She could not let the dragons have the girl.
Te’oma stepped into the observatory just as the dragon queen took a swipe at Sallah that almost put an end to the lady knight’s quest. The changeling forced herself to ignore the woman and the warforged who pulled her to temporary safety behind the massive crystal. The two had attacked the dragon as a diversion away from the girl, and Te’oma meant to take as much advantage of that as she could.
She slunk toward the hole and peered down into it. The silver dragon blasted Burch with its icy breath, then Esprë reached out and attacked Kandler with the powers granted by her dragonmark.
Te’oma stifled a gasp. She’d never dreamed that the girl would be pressed far enough into a corner to lash out at her stepfather.
“Go,” the dragon said to Esprë. “I will watch over them.”
Esprë knelt down next to Kandler and felt his neck for a pulse. Then she slumped over him, and Te’oma heard her muffled sobs.
“You do not have long,” Greffykor said. “I will watch over them. They will not interfere.”
“You must promise me you will keep them safe,” the girl said. As she spoke, she moved over and stroked Burch’s mane. The half-frozen shifter stopped shivering for a moment.
“That is Frekkainta’s choice, not mine. I will not harm them.”
Esprë stood up and wiped her face with her sleeves. “Then that will have to be enough.”
The girl walked over to the rope and began to climb. She ascended faster than Te’oma would have thought she could have managed, but the girl’s heart had to be pumping fast enough that she must have felt as if she were flying up the rope.
Te’oma admired the girl’s resolve. Despite everything that had happened to her, she had set herself on a course from which she refused to be swayed, and she would do anything—even attack Kandler—to make sure she achieved her goal.
Te’oma felt only the tiniest pang of regret that she would have to derail those plans.
As Esprë reached the top of the hole, the changeling reached down and offered her a hand up. Despite the fact that her arms had to feel like wet noodles at that point, the girl ignored Te’oma’s hand and pulled herself up to the floor above her.
“I should have known I’d find you here,” Esprë said. “Every time something horrible happens, you’re right by my side.”
“How kind of you to eliminate your protectors.” Te’oma smiled at the girl, showing her perfectly even rows of teeth. “Now you have no way to keep me from spiriting you away from here.”
Esprë groaned. “We’re not going to go through all that again, are we? I thought you’d given up on trying to kidnap me.”
Te’oma put on a pained look. “I think of this as saving you.”
“I don’t want to be saved. I’m through being saved.”
Te’oma smirked. “I don’t recall offering you a choice.”
“I’ve already made it.”
The changeling looked down and saw the black glow suffusing the young elf’s hands.
55
Sallah hated screaming, but she couldn t help herself. She’d thought that Deothen had long ago hammered the urge out of her during her childhood training drills. Having a dragon queen breathe fire down at her seemed to have subverted all that though.
The lady knight took a deep breath, as if to scream once more, but this time Xalt slapped a steely hand across her mouth. He held it there until the urge to scream passed from her, and she pulled his fingers away.
The dragon put an eye up to the other side of the crystal, which magnified it until it seemed the yellowish orb had to stand at least twenty feet tall. It growled as it did, although Sallah couldn’t tell if the dragon meant to say something in Draconic or just wished to growl in frustration at the way the crystal blocked most of the effects of her flames.
While the jet of fire from the dragon’s mouth hadn’t been powerful enough to reach all the way around the crystal, much of the heat from it had. Sallah felt rivulets of sweat slipping down the inside of her armor, soaking her from head to toe and plastering her red curls against her neck and forehead.
“I will run to the left,” Xalt said. “When it follows me, you run for the doorway.”
“You’ll be killed.”
Xalt nodded toward the dragon’s monstrous eye. “That seems inevitable. This way, at least, one of us might have a chance.”
Sallah considered this for a moment, then made to bolt to the left. The warforged’s arms shot out and stopped her. “Let me do this,” he said.
“I can’t let someone else die in my stead.”
“I might not die. I’m not flesh and blood like you. The fire might not affect me as much.”
“Do you believe that?”
The warforged stared at her with his unblinking obsidian eyes. “Not really.”
Sallah reached over and kissed Xalt on the cheek. Despite the fact that his face was made of metal and wood instead of skin, it felt warm and smelled something like wet copper.
“You’re sweet,” she said, “but we’re getting out of this together or not at all.”
The crystal before them shuddered as the dragon queen slammed one of her mighty wings into it.
This time, Xalt screamed.
Monja wished nothing more than to fly the Phoenix straight into the observatory. She couldn’t tell for sure if the airship would fit through the gigantic doorway at the end of the landing platform, but that didn’t matter so much to her. She wanted to crash the craft into the observatory and destroy her, unleashing the rebellious elemental trapped in the ship’s ring of fire.
With luck, such an explosion would bring the observatory tumbling down. She knew it might kill every one of her friends—and perhaps herself—but if it killed the dragons too it would be worth it.
Unfortunately, the dragon-man refused to leave her alone. She knew that he could kill her in an instant. If he wanted to, he could murder her and be off the ship before her corpse even smacked into the deck.
“Go ahead,” he said to her. “Try it.”
Monja stared at the dragon-man. His eyes burned like lava.
“You never know,” he said as he turned to gaze at the observatory. “It might work. You might kill her. You might save them all.”
Monja bit her lower lip. “You just want an excuse to kill me.”
The dragon-man’s lips peeled apart, showing his several rows of pointed teeth. “What makes you think I need one?” 1
Monja’s hands felt sweaty on the airship’s wheel. “You want me to kill your mother?”
The dragon-man pursed his lips and kept staring straight ahead at the observatory. “I’ve waited a long time to become king.”
“How long?”
“Your people were still living in tents instead of burrows.” Monja’s brow creased. “We do live in tents.”
The dragon-man arched an eyebrow. “See? The Prophecy isn’t infallible after all.”
“You would let me kill your mother.”
The dragon-man looked down at the shaman. “I would probably stop you.”
“You don’t sound too sure of yourself.”
Monja could feel the elemental in the airship’s ring of fire straining at her will. The creature had no doubts about what should be done. If it could have spoken, it would have begged her to chance it, to aim the ship at the observatory’s doorway and smash her into the place, to leave this world in a glorious blaze.
“No matter what you do, I win,” the dragon-man said. “If you stay here, it does me no harm, and my mother will be pleased that I obeyed her orders. If you attack the observatory and fail, you will convince her that those from beyond the borders of our fair isle are unbalanced. That kind of paranoia I am sure I can exploit to my benefit.”