«BROTHER! »
The scream was Aegon's.
Sunfyre had been taking Silverwing's assault, his golden body scored and bleeding, his right wing all but crippled. But when Aegon looked back and saw his brother consumed by flame, something broke in him.
Not his courage. His fear.
What rose from the ashes of that fear was something he had never known he possessed.
Fury.
«SUNFYRE!» Aegon roared. His voice was raw, cracked, the voice of a boy who had just watched his brother die. «TURN! KILL HIM FOR ME!»
Sunfyre heard.
The golden dragon's weary, wounded body found strength in his rider's scream. Something kindled in his molten-gold eyes—something that had not been there before.
He stopped fleeing.
Silverwing was on his left, her claws reaching for the wound on his wing. Sunfyre did not evade. He did not dodge.
He spun.
His right wing—the wounded one, the torn one—beat once, twice, a savage, desperate stroke that sent a spray of golden blood across the sky. His body lurched. His shoulder drove into Grey Ghost's exposed chest.
*CRASH. *
Grey Ghost's fire cut off mid-stream. The pale dragon's shriek was a knife of sound.
He had been focused entirely on Vermithor's back—on the enemy who had killed his rider's brother. Mirax's face was twisted in vengeful glee, waiting to see Aemond burn.
He never saw the golden dragon coming.
«MIRAX—!» Sara's scream came too late.
Grey Ghost tumbled through the air, wings flailing, clawing for purchase. Mirax was thrown from the saddle; his hands caught the dragon's neck, his body swinging wildly over the void. The glee on his face had become terror.
The fire cleared.
Vermithor's back was blackened and smoking. Bronze scales hissed and wept blue vapor.
And in the center of the scorched ruin, a figure rose.
Aemond.
The upper half of his doublet was ash. It fell away from his body in flakes, carried off by the wind. Beneath, his torso was bare—muscular, scarred, bleeding.
But not burned.
His skin was flushed an angry red, as if he had been pulled from a forge. Steam rose from his shoulders, his chest, his arms. His silver hair whipped in the hot air, sparks still dying at the tips.
Blackfyre was in his hand. The blade hummed.
He stood on the back of a wounded, smoking dragon, and the fire in his violet eye burned hotterthan any flame Grey Ghost had loosed.
The morning light struck him from behind. It painted him in blood-gold. The heat rising from his skin made the air shimmer.
«Impossible,» Mirax breathed.
Then hate swallowed disbelief.
«KILL HIM! » he shrieked. «GREY GHOST—CLAWS! TEETH! TEAR HIM APART!»
Grey Ghost recovered. His wings snapped taut. He dove.
Aemond raised Blackfyre.
«SUNFYRE! »
Aegon's roar came again.
Sunfyre had no strength left for another charge. His wings were lead; his blood was water; his fire was ash.
But his rider commanded.
And so he moved.
Not a charge. A tackle. His hind legs seized Grey Ghost's waist; his weight dragged the pale dragon off course. They tumbled together, locked in a death-grip, claws raking, teeth seeking, wings beating wildly.
«BURN HIM, GREY GHOST!» Mirax screamed.
«BURN HIM, SUNFYRE!» Aegon screamed back.
Both dragons opened their jaws.
At the same time.
They were so close—face to face, chest to chest, the distance between them less than the span of a man's arms.
And they breathed.
Twin streams of dragonfire met in the space between them. The flames compressed, focused, became a single blinding lance of white-hot death.
Scales melted. Flesh charred. Blood boiled in the veins.
Both dragons screamed. Neither released. Neither stopped breathing fire.
They hung there, locked together, burning each other alive.
Aemond seized Vermithor's reins.
Vhagar was in trouble.
Silverwing had come around. The pale blue-green she-dragon was on Vhagar's flank, her jaws fastened on the old dragon's neck—one of the few places where even Vhagar's armor was thin.
*CRUNCH. *
Fangs met scale. Sparks flew.
Silverwing's teeth scraped across Vhagar's neck, leaving shallow white grooves in the ancient keratin. A few scales lifted. A thin line of blood welled up.
For Vhagar, it was a scratch.
For Silverwing, it was the first taste of victory.
Vhagar's amber eyes narrowed.
She turned her great head—slowly, deliberately, ignoring Vermithor's claws in her belly—and facedthe she-dragon who had dared to bite her.
She did not bite back.
She roared.
The force of it nearly tore Silverwing from the sky. The reek of sulfur, of ancient fury, washed over the younger dragon like a wave.
Sara screamed. Her hands seized the saddle; her body convulsed. The child in her belly kicked.
But it was not over.
Sheepstealer dove.
The brown dragon had broken free of Lothron's harassment. He came down from the heights like a falling star, jaws wide, fire already kindling in his throat.
His target: Vhagar's wounded left wing.
The dark red flame struck the wing-root directly.
Vhagar's scales there were already cracked—Vermithor's tail had done that. Now, under Sheepstealer's fire, the cracks spread. Scales lifted, curled, fell away. Beneath them, the flesh was raw and red.
The heat charred it.
Vhagar's roar changed. It was no longer the sound of battle.
It was the sound of pain.
And beneath the pain: betrayal.
Silverwing. Sheepstealer.
Her children.
All of them, turned against her.
Something in the old dragon cracked.
Not her scales. Not her flesh.
Her patience.
Vhagar went mad.
She forgot tactics. Forgot cunning. Forgot everything but the rage—the pure, incandescent rage of a mother whose children had become her enemies.
Her wings beat once, twice, a hurricane of force that shoved Vermithor away. Her body twisted. Her jaws opened.
And she breathed.
The dark green liquid fire poured from her gullet like a waterfall—not at Vermithor, but at Silverwing and Sheepstealer, the two who had dared to wound her.
Sara saw it coming.
Her mother's instinct did not scream for herself.
It screamed for the child in her womb.
«CLIMB!» she shrieked. «SILVERWING—FULL CLIMB!»
The silver dragon felt the threat. Her wings beat in desperate, almost vertical strokes; her body launched upward.
The fire missed.
It caught her belly, scored her scales, left them blackened and smoking. But she escaped the full force of it.
Sheepstealer was not so lucky.
He had been diving too fast, committed to his attack. Nettles, on his back, could not turn him. Could not control him.
The dark green fire engulfed his chest and belly.
*RRRAAAARRRRR! *
Sheepstealer's scream was a sound no one present had ever heard from him. It was not the roar of a wild dragon.
It was the shriek of a beast being skinned alive.
The fire clung. It burned through scales, through hide, through flesh. The heat was so intense that even steel would have melted.
Nettles was thrown by the violence of his rolling. She caught the saddle, her fingers white-knuckled, her body swinging in the wind.
«Sheepstealer!» she cried. «Please—!»
The brown dragon heard her.
Perhaps it was the girl's voice that reached him through the red haze of pain. Perhaps it was simply the instinct to flee.
Sheepstealer stopped fighting.
His wings beat—once, twice, a desperate, ragged rhythm. He clawed at the air. He fled.
East. Toward the rising sun. Toward Pentos. Toward anywhere that was not here.
His flight was a thing of agony. Each wingbeat sent fresh blood spraying from his burned chest. His shadow wavered on the waves below.
Then he was gone, a trail of black smoke smeared across the sky.
Silverwing wailed.
It was not a battle cry. It was a summons. A call to her mate, her rider's beloved, the bronze dragon who still fought Vhagar below.
Vermithor. Come. Flee with me.
Sara's face was white. Her belly cramped; her lip was bloody where she had bitten through it. She clutched the saddle with both hands, guiding Silverwing higher, higher, away from the carnage.
I cannot fight, she thought. Not with the babe. Not anymore.
We must flee. We must live.
Jacaerys's child must live.
Vermithor heard Silverwing's call.
He saw her climb. Saw the smoke rising from her belly. Saw the dark green fire that had driven Sheepstealer screaming from the sky.
And he saw the she-dragon who had done this.
Vhagar.
The hesitation in his eyes—the last remnant of the hatchling who had once known this ancient beast as mother—burned away.
What rose in its place was not pain.
Not duty.
Not the commands of a dead rider.
It was fury. Pure, primal, righteous fury.
Vermithor roared.
The sound was not the bellow of a wounded animal. It was the war cry of a dragon who had finally, finally, decided to kill.
His foreclaws—armored in the thickest bronze scales, tipped with talons that could shred iron—seized Vhagar's belly.
Not her armored chest. Not her scaled back.
Her belly.
The soft place. The vulnerable place. The place where even the oldest, largest dragons are weak.
His claws punched through.
*RRRAAAARRRRR! *
Vhagar's scream shook the island.
The old dragon's blood—dark, hot, almost black—poured from the wounds. Her hind legs kicked wildly; her tail lashed at Vermithor's flanks. Her wings beat, sending gale-force winds across the harbor below.
But Vermithor did not release.
He held. His weight bore her down. His claws twisted in her flesh. His other foreclaw found the wound on her shoulder and tore it wider.
The two dragons, locked together, began to fall.
Not a controlled descent. Not a tactical retreat.
A death-spiral.
They tumbled through the sky, clawing, biting, murdering each other, their combined mass a thousand tons of scale and fury plunging toward the black volcanic throat of Dragonstone.