A deep fury rises within me, an unearthly growl beyond that of a wolf. “Were you so intent on revenge that you didn’t see her, dragon?”
It’s as if my voice is a whip.
Graviter flinches.
I don’t stop, prowling closer to him, close enough that he could burn me to ash with a single puff of fire. Also close enough that I could leap up to his neck again and do a significant amount of damage to him.
“The woman whose hammer I made,” I roar. “The woman I died for!”
He shakes himself and takes a step back from me. “No, that’s not… Asha wasn’t there…”
He seems so confused that my eyes widen and my voice lowers. “You really didn’t see her?”
He stumbles back another step, teetering to the left before he drops to his haunches on the ground. His gaze has become unfocused. Maybe he’s replaying the last few moments within his mind. Maybe he’s realizing just how close he came to killing my hope and depriving this land of Asha’s power.
He is deathly pale, his scales blanching to an unsettling shade of ivory. I wait for them to revert to their previous golden color, but they don’t.
His whisper sounds horrified. “I nearly killed Asha Silverspun.”
My claws slowly retract, my arms now hanging loosely at my sides as I contemplate a dragon king brought low by his own rage.
When Graviter first came upon Asha and me up on the clifftop where we had found Milena Ironmeld, Graviter was mindless with rage.
Asha tried to reason with him. She told him she wasn’t his enemy. She didn’t want to hurt him.
He roared back at her that his son’s death had stolen the light from his heart. He told her he would not stop until all Blacksmiths were wiped from the face of the Earth.
He would have killed Asha then if I had not attacked him like I just did, using my claws to open up long gashes in his back.
Like now, it was only because of the physical pain I caused him that he seemed to regain clarity.
If nothing else, these experiences have taught me that a fire dragon’s rage is all-consuming.
He literally couldn’t see past it.
“What have I done?” he whispers.
The consequences must be dawning on him.
He threatened her. She wasn’t his enemy before, but now?
Graviter remains hunched on the ground while the other dragons land around us, all ten of them.
The crimson-scaled dragon drops to the ground first, its female rider immediately jumping from its back. The other human riders are only moments behind her, dismounting from their dragons right after she does.
The dragons and their humans take up a formation that arcs around me in a semi-circle. They block off any possible escape other than back into the city, and even then, I would need to run to one of the gaps in the wall since the gate is closed.
Of course, there’s always Blackbird.
I don’t have to take my eyes off the humans to locate him in the air behind me. Judging by the faint beat of his wings, he’s flying over the very northern end of the city, wisely keeping his distance from the dragons. He has nothing on their size.
The female rider of the crimson dragon reaches me.
She has dark-brown hair, chestnut-brown eyes, light-brown skin, and a pale-brown birthmark that extends down her left cheek and across her jaw. She’s wearing simple leather armor—protective plates across her chest and thighs—but is otherwise dressed in a black tunic and pants.
Her right hand and forearm are covered in what looks like a long, black metal glove.
“Kneel!” she roars at me.
