marcus fled the
dragon’s mind. He stood, shivering, in his little room, and watched Grald die.

“Ven?” Marcus
called.

There was no
answer. His brother’s mind was empty, the colors drained. He too was dying.

If Marcus had been
there, physically present, he could have saved his brother. But Marcus was far
away, with a river between them. And he was running out of time.

“Lysira!” he
cried.

“Let him go,” the
young female dragon said to him, and she sounded shaken. “He should never have
been born. Neither he nor the others.”

“Others?” Marcus
cried, grasping hold of that word. “What others?”

The dragon shut
her mind and he could not find a way back in.

Desperate,
searching for help, Marcus ran about the streets of dragonkind, racing from one
mind to another, battering on doors, hammering on windows, pleading for
someone—anyone—to open up to him.

He carried the
image of Grald holding Ven’s bleeding, beating heart in his blood-stained claw
and thrust that image into every mind he could find. Colors swirled around him,
colors that had no name in the human vocabulary. If they existed at all in
human vision, they were fleeting, transitory. Colors so beautiful his heart
ached to bursting at the sight. Colors so hideous and horrifying that his soul
shrank away from them.

“You can’t let him
die!” Marcus cried. “He is your child!”

But the dragons
saw it differently. They wanted Ven to die. If he died, so did their guilt.

Raging, Marcus
kicked at the doors and bashed his fist into the windows and, suddenly, one
door opened so fast that he was caught by surprise and nearly tumbled over the
threshold.

“Who are you?”

A voice. Words.
Spoken words. A voice like his voice speaking words like his words. A human
voice, yet with something of the dragon in it, for he saw it spangled with
silver and radiating shining light.

“Who are you?”
Marcus countered, dazzled by the brilliance.

“I am Sorrow, Ven’s
sister—part human, part dragon.”

Marcus could see
her now. The light reflected off scales and shone on her long hair.

“I am Ven’s
brother,” Marcus replied, awed.

“Impossible. You
are human,” said the sister scornfully.

“I don’t have time
to explain. Ven is in dire peril. Are you in Dragonkeep? Can you go to him?”

“That picture you
showed me, of the dragon trying to kill him—”

“That image is
from the dragon’s own mind. Ven fought for his life and now the dragon is dead
and Ven is dying ...”

“Dead? The dragon
is dead? My father is dead?” Sorrow was appalled.

“He tried to kill
Ven,” Marcus returned. “Ven had no choice—”

“I don’t believe
you!” the sister cried in rage. “Why? Why would our father kill his own son?
Ven is to be our leader.”

“The dragon meant
to take Ven’s body. As I showed you. We don’t have time for this!”

“You care about
Ven, don’t you?” Sorrow sounded puzzled.

“He’s my brother,”
Marcus said. “And he’s your brother, too. You have to help him.”

“He killed our
father . . .” said the sister slowly.

Marcus would have
liked to have grabbed her and shaken her. “Look!” he said angrily and he held
up the image to her mind.

The sister looked.
She saw the human she had known as Grald in the tomb, the gaping hole where the
heart had been torn from the chest, the man’s eyes wide in death. She saw the
dragon, half in, half out of human flesh. Still, she wasn’t convinced.

“I don’t believe
that our father would take a human body. That he would become one of you. Why
would he?”

“To enslave us,
rule us, conquer us—” Marcus paused.

He heard the
sounds of wings beating and the hissing intake of breath. A shadow passed over
him, chilling him. The shadow glided over him again, larger, darker.

Lysira’s colors
flooded Marcus’s brain.

“Human! Maristara
is coming. The dragon ruler of Seth. She knows something has happened to Grald,
and she is on her way to investigate. You have to leave. Now! Go back to your
little room and shut and bolt the door. No more drunken reveling.”

“If the dragon
finds Ven, she’ll kill him,” Marcus argued. “She will finish what Grald
started!”

“There will be no
need for her to kill the dragon’s son. He will be dead by the time she arrives.”
Lysira returned. “Now, go! Quickly! Before she catches you!”

Marcus stepped
into his little room, but he did not close the door.

“The next time you
see Ven,” he said to Sorrow. “He won’t be Ven. He’ll be the dragon. Ven will by
lying in that tomb—”

The shadow of the
wings covered him. He cast one last, pleading look at Sorrow and then slammed
shut the door.

Ven lay stretched
out, his body relaxed, in his cave in the forest. A sliver of twilight, about
to be extinguished by night, trickled into the cavern’s entrance through the
heavy foliage of the trees that surrounded the cave. Ven heard Bellona’s voice
calling him, but he didn’t move. She had no hold on him now. None of them did.

He heard the flap
of dragon wings outside the cave, but that didn’t matter. When the dragon
arrived, he would be gone.

The little girl
walked into the cave. She squatted down on her haunches beside him, peered into
his face.

“Go away,” said
Ven wearily. “I did what you wanted. I did what they all wanted.”

“So now you’re
going to give up and die, is that it?”

“What do you care?”

“And what about
Marcus? You asked him for help and he gave it. He and his kingdom are in
danger.”

“That’s his
problem,” Ven returned. “He has two human legs and a pretty human face. Someone
will help him—”

“You saw the army
of dragon warriors. You know that your brother and his people cannot win
against them.”

“So will it make
my brother feel better if I’m standing there by his side, ready to die with
him?” Ven asked, annoyed.

“I’m not asking
you to die for him, Ven,” said Draconas, leaning close. “I’m asking you to
live. In the kingdom of Seth, your mother’s kingdom, there are people who know
how to fight this kind of war. People who have been fighting dragons for
centuries. They’ve been fighting for all the wrong reasons, but that doesn’t
matter. Go to them, Ven. Tell them the truth. You can enter safely now.
Maristara is away.”

Ven smiled. “Good
plan, Draconas. But it’s wishful thinking. I’m dying and you know it. And you
can’t save me. Not this time.”

“Ven—” called
Draconas.

Ven closed his
eyes and refused to open them, and eventually the little girl went away.

“Ven ...” a voice
spoke his name. Bellona was there. In all these years, she’d never found his
cave. She was there now. Stern and unsmiling, she regarded him in silence. But
he knew that he’d pleased her. For the first and probably only time in his life,
he’d pleased her. Bellona gave him a brief nod and then she was gone, and Ven
was alone.

He wasn’t afraid.

He wasn’t
anything.

Ven let himself
sink into the darkness. He let the darkness carry him along, as the river had
taken Bellona’s body to the sea.

Sorrow stared into
the afterimage left behind by the human, Marcus. She pondered his words,
considered what to do. She rose from her bed and went to the chamber next to
hers. She sneaked inside, moving softly, but her brother’s senses were acute.
Lucien’s slit eyes were already open.

“I heard you
talking in your sleep,” he said.

“I wasn’t asleep,”
said Sorrow.

“Then who was
here? Who were you talking to?” He looked closely at her face, which glimmered
white in the darkness, and he rose from his bed. “What is it, Sorrow? What’s
wrong?”

Lucien was the
most dragon of all the siblings. He had dragon arms and claws, dragon legs and
feet. His torso was human flesh and bone, with a smattering of scales across
his shoulders that extended up the back of his neck and over his head. His face
was human. The eyes were slit eyes, like those of a reptile. He was quick and
he was strong. The nearest in age to Sorrow, he was her confidant, her
companion.