"Whoever attacked knew exactly where they were camped and left unprotected. This is why I keep saying there's a traitor at court," Valentine said.
Emyr kicked aside an empty cook pot. "Let Taranis and Quinn deal with the court. Quinn unnerves them because they've never had to deal with humans before. They might spill something in front of her. She's got a way of listening that makes people talk whether they want to or not."
Valentine's nose twitched as he drew near a collapsed tent. The scent of dark, musky floral notes got stronger, and he knew it must have belonged to Yelena. He pulled back the ruined canvas and found piles of shredded books and papers. There were none of his letters amongst them, which was like another blade in his chest.
He knelt and started collating the papers. His hand caught on a drawing of a familiar sigil. It was his. He had written to Caelanabout different spells since midsummer, but he had never mentioned this particular sigil.
She would have had to have drawn it from memory. However, he couldn't remember ever revealing it in her presence before.
A lump formed in his throat, and his dragon growled. It was the spell that had contained his dragon for years. He had designed it to gag it and make sure it never rose high enough to the surface to cause him to shift. It had been on his chest since he was a teenager. Another tightly kept secret from his family.
Yelena had known all along what it did. Her notes were written in a cipher he didn't understand, but it looked as if she was trying to find a way to unlock it.
The dragon inside of him keened with a longing and sadness that felt as if it was ripping Valentine's heart out.
You scared me too much then. There were no dragons to help me, he tried to tell it. It didn't matter; the sigil was barely holding these days anyway.
Find her. Must find her, the dragon insisted.
The silvery thread of magic tied to Valentine gave a sharp tug. He fell forward and gripped the thread. Pain burst through his hand, and he felt an invisible blade hacking into it. Cold washed over him, and in his mind's eye, he saw the big fae shaking at Yelena's cage, trying to get her to wake.
Valentine came back to himself with Owain shaking him.
"Valentine! You in there?" the knight demanded.
"Have to get her. Have to get her now," Valentine stammered.Help me, you wretched beast. Help me!
Pain and power wracked his body, and Valentine gripped the earth as claws burst free from his hands. Owain shouted something to Emyr, but he couldn't hear them. His vision was awash with red and black threads of power. His scream turned into a roar, and wings burst free from his back.
"Follow..." he growled out to Owain and let the dragon take control of the shift. A ridge of spikes burst along the spine of his serpentine body, and he opened his mouth and roared as loudly as he could in a final burst of pain and rage.
Valentine's mind cleared and focused. He rose into the air, wings beating, and his black scales making him almost invisible in the dark sky. His glowing red eyes could make out the connection still binding him to the female dragon, the one he needed to find.
He wouldn't fail her. He would free her from her cage.
And then he would kill every single creature that laid a finger on her.
Through ice,blood, and bone, the dragon that was Yelena felt the echo of Valentine's first change reverberate through the magical currents of the world.
Her pale, frozen lips twisted slowly into a smile.
They had wanted the black dragon so badly, and now, they would get exactly what they wished for.
9
There was fire and fury and magic. Valentine barely held on to his mind as the dragon hunted with senses he didn't understand. He didn't need to. It wanted freedom, and he was too tired to fight it anymore.
He could still feel the binding sigil holding in places, but it wasn't time to let the magician in him examine it. The dragon had only one goal in its head, and it wasn't going to stop until it got satisfaction.
Owain and Emyr were trying to communicate with him, their warning attempts bouncing uselessly off the walls in his mind.
Valentine could smell blood in the air and too many bodies camped together. Lights were burning beneath him. The dragon dove, a dark shadow, death from above. It landed in front of the gates of the fortress and blasted the doors with fire. Arrows and spears pinged uselessly from his scales, and he tore the smouldering mass of wood and stone apart.
Emyr swooped into the courtyard and plucked Avallach and the post he was attached to clean out of the ground and flew himto safety. Valentine unleashed fire bomb after fire bomb on the courtyard, ripping tents and toppling towers.
He flapped his wings and landed on the walls. A fae was trying to pull an unconscious, frozen woman from a cage. Valentine's razor-sharp claws snatched up the fae male in one quick swipe.
Magic burned his paw as the fae changed into a bear, then a wolf, then a snake. Valentine squeezed until it became a fae once more. He lifted it and sniffed. There was a rotting hand hanging by a piece of rope around its neck. Valentine knew who it had once belonged to.
