Skalgard was unrecognizable. Streets I’d known my whole life twisted under fallen stone. The angles were strange as if the city were bending and soldiers ran, shoving each other. Debris skittered in one direction as if drawn by an invisible hand. A cart rolled past, moving uphill.
“What the fuck is this?” Uther muttered.
No one answered.
We raced through crowds, heading deeper into the human quarter, toward the Square—the heart of Skalgard—where all roads converged and where the seal waited.
A woman spotted Kairos and screamed. People recoiled, flattening themselves against walls, cramming intohalf-collapsed doorways. A man snatched up his daughter and ran.
A flicker of pain from Kairos throbbed in my chest.Don’t listen to them.
“I stopped listening centuries ago.”
I tightened my arm around his waist. “Did you just…hear my thoughts?”
Kairos grunted as eight guards burst from a side street. Armed with spears and crossbows, they blocked the road.
He closed his fist.
The first guard halted mid-stride. Blood welled from his eyes, then poured—from his ears, his nose, streaking down his face. Two of them crumpled, choking, and a third fired his crossbow. Elwen lifted her shield, the bolt skittering off with a metallic whine. Uther rode through the opening.
We followed, thundering into the Square.
The market was deserted. Stalls lay overturned and splintered, bright fabrics torn and trampled into mud. At the edge, untouched by the chaos, was the platform. The same one Kairos had stood on for a century while crowds gathered to watch him kill.
He stiffened, his discomfort rolling through me.
I’d grown up in the shadow of the Square, too. I’d watched executions, walked over that drain after it swallowed rivers of blood, and never knew therealcost of those lives. Every execution…fuel for a rune that kept dragons trapped.
The rune sprawled across the cobblestones, far larger than it had ever been, its lines too thin and stretched, throbbing with crimson light.
“Kai,” Uther shouted.
Kairos pulled back on Morvaen’s reins, and the other riders reined their mairen into a tight ring.
Runecloaks poured in, their armor polished like mirrors, forming a circle around us. They moved until we were completely surrounded, but didn’t attack.
Morvaen stamped and snarled.
My gaze snapped to the altar. More Runecloaks, encircling a dark-haired male in midnight-blue armor. Regal, composed, his handsome face illuminated by a red glow.
Vaeris.
And beside him, hands pressed to the seal, was a figure I knew better than my own reflection. Rheya’s hair was wild and she gritted her teeth, panting.
“No,” I choked.
I lurched forward in the saddle, and the ground buckled.
57
THE FALL
The stones beside the altar heaved.
A jagged fissure split the ground. Steam vomited upward, scalding and sulfurous, and then a sound ripped through the Square that the world hadn’t heard in two thousand years.
A dragon’s roar.
