The joy of battle.
Vostok had spoken of it to her in the quiet moments between dreams, but Noon had not understood. Now, with one hand pressed to the dragon’s smooth scales and the other carving elegant shapes in the air – shapes that summoned flames more precise and powerful than she’d ever imagined – she saw their enemies falling before them and she was filled with a sense of rightness. No question here of what was right or wrong, no concerns over guilt. There was just the joy of battle, of believing utterly in the fight.
Together they had edged closer to the Jure’lia queen, burning or breaking the drones she sent towards them, and now they were on the edge of the roots. To Noon’s surprise, Vostok stepped lightly over them, her enormous serrated talons not leaving a scratch, and the queen retreated, slithering back to the bulk of the trunk. There was a building of excitement in Noon’s chest as the queen threw up wall after wall of her strange black substance, and again and again she burned it away.
‘Bite her or burn her?’ she murmured to Vostok. The dragon’s amusement washed over her.
‘I would not bite such as she. I will be picking it out of my teeth for weeks.’ Vostok shook herself, like a dog in the rain. ‘No, you must burn her, child.’
Noon grinned. ‘Gladly.’
At that moment, the Hall of Roots filled with a desolate roaring. Hot, fetid air was blasted on them from above, and a great shadow fell over them. Noon looked up and saw the corpse moon hanging now not in the distant sky but just above them. Scuttling shapes like six-legged spiders moved busily across its surface, and at the blunt head of the thing, a dark mouth was opening. All joy and certainty fled, and instead she was left with the eerie sense that her dream had come back – the nightmare that had caused her to flee the Winnowry had followed her and here it was. Perhaps everything had been a dream, after all.
‘Pay attention!’ Vostok shook her, tossing her back and forth like a doll. ‘Are you a warrior or not?’
‘But that thing—’
‘That thing is a distraction. Will you look at what is happening here?’
Dragging her eyes away from the rapidly approaching corpse moon, Noon saw that Tor was fighting for his life. With them distracted, the queen had sent the burrowers in a thick wave towards him, and now he was thrashing on the floor, trying to keep them from crawling inside his mouth.
‘Tor!’
‘Leave him. Now is our chance to take the queen. Take what you need from me—’
‘No.’ Noon could feel Vostok’s will pressing on her like a physical weight, but she threw it off. ‘You can’t ask me to do that. Not him. I will not—’
‘Humans! You are more foolish even than Eborans.’ But the dragon turned and leapt, crashing down to stand over Tor protectively. Noon slipped easily from her back and released a wide cloud of green flame, a burst of near-heatless energy that doused Tor from head to foot. Each of the burrowers burst into flame but the Eboran was left unscathed. Dragging him to his feet, Noon shoved him towards Vostok.
‘Thank you, I think. Did you mean to burn just them?’
‘Shut up and get up there.’
Together they scrambled up onto Vostok’s back, but it was too late. The corpse moon now blocked out all daylight, and a thin line of the wet black fluid had descended from the gaping hole in its front end like a rope, and the Jure’lia queen had extended her arm to reach it – the two were one now, a glistening black line from one to the other. She smiled at them.
‘You are running away?’ bellowed Vostok. The dragon reared back in frustration and Tor and Noon had to grasp onto her shoulders to keep from falling off. ‘Coward! Noon, burn her!’
Noon scrambled up, holding on with her thighs only, and threw a barrage of winnowfire at the queen, but she swept away from it, closer to the waiting Behemoth.
‘You will get your fight soon enough, relic.’ Her face changed, becoming, to Noon’s mind, almost conflicted. ‘I said, did I not, that you would not be left behind again?’
Noon frowned, belatedly realising that the queen wasn’t talking to them. She looked up to see Hestillion standing on the roots, her dress ragged and torn but otherwise untouched. In her arms she held the smallest of the war-beast pods.
‘You did say that, yes,’ she said. Her face was very still and pale.
The Jure’lia queen nodded once, and Hestillion and the pod were swept up in a wave of black fluid, borne past them and up, up towards the broken ceiling of the Hall of Roots. There she joined the queen and then they were lost to view, spirited up to the waiting Behemoth at an uncanny speed. Vostok leapt forward, her wet wings beating once, twice against her sides before giving up. The gaping mouth at the front of the corpse moon sealed over in silence, and a dozen spidery creatures crawled over it, smoothing it into place before the whole thing shuddered and roared again, turning slowly away from them.
Noon watched as the Behemoth moved south, edging out of their field of vision until the blameless blue sky filled the hole in the roof again. Small fires burned everywhere in the Hall of Roots, and bodies were strewn amongst the broken chairs. The place stank of smoke and death.
Tor was the first to break the silence.
‘Did the Jure’lia just steal my sister?’
Noon opened her mouth to tell him that she didn’t think ‘steal’ was the right word, but looking at his stricken, bleeding face, she found that she could not.
Instead she took his hand and kissed the palm of it. She tasted blood.
46
Of all the places in the palace, Tor had always considered the Hatchery to be the saddest. Even Hestillion, in her passion to keep things running as though the Eboran empire still lived, could not face the Hatchery, and the place had not been opened in at least a hundred years. It was a beautiful, long room, lined with windows on both sides so that the warm sunlight could gently heat the fruits of Ygseril, but the windows were blind with dust now, and the padded silk nests that had been built to house each of the silver pods were half rotted, the silk peeling away like old skin. In truth, Tor had felt embarrassed, particularly under the unnerving violet gaze of the dragon, Vostok. Looking at this room, you could not ignore the fact that Ebora had admitted defeat.