heavy boot stamped at her throat. Missed. His sword crashed down. Missed again. Lia remembered playing this game with Grandion. No Human could be faster than a Dragon. As she rolled across the floor, Ra’aba chased her furiously. Suddenly, she reversed her legs into a scissors throw she had learned while wrestling Hallon, catching Ra’aba across the knees and upper thighs. Her momentum flipped him onto his back. Her Nuyallith sword clinked against his chest. No way through.
For half a second their gazes sparred, for Hualiama straddled the Roc’s torso as she brought her blade down to stab him in the neck.
Ra’aba waved his left hand, and struck with his magic.
Lia gasped, punched by an unseen force. She skidded twenty feet backward on the polished marble flagstones before recovering her balance. Ra’aba struck her again, and again, furious blows of unseen magic. Out between the pillars. Dazed, she tasted blood in her mouth. Wham! Over a wide planter of fireflowers. Hss … a dull explosion burst against her chest. “Unnh!” she cried. Lia crashed against the balcony’s retaining wall. Black occluded her vision for a moment. All she heard was the thudding of her heart inside her aching skull.
Her swift touch to the back of her head brought back a smear of blood.
* * * *
The fungus-face had done quite enough to his girl! The dragonet swooped in with a furious screech, but Ra’aba batted him away with a casual surfeit of magic. Flicker careened across the balcony, fetching up in a thicket of aromatic vines trailing up one of the marble columns. He shook his wings. How could they possibly fight this madman?
Ra’aba stood just a few wing-lengths from Hualiama, facing outward from the balcony as though she no longer mattered. “Look.” He pointed out over the city. His blade was sheathed once more. “They will bring me the King.”
Wincing in evident pain, Lia raised her head.
The dragonet looked, too. Smoke rose from many places in the city, but it was the mayhem surrounding the King’s forces that drew Flicker’s eye. Yulgaz the Brown led the attack, along with half a dozen Green Dragons. Master Jo’el and a handful of monks withstood them, holding the Dragons’ repeated acid attacks at bay with a shield that shimmered like bubbles on a volcanic lake. He scanned the horizon. No Dragons? Why then had he sensed Grandion’s presence when Lia froze for several seconds while shooting arrows over Rallon, and again, just seconds before? If the Tourmaline Dragon was able to help her from afar …
One of the Greens screamed in pain. A six-foot crossbow bolt plugged in his chest. The Green’s Dragonwing smashed into Jo’el’s force, time and time again. The monks buckled and struggled but somehow forced the Dragons back. Just behind them, King Chalcion stomped up and down, screaming orders. Suddenly, Yulgaz drove his talons into the wide cobbled roadway. A hundred feet of Brown Dragon burrowed beneath the ground like a mole. The King’s forces broke into a full retreat, leaving the pocket of monks standing on a deceptively unbroken stretch of road. Yulgaz broached! Rocks and dirt exploded upward in a huge brown fountain, the Brown Dragon’s great jaws snapping and grinding against the monks’ shield. Master Jo’el staggered, struck by a flying rock. The shield collapsed. The Green Dragons hurtled together like hounds fighting for a choice bone, and when the dust settled, there was nothing left. Not even a scrap of a monk’s robe.
A low sob escaped Lia’s clenched teeth.
“You see, my victory is inevitable, said Ra’aba. “I’ve planned for every eventuality.”
Hualiama groaned longer and lower, her face twisted in the Human expression of grief. She folded in on herself, holding her stomach as though gutted like a hunted lemur. Flicker began to hang his head, his fires dampened in sorrow at the great Master’s demise, when he saw her countenance change. Strength from grief. He remembered now. Every one of his scales prickled in anticipation.
The Human girl transformed before his eyes. Flicker thought to see hatred. He saw sorrow. He thought to see weeping, but instead Lia’s eyes widened, swirls of smoke gathering in their orbs as though ignited from within. He expected dark Dragon fire, but instead, the magical fire that poured forth from her soul was so pure and white, it hurt his eyes to look upon. It was adamantine purpose. Obligation. Necessity. A manifestation of the fibre of her will brought into beautiful being, the light coalesced in the blades lifting