and rising within her, that Finnegan was hurt, Finnegan was burned, she had failed them all.
“Aurora,” Finnegan said. “Aurora, are you all right?” His voice was laced with pain.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine. Finnegan, we need to get you out of here. We need to move, we need to go, we need to—”
“Panicking, little dragon?” Finnegan coughed. “Now’s not really the time.”
“Can you stand?” she said.
“I think so.”
She and Lucas hauled him to his feet and staggered toward the mouth of the cave. Finnegan leaned heavily on Aurora, his hand clutching her shoulder. The light ahead seemed impossibly far away.
When they emerged from the cave, the sudden brightness of the sun made Aurora’s eyes sting. She forced herself to keep looking forward, to not even glance at Finnegan, until they had scrambled onto the outer slope, collapsing behind a pile of rocks to breathe.
Then she looked. One side of Finnegan, the side she had been supporting, looked fine. Dusty and scraped from their climb and their fall, but healthy enough. But the right side of his face was blackened, and the burns ran down his arm, his shirt melted and molded to his stomach.
“Finnegan—”
Lucas lay Finnegan on the ground, sheltered by the rocks. He ran his fingers around the edge of the burn. “Get the cream,” Lucas said. “In my pack.”
Aurora untied the flap of his bag and rummaged inside. Her hands shook. “This will cure him?”
“No,” Lucas said. He snatched the jar from her as soon as she pulled it out and scooped the cream into his palm. Finnegan hissed in pain as Lucas rubbed it onto his burns. “But it’ll help. We have to get him back to Vanhelm. Now.”
“It’s almost two days’ walk from here!”
“We might be able to do it in a day,” Lucas said. “If we go directly there. Leave the river behind. But it won’t be as safe, without the water. If a dragon finds us—”
“I don’t care,” Aurora said. “We don’t have a choice.”
Nothing lived where dragon fire touched. That was what they said, that was what the waste screamed to her as she slid down the mountain toward it.
The sun scorched the skin on the back of Aurora’s neck, but they stumbled on, step after step after step, ignoring the screams of the dragons, ignoring everything except one foot, and then the other, through burned villages, through the bleak emptiness, through looming shadows and the whisper of the wind. And slowly, Vanhelm took form in the distance, a collection of faint buildings, stretching to the sky.
TWENTY-THREE
IT WAS DARK BEFORE FINNEGAN SPOKE AGAIN. “STOP,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I need to rest. For a minute.” They sank to the ground, backs pressed against a half-melted wall.
“How far are we from Vanhelm?” Aurora asked.
“We should reach it about midday,” Lucas said.
Midday. The sun had barely set. They could not drag Finnegan along for another sixteen hours or more. He couldn’t keep walking, his skin black and burning. They would never make it back to the palace.
But they did not have a choice. They had to succeed.
“Are you hurt, Aurora?” Finnegan asked.
Every inch of her hurt, but she shook her head, forcing herself to smile. “I’m fine,” she said. “Perfectly healthy. I’m just worried about you.”
“You’re holding your hand strangely.”
The dragon pendant sat in the center of her fist. It had worn grooves into her skin.
“My necklace,” she said. “I forgot.” She had forgotten everything in the panic. She looked up at Lucas, moving so suddenly that the muscles in her neck snapped. “You broke it,” she said. “You threw it on the ground.”
“I did,” he said. “That dragon was getting out of control. I thought it was going to kill you.”
“So you broke my necklace?”
“It has dragon’s blood in it,” he said. “I thought if I threw it aside, the dragon would follow, and we could get away.”
She stared at the pendant. The silver chain had snapped, the two threads hanging uselessly from her palm. She did not believe him. His words sounded reasonable, but something about the shake in his voice, the way he spoke a little too quickly, suggested he was lying. Whatever his reasoning, it had not been to protect her.
“I’m going to need a new chain,” she said. “When we get back.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Finnegan laughed, but it came out as more of a groan. “I’ll get you a new one,” he said. “You deserve it after today’s rousing success.”