Gaven’s first impulse was to crush the airship between irresistible blasts of air, to shoot her through with lightning and scatter her flinders to the wind. Destruction was the easy path, the purest manifestation of his power. So simple, so tempting. The impulse startled him-his friend was aboard that ship. Why would he destroy her?
Gaven snarled his frustration, and lightning coursed around him. Destruction was easy. It was far more challenging to create, to build, to save. His anger was a tight knot in his gut-he felt it as he roared, like nausea. He wanted to curl his body around it, cradle it in his arms and vomit it out.
The wind tore at him in a manifestation of his rage, and the airship bucked against Darraun’s control.
No, Gaven thought. I need to let it go.
Layers upon layers of rage and resentment fueled the storm. The dragon’s attack mattered little, just the fury of a misguided minion, now undone. A thin layer of anger, easily sloughed away.
Haldren’s brewing rebellion angered him, the way Haldren had used him, manipulated him, coerced him. Was that truly significant? Haldren had also engineered his release from Dreadhold, and his attempt at conquest would soon be quashed. The world would return to its uneasy peace. Another layer gone.
The howling of the wind diminished, and Darraun managed to tame the blazing elemental fire in the airship, leaving only the bright ring.
Twenty-six years in Dreadhold…
Haunted by visions, plagued by nightmares, abused by guards and fellow prisoners alike…
So utterly alone in the wilderness of his mind.
Waking from sleep, night after night, to stumble to the door and speak his dreams through the shutter in the door-he’d done it long before Haldren had come to occupy the cell across the hall, as though giving his dreams voice would help exorcise them from his mind.
Carving the words into the floor and walls of his cell-writing them in his blood before they finally relented and gave him a stylus to scratch the stone. Trying to make them solid, to ground them, to fix them into the present.
It had nearly driven him mad-perhaps he had gone mad.
He wished for true freedom-freedom from the ceaseless pursuit of Bordan and the Kundarak dwarves, freedom from the visions that still besieged him day and night. That anger seethed and bubbled, fierce and hot. He squeezed his eyes shut and roared again. The wind snatched away his cry and carried his boiling anger with it. His knowledge of the Prophecy might have seemed like a curse in the past, but he was using it to his advantage. It had given him power and insight. It was a gift.
The Heart of Khyber with its stored memories. The dragon who had altered the course of his life. A hard shell of resentment.
“I’ve given your life a purpose,” the dragon said. Its voice was Gaven’s.
“I didn’t want that purpose.”
“But you chose a new one. You can’t carry on without one. And you will never again be content to live an ordinary life.”
Another gift. The hard shell broke and fell away, leaving a blazing core of molten fury.
Lightning seared through Gaven’s body, and he hung in the sky. Lightning flowed through each hand and foot and poured from his mouth as he screamed.
Rienne shook him gently awake. He sat bolt upright-he heard the jangle of chainmail.
Tears streamed down Rienne’s face. He was too stung by her betrayal to resist the Sentinel Marshals.
The person he loved most in the world sent him to Dreadhold. This anger was thick and hot, and would not fall away so easily.
At night in Dreadhold, waiting for the nightmares to come, he lay in his bunk and nursed that anger.
Rienne testified to the Tribunal. She wanted to convince them he needed help, but instead she convinced them of his guilt.
He glanced down to where she hung in the air, held aloft by the winds at his command. Again the urge to destroy welled up in him. It would be so easy to let her fall.
Four Sentinel Marshals struggled to restrain him. He wanted to get to Rienne, to break her neck, to tear her small, lithe body apart with his bare hands.
“Let him live, I implore you.” Rienne was pleading for him, even as he tried to reach her. “By all that is holy, have mercy! If he is mad, who knows but that he might one day recover his senses?”
For twenty-six years he’d nurtured a lie-a lie that let him focus his anger outward at her, instead of inward. Rienne had not betrayed him, she had tried to protect him. She had acted out of her love for him. He had kept her out while the Heart of Khyber had wormed its way into his heart-he had betrayed her.
“Don’t you think I deserve an explanation?” she said.
“No.”
“I think I do. I loved you once, Gaven, and you made me believe you loved me.”
Sobs wracked his body. “I’m sorry, Ree,” he whispered, and he imagined that the wind carried his voice down to her.
The knot of his anger was stripped down to its core.
“Let me see you, Gaven.” Arnoth stood over the parched, feverish body of his son.
Gaven huddled under a blanket that chafed against his sunburned skin.
“Let me see him,” Arnoth said.
Someone pulled the blanket off him, and Gaven felt his father’s eyes searching him, looking for any sign of a dragonmark. In vain-Gaven had failed his test.
A blur of faces surrounded him, but one face stood out clearly-his father’s, trying to smile.
“I am not you!” Gaven cried into the storm.
A young Gaven held an orb of magical light in his palm, full of excitement at his first successful spell. “Look, father!” he cried.
Arnoth stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, smiling with pride. “Well done, Gaven,” he said. “Keep practicing.” He turned away, returning to his work.
Gaven dismissed the spell and refused to try it again for a week’s time.
All his life Gaven had resented the firm hand of a domineering father, and had blamed Arnoth for every act of rebellion he had committed. He had imagined a father who was determined to mold his son into a replica of himself, and he’d been blind to the pride Arnoth took in the son he had-not the son Gaven thought he wanted.
“Why don’t you apply yourself, Gaven?” An older Arnoth frowned in the doorway as Gaven packed supplies for an expedition into Khyber, hunting for dragonshards.
“I am applying myself,” Gaven said, not looking up. “And doing good for the house.”
“But you could do so much more! You have greatness in you, Gaven.”
Greatness? Gaven thought. You mean I have you in me. I am not you!
Gaven had avoided any achievement of consequence, and used his father’s high expectations as an excuse for his own failure. He had clung to the image of a stern and distant father because that was an image it was easy to blame-and for years he had channeled his anger at that image instead of at himself.
A fresh wave of grief surged through him.
I love you, father.
Lightning blasted the rock around Gaven’s feet, and only then did he realize that he had come down to the ground. He blinked and looked around, and saw Rienne standing ten paces away, staring into the air with wide eyes. He followed her gaze to where the Eye of the Storm floated calmly under a slate-gray sky.
Darraun managed to get the ship down close to the ground, and Gaven and Rienne climbed back aboard. Darraun was glad to relinquish the helm, but worry creased his face.
“I spotted Haldren’s forces,” he said, gesturing vaguely to the south. “They’re on the march already.”
“We should have no trouble catching up to them,” Gaven said as he settled himself in at the helm. Darraun had done well piloting the ship this time; the elemental seemed much more docile already.