Death would have been a kindness.
Everything hurt. Every inch of skin, every fiber of muscle, every sliver of bone. Caius groaned, and that hurt too, his vocal cords stripped raw by his own screaming. Something hard abraded his cheek as he tried to turn his head. Something hard and solid, pockmarked and uneven. Like stone.
That was new.
He opened his eyes and the world shifted around him. The view was the same, but different. Same rounded cavern walls. Same lonely little door at the end of a narrow stone bridge. Same unrelieved monotony. But he looked at it all now from the vantage point of the floor. Days had passed since the iron shackles had locked around his wrists and he’d been strung up like a freshly butchered pig. He felt like a freshly butchered pig. The welts along his back that had started to heal widened with every movement, however minuscule, and his inflamed skin was feverishly hot compared to the cool stone beneath him.
Voices, familiar ones, drifted to him. With great difficulty, he turned his head toward them, noting the fractured lines of a broken circle in the stone. The glyph. It had been shattered. Thoroughly.
When he saw his friends, he would have wept had there been any tears left in him, had his sister not wrung him dry.
Hair the gleaming color of polished steel. A shock of vibrant feathers in a dozen different hues. Hair the rich brown of dark chocolate pulled back in a messy ponytail.
They had come. They had come for him.
Dorian. Jasper. Echo.
And a dragon.
Caius fought to find his voice, but it rattled around in his throat, scratching at its tender walls.
The dragon – oh, what a marvelous beast it was, with its alabaster scales and the soft golden tinge of its wings – dove toward Echo, who faced it with all the bravery of a knight out of a fairy tale. But unlike a knight, Echo was just a girl. Unarmed and unarmored. She didn’t stand a chance.
With an earth-splitting roar, the dragon gnashed its teeth at Echo. A warning perhaps, or a promise. Wind gusted over Caius with each flap of the thing’s powerful wings, abrading his broken skin. Fire blossomed in Echo’s open palms like the first blooms of spring, pure white and blackest black dancing against her skin.
Stupid, Caius chastised himself. Echo didn’t need a weapon. She was the weapon.
Dorian’s sword was drawn, but Caius saw the reluctance in his stance. He didn’t want to fight the dragon. To the Drakharin, dragons were sacred. They were gods, on this earth but not of it. To harm a dragon was the gravest sin among their people, the highest and most unpardonable form of blasphemy. One who raised a weapon to a dragon would never find peace in the realms beyond this mortal life. They would be damned.
“Stop,” he tried to say, his voice a shattered whisper.
They didn’t hear him. Fire arced from Echo’s hands, twirling through the air like ribbons of light and shadow. The dragon retreated from the flames, its milky eyes squinting against the onslaught of light.
Caius had heard the dragon shifting among the rocks as he’d hung there. There had been a soft quality to those movements, a mindless rustling, like a person in the throes of restless sleep. Caius had convinced himself he’d imagined the noise, that his desperate mind had concocted a creature out of shadows to keep him company so that he wouldn’t die alone, but the dragon was beyond his wildest imaginings.
It would be a travesty to kill it. It had not done Caius harm; it would be poor recompense for his companions to cause it grievous injury.
“Stop,” he said again, louder this time as his voice returned to him, shaken from its tortured slumber.
Echo’s head snapped toward him, her brown eyes wide as she watched him struggle to stand. Her attention was only off the dragon for the barest of moments, but it was enough. The creature saw an opening and took it, dropping its clawed feet to the ground and lunging at her, jaws wide and dripping with saliva. Jasper barreled into Echo and they both went sprawling, missing the dragon’s dagger-sharp teeth by inches.
A hand wrapped around Caius’s forearm and helped him to his feet.
“My prince,” Dorian said. The words were spoken in formal Drakhar, but Dorian’s tone was chipped at the edges with emotion.
“My friend,” Caius replied, letting his weight fall on Dorian. “There’s a dragon,” he added rather dumbly.
“Indeed.”
“We can’t kill it.”
“No,” Dorian agreed. “That would be a crime.”
Caius tried to stand on his own, but gravity reminded him what a bad idea that was. He swayed back against Dorian’s chest. “I have an idea. But I have to do it alone.” He pushed away from Dorian again, unsteady on his feet but mostly upright.
“Drakhanis,” Caius said. The dragon’s head swiveled toward him, its nostrils flaring as it sniffed the air. Perhaps it recognized Caius’s scent – they had shared space for gods knew how many days – or perhaps it simply sensed the frailty of his abused body and didn’t mark him as a threat. But either way, it did not attack. It cocked its head to one side, looking, a bit ridiculously, like a curious dog.
A single tentative step took Caius toward the beast. Then another. And another. Echo shouted his name, but Caius had eyes only for the dragon. He could smell its foul breath – a combination of burnt meat and brimstone – even from a distance.
The cavern was dark, but Caius could just make out the markings on the dragon’s long body: mottled white-gold scales that reminded him somewhat of a spotted leopard. When its wings spread and lazily fanned the air, he noticed the underside was streaked with a dark pattern like the wings of a moth.
Caius approached the beast slowly, arms at his sides, his hands open to reveal that he was unarmed.
“I do not wish to harm you,” Caius said in Drakhar. The tongue of the dragon, as it was known among his people. He prayed that the term was more than just a pretty phrase. The stories his tutors and governesses had told him in childhood burned fresh in his memory. All those tales emphasized that dragons admired strength and cunning and skill, but they demanded respect. Caius dropped to one knee and brought one fist up to his heart, a Drakharin sign of the utmost obeisance. Though every instinct in him screamed against it, he lowered his gaze deferentially. “I am your humble servant.”
The others held their breath, a frozen audience, utterly silent. Not a single soul dared shatter the moment. Not even Echo.
With his gaze still fixed on the ground in front of him, Caius could not see the dragon step forward, but he felt it. The earth trembled with the force of its mass as it came forward in a four-legged crouch. It let loose an odiferous breath, huffing for all the world like a dog. A very large, very deadly dog.
Caius dared not raise his eyes, not even when he felt each lumbering step the creature took. Pebbles rumbled loose from the rocky ground, skittering away as if fleeing in terror. The dragon stopped when it was mere feet from Caius. Air gusted over him as the beast scented the area around him. Fat droplets of pinkish saliva dripped from the creature’s bloodied maw. Caius tried very hard not to think of where – or whom – that gore had come from. He knew that several Firedrakes had accompanied Tanith when she’d deposited him here; he wasn’t certain they’d all made it out alive. It would have been like her to offer one of her own as a sacrifice to the beast she’d left to watch her brother.
It inched closer, if something of such massive size could be said to inch.
Caius’s heart hammered in his chest, beating out a staccato rhythm that screamed its desire to run far, far away.
But Caius held his ground, eyes still cast down and fixed on the loose pebbles that might very well be the last thing he ever saw. Forepaws with wickedly sharp talons tipped red with drying blood came into his range of sight.
A wet, hot breath gusted over the top of Caius’s head, ruffling his hair. Something slightly damp snuffled at his head. A snout, he realized. The dragon was scenting him.
His skin prickled into goose bumps, but he allowed the inspection. Up close, the beast’s breath made Caius’s eyes water. He took shallow breaths through his mouth, which had gone frightfully dry.
Satisfied, the dragon stepped back and the claws disappeared from Caius’s sight. With slow, incremental movements, Caius raised his eyes enough to see the creature. It sank gracefully to its knees in front of him, bending its enormous body forward in a gesture that looked remarkably like a bow. Its wings draped across the ground like a heavy blanket, spread as wide as the dragon was tall. It dipped its head low, vertical eyelids sliding closed for a moment. When its eyes opened, they were peering at Caius in a way that made him think the dragon was not nearly as blind as it appeared.
Caius met its milky, pearlescent gaze, unafraid.
With exaggerated slowness, he stood. Those unsettling eyes tracked his movements. He raised a hand toward the beast’s head. When it didn’t withdraw, he rested his palm against the ridge of its brow. The scales were warm to the touch, like the embers of a forgotten fire. He’d expected the texture to be rough, but the dragon’s scales were as smooth as his own. The creature twitched, bumping its head against Caius’s palm as if asking to be stroked. Caius slid his hand over its head, tracing the ridges of its skull. Its eyes drifted shut, and it huffed out a satisfied breath.
“It won’t harm us,” Caius said, petting the dragon’s head. A faint rumbling, almost like the satisfied purr of a cat, bubbled up from deep within its chest. As the adrenaline rush dwindled, darkness began to creep in at the edges of Caius’s vision. His wounds ached with renewed vigor, as if affronted that he had dared to ignore them for just a few moments. He wouldn’t last long. Not with blood loss and hunger and dehydration ravaging him from within.
“As kenan, nes kenan,” Dorian said.
Come in peace, leave in peace. It was an old Drakhar saying, one uttered both upon meeting and parting. Their people had an affinity for war, and valued strength above all other qualities, but they recognized peace even if they didn’t always treat it as an ideal worth striving for.
“Holy shit,” Echo breathed. “You’re like Snow White, but with dragons.”
Caius tried to summon a witty retort – he was no slumbering princess in need of rescuing, except perhaps he was – but the shadows overwhelmed him and his body succumbed to the blissful oblivion of darkness.