Sworn To Secrecy: Courtlight #4 (25 page)

As they flew over the city, Ciardis was surprised to see the sky darkening with ominous clouds. Not the kind that predict heavy rains, but the ones that flashed and flared with clouds of purple and midnight blue full of thunder and lightning. The winds picked up and slammed into them above the city. In Thanar’s arms she felt the buffet of harsh winds tangling her hair, ice scraping her skin, and the feel of Thanar’s muscles bunching as he clutched at her desperately, trying to keep ahold of her and stay flying high.

“What’s going on?” she yelled into his ear. She tried turning to face forward and see what was in front of them but the wind and ice was too strong. They stung her eyes and forced them closed. She couldn’t imagine how Thanar was handling it. Determined not to bury her face in his shoulder and wish away her fears, she faced backwards, looking past his broad black wings to what lay behind them.

She almost wished she hadn’t. Because what she saw almost made her swallow her tongue down her throat in fear.

She screamed in his ear. “Thanar! Trouble!”

“What kind?” he snapped back.

“The fire-breathing dragon kind!”

He turned his head slightly in the air, too laden down by her weight while he fought the fierce winds to turn his full body. What he saw made him start cursing enough to set the air on fire in three languages.

“Hang on,” he snapped at her.

“To what?” she screamed as he suddenly dropped through the air.

Desperately she clung to his neck and prayed to the seven gods to deliver them from this evil. Because the dragon wasn’t just passing by. When Thanar dropped, so did he. The great horned beast, black of scale and fiery of eyes, smiled with rows of razor-sharp teeth as he gained airspeed on them with a leisurely pursuit. The dragon didn’t even look like he was breaking a sweat. If dragons could sweat at all.

Not that Ciardis was such a connoisseur of dragon physique. It could have been female for all she knew. The only thing she could say with definite certainty was that it didn’t look friendly and it certainly wasn’t Raisa.

“This isn’t working,” Ciardis screamed to Thanar. “He’s gaining on us.”

Thanar kept falling in the air. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Does it involve us bashing into a building at top speed? Because it looks like that’s what going to happen more or less,” she said. By this time Ciardis had her nails digging into Thanar’s topless shoulders, and she was fairly certain it would leave a mark if they survived.

With an enormous twist of his body, Thanar jerked around so that they were facing the dragon as they fell. She couldn’t help but turn to face death as well. Cradled in his arms, she turned her face so that her cheek rested on his neck. All she could see was the vertical flutter of his wings in the air beside them and the giant maw of an oncoming dragon above them.

The dragon let a small whiff of flame flare down toward them. He was still hundreds of feet away, so it was more the promise of fire to come than an actual threat.

Still, Thanar snapped, “Take cover.”

She buried her face into his neck with her head under his jaw, and she felt him speak before she heard the words. The velocity of the fall was too much for her turn up her head, so she listened. Ciardis listened as Thanar’s voice became deep and his power became strong; he called on his magic, the darkness of his race, to combat his enemy.

But to her surprise, it wasn’t the words that he spoke from his mouth that reverberated within her, but the essence of the thoughts he spoke. Thanar began to physically vibrate like a living specter. His body shook with one pulse and they no longer flew, but they hovered as they watched the pursuing beast come upon them. And then she felt his arms move. Instead of tightening around her, they loosened. Freeing her from their grip.

She felt weightless and she screamed, because she knew she was about to die. She wasn’t sure if the Daemoni prince was sacrificing her for his own good or freeing her to give her the chance to fall to freedom as he fought the dragon. But it didn’t matter. Because she’d either be snapped in half in the air by the dragon’s maw or crushed to death in her fall.

She had a second to wonder if she should close her eyes. Instantly she did. But then she wondered why—why shouldn’t she stare death in the face and her killer in the eyes? She opened them and stared in wonder. Thanar was hovering below her with wings outstretched as if he reclined on a bed and she was merely on top of him. Why hadn’t she seen Thanar’s form streaking past her in flight? Inches separated their faces, wind tangled their hair, and their breaths mingled in the frosty air.

“Ready to kill a dragon, Golden Eyes?” Teasing laughter echoed in Thanar’s voice as confidence lit his beautiful dark eyes.

Her lips twitched as she fought to answer him. What could she say? She couldn’t explain how they lay motionless in the clouds as if gravity and the force of the wind were immaterial to their existence. All that she knew in that moment was that she could trust him—trust him with her life, trust him to find this solution.

“Yes,” Ciardis Weathervane answered as the winds snapped around them.

A heart-stopping smile appeared on Thanar’s face. And then he reached forward and grabbed her hands.

“Say it with me,” he said softly as he looked behind her at their oncoming foe.

“Say what with you?” she said, her breath misting in the air.

“Say, ‘It’s time to die.’”

She shook her head and her riotous chestnut curls bounced in the air above her. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ll see,” was all he said as he tightened his grip on her hands and pulled her down to him in one swift movement. Their lips locked and Ciardis’s world exploded.

Thanar’s power enveloped hers. He didn’t use her Weathervane gifts in the traditional sense. Instead, he became her. Their minds linked, their sense of touch became one, their passions ignited, and she felt as he did when he spoke the words in his mind. Her entire body reverberated as his did with a single sentence, a single thought, a single goal:
It’s time to die.
Their thoughts became one with a magic that hadn’t been seen in Algardis since the dawn of the great Initiate Wars.

Their passion became emotions, their emotions became thoughts, their thoughts became symbols, and, in the way of the daemoni race, their symbols became sigils.

Their minds and bodies merged in the air. Through his open eyes she saw. She saw the darkness of the arcane sigil rise above, written in the sky in lines of black outlined in the Weathervane power of gold.

And not a moment too soon. Because the dragon had reached them. Instead of killing the two before him, the magic of their union surrounded him. The sigil grew to immense boundaries. So large that it dwarfed the dragon in the sky as it realized its mistake too late, the sigil morphed and wrapped around the dragon’s torso in a wide net that looped and crisscrossed every inch of it’s body.

The dragon managed one scream of horror as the powerful sigil lines of thrumming black and gold bound its wings and cut off its flight. It plummeted just as Thanar and Ciardis had moments before. But its plummet was uncalculated and unchecked.

She didn’t fear the dragon’s death. She feared the destruction of people and buildings below. Before her horrified thoughts could overtake their bond, Thanar hushed her in their mind’s eye.

Watch
, he whispered to her.

As she watched through his eyes, the lines of power wrapped around the dragon’s body, pulsed once, pulsed twice, and glowed with a blast of power. The dragon was afire. But not with its own power or smoky intent, but with the orange and red sunset of a molten explosion.

In satisfaction, Ciardis felt Thanar unseal his lips from hers. He whispered aloud to her, “The net of Sauras—the only fire that can kill a dragon.”

And then they were falling again but in unison and content, almost drunk, with the power that raged within them. Ciardis was silent. Her head buried in his shirt until they touched land. Unsteady but unwilling to stay hidden in his arms, she forced herself to take steps back. She kept stepping back until she could see around them and the building on which they stood.

Breathing heavily from the passion of the death-defying stunt and the kiss, she said, “What just happened?”

He gave her a lazy smile. “Something that hasn’t happened in centuries. We released the net of Sauras. A powerful arcane spell that can only be created between two individuals in perfect unity.”

She looked at him, breathing heavily.

“We’re not in perfect unity.”

“You go on thinking that, sweetheart.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t distill the heavy feeling of their combined powers. “What have you done to me?”

“Nothing that you haven’t already experienced before with Sebastian.”

She shot him a dark glance. “You think you’re equal to the love of my life now? It was just a kiss.”

“I wasn’t talking about the kiss, Golden Eyes,” he said languidly.

“Then what?” she said in confusion.

“But now that you mention it,” he said with a devilish smile, “I will give you something you’ve never experienced with that human prince of yours.”

Before she could process his words, he moved forward with the speed of his race, rivaling a chimera’s rapid pace.

Taking her face into his hands, he kissed her again. Long, thorough, delicious, and devilish rolled into one. As their mouths warred, she felt the pain of betrayal in her heart. She had no choice about the first kiss, but she did about this one. With power that she never knew she had, she gripped his chest and threw him back.

She watched as he fell back not just a few steps, as she had expected, but was thrown back almost four feet, where he landed on his bum with a laugh.

“Now you see, Golden Eyes?”

Staring at him in befuddlement where he lay laughing, she realized slowly that something was wrong with her hands. Shaking she brought them up to her face and stared. There was no silver orb in her palm. Instead, each hand was outlined in a bright aura of gold.

“What? What is
this.
” she said.

Sitting up, he said smugly, “It’s your power. Your magic has absorbed the Cold Ones elemental gift and unlocked new Weathervane powers.”

“My gifts were
already
unlocked,” she shrieked as she continued to stare at the golden aura that pulsed through her hand.

“That, Ciardis,” he said seriously, “was merely a taste of what you can do. Back during the wars, Weathervanes were among the most powerful creatures to inhabit this empire. Now you’ll truly see what is that you can accomplish.”

She shook her head. “How do you know?”

“Because I was there.”

She growled in frustration. “How do I turn it off then?”

“Relax,” he said. “It’s reacting to your fear, your passion, and the threat you felt to your life. Let the power soak back into your core until you need it.”

She felt true fear, fear of the unknown, and the uncertainty of new gifts. She’d just gotten used to her old ones, damn it! And she knew he saw the fear in her eyes, because he said soothingly, “Just breathe in and breathe out. Slowly. That’s it.”

And just like he said, the visible aura surrounding her hands diminished and died.

Backing up hastily, she turned around and stuck her hands under her arms. “That’s enough of that.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve had enough of this. Enough of being special. I was special enough as it is before you fiddled with my magic. Without my permission I’ll add.”

Then a thought occurred to her and she turned back to him quickly. “Can my mother do this as well?”

“Most likely not.”

“Good.”

“Why?”

Fear surfaced again in her eyes. “Because if she did, I’m not so sure she’d stop at just eliminating the threats to her life.”

He looked at her with his mouth set in a grim line. There was nothing else to say.

“A
re we where we were supposed to be?”

He gave a grudging nod. “The very building.”

“Then let’s go down and see, shall we?”

They turned and walked across the flat rooftop—a rarity in Sandrin, but a normal occurrence in the weaver’s distract. A door lay nearby—their entrance to the lower floors. Ten feet away from the entrance, Thanar stopped and held out a hand at Ciardis’s waist to halt her.

“Who’s there?” he demanded.

She peered into the darkness of the doorway, but saw nothing but shifting shadows.

Out stepped a woman in the floor-length golden robes of a mage. It wasn’t until her face was revealed in the light that Ciardis let out a gasp of mingled surprise and relief.

Ambassador Raisa stood staring at them with an unreadable expression on her face.

Thanar stiffened perceptibly and gathered his magic.

“No,” shouted Ciardis, knowing instinctively what he was about to do.

Raisa smiled, one of teeth bared in challenge rather than welcome.

“You think you could take me so easily, daemoni prince? I am a dragon
queen
.”

“I could try.”

“No one’s taking anyone,” snapped Ciardis. “You must have seen the black dragon, Raisa. It attacked us with no provocation. We had no choice; we had to defend ourselves.”

“That dragon was from my clutch.”

Ciardis paled. The tone was deadly. Raisa might as well have said the male dragon was her brother.

No, he wasn’t her brother
, Thanar whispered in her mind
. Queen dragons birth dozens of dragonlets in a litter. Then they throw them together in a clutch.

I thought they had an empress. Are you saying she’s their queen?

No,
said Thanar in exasperation.
What are they teaching children these days? Being a queen only refers to her ability to breed. Queen dragons can clutch multiple litters. All dragons, male and female, are ruled over by one empress who is always a potential queen.

Got it.

And,
scoffed Thanar,
just because they’re raised in the same clutch means nothing. He was probably no more her brother than I am yours.