Dragon Blood

Chapter 4

When the morning rush was over, Keriya retreated to her room. She left a gold lucrum coin on her pillow for Caimos and Seema—a thank-you and a farewell. She buckled her sword around her waist, grabbed her satchel, and donned a hooded cloak to hide the weapon before she left the inn.

Outside, Pergran was waking up. On the corner, one man hoisted a crossbeam into place using nothing but his own strength. Across the street, the baker was feeding fires in his brick ovens with coal. A woman tended the wilting flowers in her window box, watering them by hand. The grocer was organizing his wares, an assortment of desert fruits he’d grown and harvested, all without the use of any magic whatsoever.

Once, Keriya had been obsessed with magic. Now it felt like a far-fetched fantasy, something she’d imagined to make the world seem brighter, better than it was. There were no wielders in Jidaeln. The few times she’d made the mistake of mentioning magic, she’d been met with derision or fear. People spoke of dangerous foreigners in connection to magic—and Keriya had quickly learned she’d be safer if she never brought up the subject again.

Oddly enough, she was comforted by the magicless state of affairs. No longer was she the only girl in the world who couldn’t wield—now she was like everyone else. There was no one around to make her feel inferior. She was almost ordinary.

A nasty punch of shock jolted her from her musings. Three heights in front of her stood a tall young man with dark skin and black, spiky hair, browsing a stand of Syrionese silks. A name surfaced on her tongue—a name she had forgotten, a name she would never forget.

“Effrax?” she croaked. “Effrax, is that you?”

Effrax turned away from her, threading through the morning crowd. Another panicked jolt thundered through Keriya. She couldn’t lose him—she needed to tell him something important.

“Effrax!” She ran to him and grabbed his shoulder. “It’s me, I’m—”

She bit off her words as she spun the boy around. Those mean, watery eyes were certainly not Effrax’s, nor was that round face or crooked nose.

He angrily knocked her hand aside. “Get away, woman. Learn your place!”

“Sorry . . . I thought you were someone else.” Keriya ducked her head and continued on.

She often recalled things from her past with some sort of visual prompt. Her friends’ names and faces had returned to her because she dreamed of them often, saw them dying horrible deaths. The visions were so clear, so insistent, that she was starting to fear they were more than night terrors.

When she reached the city wall, the gate guard scowled. “Miss Kayah. Going out alone again?” His tone screamed his disapproval. “Make sure you’re home before curfew.”

He went into the watchtower to open the gates of Pergran. The stone doors creaked outwards, and Keriya ghosted into the arid air of the growing fields.

The only interruptions in the golden sea of sorghum grass were plot markers denoting where one field ended and another began. Workers toiled in the irrigated plots closest to town, but as Keriya walked further the crowds thinned, then vanished. She passed the final plot marker and veered off the dirt road, making her way to a distant hill.

Beyond the hill lay a charred crater in a shallow valley. The scar in the land had barely begun to heal—only now, two months later, were fountain grasses daring to creep in at the edges. This was where she’d fallen from the sky.

Keriya removed her sunshields and stared at the crater, shaking her head. “What power can transport someone halfway across a planet?”

It was like someone had unraveled her memories, sliced them up, and strewn the pieces haphazardly across her mind. She didn’t know how she’d gotten here, she wasn’t sure what ill fate had befallen her friends . . . and she couldn’t remember what had happened to the young dragon who’d been destined to save them all.

Memories of him were the most obscure. She’d extracted glimmers from her shattered brain—a flash of bronze scales, a pearly-fanged smile, an afternoon playing in a snowy forest—but guilt pressed on her whenever she thought of him. In her heart, she knew something terrible must have happened.

“It’s Necrovar’s fault,” she murmured to the crater. “It has to be.”

Keriya remembered him vividly. His demonic face leered at her from the depths of her nightmares. He was the cause of her pain. It had been her job to fight him, and she had failed.

Every fragment of recovered memory was drenched with the underlying knowledge that she’d been given a hopeless mission—after all, how could a girl with no magic be expected to kill the most powerful wielder in the history of Selaras? The answer had come after she’d eavesdropped on the soldiers: she had to learn to use her sword.

A breeze whispered over the hill, brushing her long hair past her cheeks. Tawny grass rippled beneath the azure sky, beckoning her onward. With a stout nod, Keriya left the crater and followed the wind away from Pergran.

Today she would find the Xamarai. She would ask for sword training. The blade had saved her from Necrovar—that was a feeling more than a memory, but Keriya didn’t doubt the truth of it. The ancient weapon was her only hope of victory. Once she’d mastered it, she would return to Allentria to defeat the Shadow.

A nervous thrill coursed through her as she approached the boundary. Her footsteps faltered. What if the Xamarai turned her away? Would they deign to teach a lowly peasant girl? There were a lot of things she hadn’t considered when she’d concocted this scheme in the safety of her attic room.

She paused at the fence. This was an ill-conceived plan. It was something the old Keriya would have come up with. The old Keriya would have likely considered it brilliant.

“And I’m not the old Keriya,” she whispered to the wind, as if in apology. “I’m not that person anymore.”

You’re not, said the voice in her head. Hearing the voice came as something of a shock. That part of her personality had lain dormant in the aftermath of the accident, silenced beneath the weight of her trauma. But neither are you Kayah, the best dishwasher in Pergran.

“Then who am I?” she said aloud.

She’d been speaking to herself her whole life, albeit under the guise of conversing with inanimate objects. It was what lonely people did . . . and she was very alone now. She had no family, no friends, and no Shivnath to tell her what to do or tangle the threads of her fate.

Her hands clenched involuntarily as her thoughts turned to the powerful dragon god. Did Shivnath know what had happened? Did it matter? Keriya was finally free of the Allentrian guardian’s influence, free to make her own choices. She could give herself—and the world—a fighting chance.

“I have to try,” she whispered.

She’d been angry once, resentful, bitter, hungry for revenge . . . but this wasn’t about revenge anymore. It was about something, to be sure, but Keriya couldn’t explain what made her square her shoulders and slip through the loops of barbed metal wire. Maybe if she’d had her memories, she’d have known. Maybe not even then.

She’d walked about a league past the fence when an angry cry reached her ears. Two riders appeared on the eastern ridge.

“Halt, trespasser!” The riders were mounted on large, bipedal lizards with stunted arms and strong back legs tipped with ivory talons. The animals’ faces were lupine in nature—pointed ears and manes of dark fur ringed their heads, and they bared sharp fangs around leather bridles.

Keriya raised her hands in surrender, but it was too late. The wolf-lizards slowed a few heights from her, and their humans produced thin, silvery-white whips. There was a metallic buzz as the tendrils sliced through the air. With suspiciously alarming accuracy, the whips lashed around Keriya’s wrists. The riders swiftly circled her, ensnaring her, the whips pinioning her arms against her chest.

“Stop,” she cried, well aware that her foreign accent and odd complexion were both marks against her. “I mean no harm—”

“Silence,” snapped one of the men. He spurred his wolf-lizard, and Keriya was wrenched forward as the riders trotted away.

They dragged her north for two hours, ignoring her pleas and explanations. By the time she and her captors crested a steep slope marked with wooden pikes, her throat was parched, her arms were cramped, and her feet were throbbing. Despite her growing panic, her eyes widened in awe when she beheld what lay on the other side of the hill.

Below sprawled a vast, flat valley. A thick sandstone wall circled its perimeter, festooned with barbed wire. There was only one entrance: a massive black gate flanked by ornate watchtowers.

Within the confines of the wall was a town, or something akin to it. The biggest structure was a long, low building of black marble crouched at the far end of the valley. Its western corner rose into a clock tower seven stories tall, each marked by a ring of red slate tiles. In the open space amid the buildings, hundreds of people toiled in the heat. They wore loose tan robes, secured at the waist with belts, that had short sleeves and pant legs that cinched below the knee.

Keriya had found the Xamarai.

Or rather, she thought, as the riders yanked on the chains to pull her forward, they found me.

The massive gates creaked open to admit the trio. Once inside, she surveyed the valley. Most of the trainees were young men. There were some who looked older, and a group of boys who looked quite young, and . . .

Her stomach sank, twisting with unease. There were no women in sight.

The metal whips loosened and retracted from Keriya, returning to the riders. A rough hand took their place, grabbing her shoulder. At the uninvited touch, a forgotten memory catapulted to the forefront of her mind, a recollection of pitch-black fingers clamping down on her. She turned and found herself staring into a pair of dark, angry eyes.

“How did you find us? Speak, if you value your life!”

Suddenly that face was covered in blood and its owner was crouched on the ground, holding his hands to a gash that stretched from jaw to nose. Shouts rang across the valley, and Keriya dimly registered the fact that her sword was in her hands.

“Now it’ll be death for you,” the young man hissed, his tan face flushing russet.

She was shaking, wondering where that violent outburst of hers had come from. The man’s mouth widened in a nasty smile as a fighting staff was drawn against her neck. Her sword and satchel thudded to the hard-packed dirt as her hands were caught and yanked behind her back to be tied together.

The staff was removed and she was shoved to her knees. Panicked and breathless, she knelt in the red dust. The commotion of training had ceased. The men were frozen, watching her.

Out of the throng stepped a brown-skinned fellow of middle age, every inch of him muscle. Close-cropped black hair ringed his square head, which perched above a stocky neck and broad, sloping shoulders. His robes were gray, edged with golden thread.

“Sullsai Hanso,” said one rider, “we found this woman trespassing in the southern quadrant.”

Square-head nodded a dismissal to the riders. They saluted him, pressing their fists to their hearts, before wheeling their wolf-lizards around and loping out of the training grounds. The black gates slammed shut behind them with chilling finality.

“Why did you trespass on our grounds?” Square-head asked Keriya.