the throne of Alyssinia, and your queen has commanded you to help me. Do you want to be the one who defies her? I hear she does not suffer fools gladly.”
The man stared at her for a long moment, and then he bowed. “As you wish, my lady.”
“Impressive,” Finnegan whispered in her ear. The hum of the word made her shiver.
“What can I say?” she murmured. “I was born to be a queen.”
Aurora stood by the side of the boat until Vanhelm faded from sight. The dragon circled overhead. Every now and again, it screamed or thrashed its wings, but Aurora simply glanced upward, and it quieted again. The heat of it, the smolder, was less over the water, like it had left part of itself on the shore. But the heat inside Aurora, the burning in her heart . . . that was fiercer than ever, a heartbeat that grew stronger every mile they sailed from the shore, as though she were driving the dragon onward, as though her own heart were keeping it alive.
Night fell, and still the dragon circled, lighting up the sky. Not a single breath of fire slipped past its teeth. It just flew, around and around and around, as though tethered to her somehow, as though waiting for the moment when it could land again.
Finnegan waited in her cabin below. “I don’t know if I can do it,” she said, as she paused in the doorway. It seemed safer, admitting the truth in the dark.
Finnegan was leaning back on the bed. “You can do anything you want to, dragon girl. I knew that from the start.”
“I don’t know if I want to,” she said. “If I kill him . . . I’ll be as bad as he is. Won’t I?”
“Sometimes you have to do terrible things,” Finnegan said. “Sometimes it’s the only thing to do.”
“That shouldn’t be true.”
“It shouldn’t, but it is.”
“Celestine . . .” She trailed off, searching for the words. “She said that I was only good for destruction. Maybe she’s right. Maybe this is exactly what she wants.”
“Maybe,” Finnegan said. “Is that going to stop you?”
She thought of Rodric, of flames, of the hunger in Celestine’s eyes when she looked at her. Of the whisper of dragons, and the power that was hers and hers alone. “No,” she said. “It won’t.”
The journey to Petrichor seemed endless. They marched through the day and the night, weaving through forests and around villages in order to reach the capital before Rodric’s trial. Crowds gathered wherever they went, people come to stare at the soldiers and the dragon, mouths open in astonishment, eyes wide with fear. No one attempted to speak to them or question their presence. Did they know who she was, Aurora wondered, or did they see the dragon and assume she was from Vanhelm, a long-feared enemy invading them at last? She had felt so trapped before, hating their desperation for her to save them, but now was almost worse. Now she was a creature from their nightmares, come to tear them apart.
Aurora kept the dragon’s fire tight within her chest, but her control hardly mattered. As they walked, they passed burned-out fields, whole villages that had been torn to pieces or reduced to ash. Endless groups of travelers limped along the road, heading to and from the capital. Nowhere, it seemed, had been safe while Aurora was gone.
Aurora swallowed her guilt. A few more fires, one more fight, and things would start anew.
And perhaps it would not come to that. Fear of dragons was a powerful thing. Who would face one, when surrender was an option?
They did not meet any Alyssinian soldiers on the road. Either King John had chosen not to fight, or he had pulled his men back to guard the capital.
One day’s journey outside Petrichor, their group paused at the edge of the forest for food and rest. The trees loomed over them, whispering with the wind, and Aurora shifted closer to the fire, trying to focus on Finnegan’s conversation, trying not to think about what the following evening might bring. The men had caught deer for dinner, and it tasted rich after days of increasingly stale food, but her stomach would not settle, and she could hardly eat a bite.
The dragon flew above them, swooping in and out of sight. It had grown stronger with every step away from the water, so that Aurora could feel the heat of its skin again, the anger and desire rushing