of stones. Nothing but dust, and ash, and death. A few hills and cliffs broke up the landscape, and the corpses of towns were scattered about, their unburned fragments gleaming white in the sun.
In the distance, a mountain loomed. Aurora saw a flicker of movement around the summit, like a dragon was circling, but perhaps that was her imagination. Soon, she would be there herself.
The journey would take about two days by Lucas’s reckoning. They planned to walk for most of the afternoon, until they met another wide, slow-moving river. Then they would follow the river north, sticking close to the bank, until they reached the point where it swerved southwest. North of this river, Lucas said, was dragon territory. The dragons lived south of the river now too—they lived everywhere in the waste—but they were concentrated near the mountain where legend said they had slumbered and in the dry land stretching into the west.
If their group walked directly across the waste, they would reach the dragons in almost half the time. But without the river to guide and protect them, any explorers were unlikely to make it through alive. Despite the dangers of their eventual destination, Lucas insisted that they stick to common sense and take the river path.
Lucas would get them safely to the mountain, avoiding the dragons as much as they could. Then it would be Aurora’s turn. No one knew precisely what the inside of the mountain was like, but Aurora pictured some kind of cavern, where she could walk to the center, command the dragons’ attention, and then . . . then she did not know. She did not know how many she could control at once.
Perhaps it would be safer to start at the edge, to control one first, and then two, until she felt herself reaching her limit. She would soothe those dragons back to sleep, and then more, until only the ones she needed for Alyssinia remained.
It was not a strong plan, but how could she predict what would happen when dealing with dragons? She would trust her instincts, as she had with them before. When she saw them, she would know what to do.
They reached the river as the sun began to set. It was wider than a city street, and the water rushed past, leaping over rocks and splashing the bank. Reeds grew along the sides, bending inward as though bowing to their river god.
“There’s an abandoned house a little way up here,” Lucas said. “We’ll rest there tonight, give ourselves time to regroup. It’ll be the last relatively safe spot for a while.”
House was a generous word for the small pile of rubble that waited ahead of them, but one wall stood right against the bank, sturdy and unburned. The other walls had not fared so well, but it would shelter them from sight, and Aurora doubted they would find anything better so far into the wild.
They stepped through a space that might once have been a front door. The ground floor was all one room, and although the walls leaned inward and rubble dusted the ground, it looked stable enough. Pots hung above the fireplace, and a table had been knocked over in the middle of the room.
“We should check upstairs,” Finnegan said. “Make sure it’s safe.”
“A dragon couldn’t fit in here,” Aurora said.
“A dragon couldn’t, but an outlaw might. Who knows who else might think this a good place to rest?”
The stairs led to an attic room that was half-destroyed by fire and time. Rubble and tiles had fallen from the roof, and the remnants of the bed frame were still littered with ash. Something sat by the end of the bed, low to the ground, impossible to make out in the gloom. Heart pounding, Aurora gathered a small ball of fire in her hand, casting a dancing light across the room.
It was a skeleton. It slumped against the ruined wall. Aurora stared at it. It stared back at her with empty sockets, reproaching her for some unknown crime.
“The people here didn’t want to leave,” Finnegan said. She jumped, and the fire flickered out. “They thought they’d be safe, so close to the water, and so they stayed. No one was safe.”
She had never seen a skeleton before. Her life over the past few weeks had been full of death, of family members long gone and friends choking out their lives before her, but she had never seen how it left them, how time had torn everything