Breath of Dragons (A Pandoran Novel) (49 page)

Thad heard me and turned around, looking bewildered. "Rook, what are you—"

"We have to get out of here!" I screamed.

A loud, bone-chilling cry of hundreds trembled from the tower.

"Hellfire, Rook!" Thad's eyes bulged like a frog's. "I thought your stone—"

"It broke!" I yelled. When I caught up to him, I grabbed his hand and pulled him after me.

"How!?"

"I fell, okay?!"

"But I thought those things were trapped down there!"

"I broke down the wards."

"You…
what
?"

"I couldn't get back out!"

He cursed under his breath, panting. "I hope you at least got what you were looking for!"

"It's in my cloak!" I yelled. We hadn't gone more than a few hundred yards when a shadow burst from behind a bush and a fist collided with my stomach. I tumbled forward, choking on my breath, while more hands grabbed my arms and legs, pinning me in place.

Part Four:

 

 

 

 

Karth

 

 

 

 

 

"Great power bestows great responsibility,

And great responsibility bestows great power."

 

~A Daloren Proverb

 

 

 

 

 

Stefan

 

 

H
ow had it come to this?

The lush and dramatic landscape of Valdon was covered with black, like a great veil blanketing the land. But this veil did not bring warmth. This veil brought a deadly cold, infusing the air with the putrid scent of death, and fear permeated the city like a disease.

The shadowguard stood outside of our walls, tens of thousands strong. They did not attack. No, they would starve us out in order to take this castle intact. Eris wanted this castle as an example. We did not have the men to fight him, either.

"Still no word from Lord Commodus?" I asked.

"No, your highness," said Headmaster Ambrose. "However, I imagine if your request involved your sister's—"

I slammed a fist on my desk, rattling the quill in its ink, but effectively silencing the headmaster from expounding any further upon his point. "What of Campagna?"

Headmaster Ambrose stood like a statue of himself. "Nothing, your highness."

The unease in the room thickened. A few of the Aegises shifted and even Aegis Cicero Del Conte looked dismayed. It was rare for him to show anything other than hope, and seeing him without it was unnerving in a way I could not bear. "Excuse me a moment," I said to them, and I crossed the room and walked swiftly out the door.

Guards jumped aside, making way for me as I stormed down the long corridor. When I reached the double doors to the king's chambers, his guards took one look at me and stepped out of the way.

I pushed the doors in to a dark room.

"Grandfather." I looked around his empty chamber; there was a single candle lit upon his nightstand. The sheets of his huge bed had been thrown back in a sloppy heap and his pillows lay in a pile on the floor. Books were thrown all over the place, and papers were jumbled in a corner. "Grandfather, this has to end," I continued. "Your kingdom is at war, and you are hiding from it like a child."

The insult felt awkward in my mouth. I'd never spoken thus to my grandfather, but if he meant to be respected, he needed to act respectable. I thought Daria would be proud of me.

A shadow moved in my periphery, just near the window. It separated itself from the thick draperies like a phantom. "Get out," grumbled a raspy voice.

"I will not," I said. "Pretending Lord Eris and his shadowguard do not exist will not make it so. Grandfather, if there is something you know that could help us—anything about your son—I need you to—"

"He is not my son!" King Darius stepped out into the halo of light. His hair was tangled and matted and the skin hung loosely from his face, his pale eyes bulged and the hollows of his cheeks deepened in a way that made him skeletal.

"If he is not your son, then who is he?" I snapped.

King Darius stared at me a moment, a fire blazing in those pale eyes, and then my grandfather slumped in the seat of the window, burying his face in his hands. Weeping.

"Grandfather." I approached him slowly. "Please. I understand your sorrow, but—"

"You do not…" He sobbed into his hands. "You do not understand. No one…my fault. All my fault. I should've seen it. I should've taken the time…I might have prevented…" His breath shuddered. "I would have both my sons."

I inhaled very slowly. "Grandfather, I need to know how to stop Lord Eris. I need to know how to save this city."

Before the words were out, Grandfather was shaking his head. "You can't, Stefan." His voice was a faint whisper. "Thanks to my father, Eris is the most powerful dark mage this world has ever seen."

Chapter 24

The Power of the Dark

 

 

"S
earch her," said a woman's voice.

At first I'd thought Thad had betrayed me, but then I realized Thad was in a similar predicament. His arms were pinned behind his back and his left eye was already starting to swell and turn purple.

"Let…go of me!" I screamed, trying to writhe free, but all of my extremities had been efficiently secured to the ground.

A pair of rough hands felt around my body while other hands held me down. "Found it," said a masculine voice as he pulled the box from my cloak. The voice belonged to Lorimer Faris. I grunted and jerked but to no avail, and the look he gave me was grimly sardonic.

Lorimer handed the box to a woman with long, elegant fingers and lustrous brown hair that spilled in a dark river over a cloak colored like midnight. Her features were sharp and aristocratic, and they hardened with purpose as she studied the box. I'd never seen the woman before, but there was something oddly familiar about her warm brown eyes.

Satisfied, she shoved the box in the folds of her expensive cloak, while eyeing Thad with deep loathing.

"Hey, Ma," Thad smirked.

Ma…? This woman—whoever she was—was Thad's
mother
?

The woman's robes fluttered behind her as she walked over to him, then promptly smacked him hard across the face. The slap cut through the air like the crackle of lightning. "You are no son of mine," she hissed.

"Ow!" Thad flexed his jaw. "That hurt!"

The woman then moved to my side, gazing down at me as one might gaze down at vermin. Wisps of hair floated about her face—a face with the terrible beauty of an evil queen from fairytales—but again, I was struck by her eyes. There was something familiar about them I couldn't quite put a finger on.

"Thank you, Daria," she said in a full and authoritative voice. "I've been looking a long time for the box of the Draconi, and I could not have retrieved it without your help."

"You can't…do this!" I shouted.

She crouched and grabbed a fistful of my hair. "Shut up. I am sick and tired of your whining, you spoiled, pampered little brat." She released my hair with a shove, then found the gemless chain draped around my neck. She jerked the chain free, observing the small fragment of stone that still clung there. "I should've known it was the necklace," she said. "I had suspected it was your dagger, and had you not kept this so safely tucked away, I might have discovered it sooner."

And then it hit me over the head like a cast-iron pot. "Rhea…?" I gasped.

Her smile twisted with cruelty. She waved a hand over her face, and for a split second, her face transformed into the face of my sweet handmaiden. Kind and sincere, with soft wrinkles of age. Everything had changed but her warm brown eyes. And then the friendly and gentle features of Rhea transformed back into this powerful and angry woman crouched before me. Power radiated from her like heat from a desert sun.

"But I don't understand," I said. "Why would you do this?"

She looked as though my question fascinated her, but she didn't answer it. Instead, she stood, her midnight robes cascading over her slender frame. "Hand me Lord Eris's strongbox," she said to Lorimer.

Lorimer produced a bundle from beneath the folds of his cloak. The item had been wrapped carefully in black velvet, and when Rhea grabbed it from his hands, she did so reverently. Very carefully, as one might unwrap a precious and fragile artifact, she unwound the velvet, revealing a charcoal black strongbox inside, with an oval and chalky-white hinge on the lip of the lid. The box wasn't very big—perhaps a shade larger than the box of the Draconi—but there was something wrong about it. Something wicked, and I found myself immediately afraid of what was inside.

Rhea ran her fingers lightly over the hinge as if relishing the feel of it.

"Mistress Dothrai? Should we, ah, step back, or anything?" asked one of the guards.

Mistress Dothrai
? Rhea—my old handmaiden—was Mistress Dothrai? The same terrible sorceress I'd read about in stories?
She
was Thad's mother? Was there an end to the deception in my life?

"That won't be necessary," she said coolly, examining the strongbox. "Lord Eris took great care with this. Ah." She must have touched the hinge in just the right way, because there was a soft click, and the lid opened. She looked hungrily inside of the box, and a pale and eerie light reflected upon her face, making her look phantasmal. Her lips curled back in a smile. "It is even more beautiful than I imagined," she whispered, awed.

"Yeah, you think that about every spell Pops creates," Thad grunted, earning himself a swift kick in the gut from one of his captors.

"What is that?" I struggled. "What are you doing?"

Rhea—Mistress Dothrai—crouched, setting the strongbox carefully on the ground. I couldn't see what was inside, but the pale light still shone on her face. "That," she said, "is what will change this world forever. You should have sided with my lord when you had the chance, princess. Now, you will experience his wrath." She held her hands over the box and closed her eyes, her lips moving with whispers I could not hear. But I felt the power, noxious and virulent and cold as death. It was a crushing sort of power, smothering and deadly yet somehow alluring. It was the power of dark magic, and she was using it to unleash the magnificent and deadly spell secured inside of the box. A spell my uncle had created. But for what purpose?

The wind picked up and the sky darkened as Rhea—Mistress Dothrai's chocolate hair whipped about her face. The light inside of the box grew brighter, pulsing like the steady beat of a heart. Tendrils of faint black smoke rose from inside the box, swirling over the lip and twisting into the earth like fingers. Ugly black and thorny roots snaked up from the ground, coiling around the strongbox protectively, thickening until all that remained of the box's existence was the eerie pulsing of white light through the new bramble.

Dark magic rolled through the earth, foul and evil, diffusing outward like ripples in a lake disturbed from a central point of contact. Darkness moved through my body, chilling my bones, and my heart raced with new fear. Never had I felt something so powerful and
wrong
.

She opened her eyes and stood. "We're leaving."

Lorimer looked like he regretted not being able to stay and watch whatever was about to happen to us.

"Mistress Dothrai? What do you want me to do with him?" asked one of the guards holding on to Thad.

"Leave him here to rot with his cousin," Mistress Dothrai said in a tone void of emotion.

"Oh, come on, Ma," Thad rasped. "This is a little cruel—even for you."

Mistress Dothrai waved her hand, and in a gust of wind, large black shapes descended upon us—vox, magnificent winged horses I'd met in the Arborenne and rescued during the games. Like the vox at the games, these looked as though they had been beaten and abused. Mistress Dothrai and her guards hurried away from Thad and me, and in the next moment, they mounted the vox and were gone, taking the box of the Draconi with them.

An overwhelming sense of desperation took over me as I scrambled to my feet. "You could've told me Astaire Dothrai—my
chambermaid
—is your mother!" I yelled at Thad.

Thad winced from pain as he stood. His left eye had swollen completely shut. "It didn't exactly come up."

"Well, now she's got the box!"

"Actually, she gave you a new one…"

"Thad!"

"Okay, okay…spirits."

"What did your mother just do?" I demanded, the two of us staring at the pulsing black bramble.

"Looks to me like she just set one of my ol' pop's curses on Pendel."

I grumbled. "I figured that much out myself, thanks. But what kind of curse?"

"I don't know, Rook. Like I said earlier: He doesn't tell me everything. But if he made it, you can bet it's pretty bad."

"Lovely parents you've got," I said.

Thad shrugged defensively. "Hey, I didn't exactly get to choose whose womb I grew in."

I looked back at the strongbox; it was completely buried in twisting black roots, and that pale light pulsed inside of the tangle like a heart. "How do we destroy it?"

Thad eyed the twisting bramble with his one good eye. "Dunno. But if he sent my ma to detonate it, I'm sure it's got some kind of really powerful failsafe…" He moved slowly around the bramble, examining it, then reached out his hand. His fingers were inches from the edge when light shocked his hand, throwing him back about five feet. He landed hard on his tailbone and winced.

"Can we get to it with magic?" I asked.

"Ah…" Thad stood, massaging his lower back. "Dark magic can only be broken by dark magic."

"Well, that shouldn't be a problem for you." I raised a brow.

He actually looked a little offended. "Hey, now, just because my parents—"

His words were cut off by the sound of collapsing rock, followed by an inhuman scream. We exchanged a terrified glance.

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