Rayna’s movements were jerky and uneven, and Sakarias wrapped both his arms around Anders to keep him in place, taking handfuls of his fur and clinging to him.
Desperately, pulling up every last ounce of his energy, Anders threw his icefire again, hardly seeing what was happening. He hurled it out blindly into the void between the wolves and dragons with everything he had, hoping against hope they’d see that neither side could win. That he’d stand between them, force them back to peace. That they’d believe it, before he completely ran out of energy.
The silver flames bloomed, and then they kept growing—and growing.
And growing.
They blossomed out until they were almost touching the combatants, sending the wolves scurrying back along the wall with howls of alarm, the dragons veering sharply away to escape by a hairsbreadth.
This flame was impossibly large. Impossibly strong.
Because it wasn’t just his.
Rayna, who hadn’t breathed a single flame, not a spark, since her transformation, had joined him.
His sister had found the same well inside her that he’d discovered in his desperation, the gift of both their mother and their father, and as the augmenters Hayn had left them did their work, he knew that together their silver flames were bigger, stronger, more powerful than his had been alone.
Though she brought a dragon’s fire and he brought a wolf’s ice to their silver flames, together they would always be stronger. No difference between them—no time apart—could weaken them. The more they grew, the more they learned to know themselves, the stronger they became.
The Snowstone was gone now, and the Sun Scepter, and together, in this moment, the twins were the most powerful thing in Holbard.
The silver flame rolled out across the city, consuming ice spears and dragonsfire, consuming everything in its path.
It halted the spread of the ice in the streets below.
It calmed the hot wind left behind by the Sun Scepter.
It traveled out and out, enveloping everyone and everything, leaving them standing in its wake, their fire cooled and their ice gone.
And when it finally dissipated at the city walls, everything below them was still and silent.
Anders had nothing left, and he was sure Rayna didn’t either, but she gamely circled around, as if to bluff the adult dragons that the twins were ready to do it again, andagain, until everyone else gave way to them.
What would happen if the wolves somehow rallied for one more attack?
What would happen if Torsten and the dragons swooped in to breathe their white-gold flame again?
Anders howled his warning, and Rayna bugled her challenge, and both of them knew they were lying—that this was their last and only remaining move.
One second passed, and with it a swoop of Rayna’s wings, a thump of Anders’s heart.
Another second.
Another.
And then, as the children watched, the members of the Dragonmeet turned one by one toward the northwest.
And they flew away from the city, on a course for Drekhelm.
Chapter Sixteen
DARKNESS WAS FALLING RAPIDLY AS THE DRAGONSdisappeared into the blue velvet of the night. Anders could still make out the wolves in the city below, forming up, ready to defend Holbard if the four dragons still above them descended.
Rayna and the others were talking about something, bellowing to one another across the distance between them, but he had no way of knowing what they were saying. Some decision must have been made, though—as one, they turned for the west. They were leaving the city but picking out a direction that made it clear they weren’t following the adults.
They crossed the Sudrain River by moonlight after about half an hour, and slowly descended to land near a clump of trees in the farmland beyond it. The Great Forest of Mists loomed on the horizon, black trees wreathed in white fog.
One by one the dragons came to ground, and the wolves slid down from them. Anders transformed as soon as his paws hit the earth, and once human, silently pulled off Rayna’s harness so she could do the same. Nearby, Lisabet was seeing to Ellukka. Both the harnesses were charred in places, and he wasn’t sure Rayna’s would hold if they used it again.
