Dari and Lord Ross and Lord Cobb, even if Aron was beyond assistance.
The energy attacking him shimmered, then shifted away. He saw the little children running, herded by their handlers, making off toward the trees with the graal force they had stolen.
Seconds later, an ear-splitting roar overrode the chaos on the battlefield.
Aron’s pulse stilled, and he wondered if that sound would be the last he ever heard.
He didn’t need to see the creature to know what it was, but it filled his vision, covering all of the empty sky before his eyes.
A scaled, long-necked beast the size of a castle tower—one he had seen before.
This dragon was stark white, and its barbed tail seemed polished and sharp. Its outstretched wings pumped once, stirring debris on the ground, which bounced and struck soldiers who had gone as still as stone monuments. Brilliant black eyes surveyed the battlefield, and the dragon’s mouth opened to show its curved teeth just before it let out a blast of fire that reached from the woods to the stones of Triune’s castle.
As the flames died away, only silence remained.
Aron turned his neck for glimpses of the battlefield. It seemed as though all the soldiers had stopped riding, stopped clawing and fighting, from Mab to Brailing to Cobb. Altar warbird soldiers lowered their hammers and pikes and swords. Ross Guardsmen backed away, green graal energy shoving outward to be taken by the children—as if it would have made a difference against a Stregan in full battle fury.
The white dragon flapped its massive, leathery wings again, rising higher above the conflagration. When it roared, Aron’s muscles jittered as the animal instincts left to him tried to answer that call. It was graal, yet natural. Energy, but also spirit, almost tangible. The children didn’t seem to be able steal it or to stop it.
Why would they?
This was Lady Pravda’s ultimate weapon.
Kate. A Stregan maddened by illness, then by cycles of captivity and misuse.
In her arrogance, Thorn’s Lady Provost had thought she could control such a force, but Aron suspected she had no idea what she had done.
Kate’s cry was a power unto itself.
It was a summons, and a warning.
The few talons left standing on the battlefield let out terrified bugles, and charged away behind fleeing horses. Aron thought he saw Tek amongst them, riderless and frightened, still swiveling her massive head as if she was searching for him.
Go, he thought, wishing he could command her. Save yourself.
From the mists of the Deadfall, the sands of the Barrens, and the rocky land of the Outlands came the wails of manes and mockers and rock cats, the screams of Great Rocs still infuriated by their enslavement, the howls of wolves and jackals and other creatures Aron couldn’t even identify.
A hand closed on Aron’s forearm, and Stormbreaker’s silvery energy dribbled into his own, giving Aron enough power to pull himself to a sitting position.
Stormbreaker was on his knees beside Aron, head sagging. “She’s … calling them,” he said, the words barely squeezing out of his throat. “The manes and mockers and predators. She’s a ruler of beasts, and she’s calling them… to kill us all.”
“Kate!” came Dari’s wavering cry, and Aron heard the resonance in that single syllable.
Dari, yet not Dari.
Kate’s cries were rousing her Stregan instincts as well, punching through her exhaustion and the damage done by the children. In her weakened mental and physical state, what could Dari do but answer that call, and save her own life?
Nic’s earlier words rushed back to Aron.
If you join the battle as a Stregan, only death will come of it…. Don’t shift, for the sake of us all.
“Don’t do it, Dari,” Aron shouted, on both sides of the Veil, but his words had no graal force behind them—and it was too late.
A second dragon, this one also white but with black benedet-like swirls on its massive clawed forelegs, rose to greet its twin in the skies above Triune.
“She is lost,” Stormbreaker whispered, unable to loose so much as a rumble of thunder or a drop of rain as soldiers began to shout and arrows began to fly at the Stregans. “And we are lost with her.”
The two massive dragons blasted great gouts of flame toward the woods, burning the trees down around Pravda Altar and her quaking child protégés. Aron winced and Stormbreaker sobbed as the children fell. Aron hoped that the little ones felt only the briefest pain before the heat rendered them to ash beside their mistress.
Energy returned to him in