its head to the crescent moon. Great wings stretched, blotting out the light of the stars. Mora could hardly breathe. Dust filled her mouth.
With a tiny cry she leapt over the sleeping prince, standing broadly across his body. “Stop,” she cried, “you’ll crush him!”
A massive, stony arm crashed down beside her, diamond claws digging into the mountain like the mountain was soft flesh. Banna Mora, said the dragon in a voice as huge as the sky, so that her name pushed at her from every direction. I ask that you welcome me, Banna Mora.
“What?” Mora wished for a sword in her hand, but they’d brought no weapons on this pilgrimage. She gripped her bare hands into fists. She yelled, to make certain her own measly voice could reach the dragon’s ear so high above. “You are welcome! If that is what you want!”
What do you want, Banna Mora of Aremoria and Innis Lear?
Moonlight edged the dragon in silver, glinting off polished garnet scales and veins of bright copper.
She shook her head. She did not know what she wanted. Half the mountainside was gone, transformed into this dragon before her, as if it had been sleeping, had been curled so long against the earth that it became part of it—and Mora did not know what she wanted!
The dragon reared onto its hind legs and turned its massive, long head to put one eye toward her; that eye was a swirl of orange-and-pink fire, the inner landscape of a mountain’s hot heart. Mora felt it as her own heart flared to life.
What do you want, Banna Mora? the dragon intoned again. Its mouth opened and black teeth shone sharp and tall as her, the tongue a flicker of living moonlight.
“I don’t know!” she yelled.
You know.
She shook her head, gasping for breath, and put her heel tighter against unconscious Rowan, to be sure he remained, to ground herself.
All dragons know what they want, the dragon said.
“I’m a woman, not a …”
The air shook with heat as the dragon laughed.
Mora laughed, too, stunned and disbelieving. Her chest ached, and over her heart the Blood and the Sea blazed.
When your whole world burns, you must learn to breathe fire.
“How? Tell me how!”
You are a dragon, Banna Mora.
She flung out her arms, let her head fall back and her eyes close.
Mora breathed deep and sighed: her breath was hot. This freezing island could not cool her, nor tame her—the wind was her breath and the earth her bones, the rootwaters her blood. And a piece of her was a piece of Aremoria, too. This island had been sheared away from its own body centuries ago, an amputation, a wild, broken thing, raging apart from itself.
Just as Banna Mora was in pieces.
“That is what I want,” she said softly. Then, louder she screamed, “I want to be whole again!”
With a stroke of powerful wings, the dragon lifted off the mountain, gusting wind at her. Mora braced, bared her teeth, and did not close her eyes as the dragon flew up and up into the stars. It radiated heat and fire, rippling the air in thick waves, and she caught it all, tasting it on her tongue, swallowing it down her gullet into a smoldering mass inside her belly; a fire for herself to call on. It was a seed of power.
Banna Mora laughed in the crystalline night.
“Mora. Mora!”
Her name woke her.
Rowan bent over her, hands cold on her face; she was so very hot, feverish even, but Mora laughed again.
The world was the same. The mountain whole and unmoved beneath her, its gray, rocky skirts falling away to either side, and silvering dawn shadows pulled from the east where the sun smiled against the horizon.
Mora sat, and she stared at Rowan’s concerned face, and brushed wisps of white-gold hair back behind his ears. There was the charm she’d knotted in. She grasped it, then dug her fingers deep into his hair, pulling at his scalp. Rowan Lear gasped, and Mora said, “I have something to show you. Untie my collar, Rowan, and bare my skin.”
He obeyed with graceful hands, holding her gaze determinedly. His fingers brushed her collarbone, and the expanse of her breast, exploring along the length of chain until he found the leather pouch. And he knew that was what she needed: for if she was the island, he was her wizard.
With her hands still gripping his skull, twined in his hair, Mora murmured, “Take out the ring.”
Rowan did, and he cupped the Blood and