Minutes might have passed. Hours. I drifted in a haze of pain and bond-strain, aware of voices but unable to parse them. Someone was arguing. Goff, I thought. And the hawk-girl. Words like ransom and message and how long filtered through without landing.
Azurene was still there. Still alive. I clung to that knowledge like a lifeline. The bond hadn't broken. It was thin, agonizing, wrong in a way that made my soul feel like it was being stretched on a rack, but it was there.
Hold on, I tried to send. I'm coming. I'll get you out. Just hold on.
If she heard me, she couldn't answer.
A door slammed somewhere. New voices. Excited. Someone said something about patrol and saw and moving fast.
"How many?"
"At least six. Palace colors."
"Shit." Goff's voice, sharp with something that might have been fear. "How did they..."
"Does it matter? We need to go. Now."
"The kid..."
"Leave him! He's not worth dying for!"
Footsteps. Running. The building around me erupted into chaotic motion; people grabbing things, shouting, scattering. I tried to lift my head, to see what was happening, and the effort sent fresh waves of agony through my skull.
The door exploded inward.
No. Not exploded. Cut. A blade of wind, invisible and surgical, sheered through the wood and sent splinters flying. Palace guards poured through the gap; four, six, more; all of them armed, all of them moving with the terrible speed of people trained to kill.
Goff turned to run.
He didn't make it two steps.
The first guard reached him in a blur of motion. A sword flashed. Goff's head hit the ground before his body did.
I heard screaming. The hawk-girl. She was trying to flee through a back window, her Anima already airborne. A guard raised a hand, formed a hand seal I recognized from my tutors' demonstrations. Lightning arced from his fingertips. The hawk fell from the air in a burst of singed feathers. The girl fell a heartbeat later, halfway through the window, her body going limp.
No.
The boy with the rat Anima, the one Azurene had bitten, was huddled in a corner. He couldn't have been more than fourteen. His hands were raised. He was saying something; please and didn't mean and just a job; but the guard walking toward him didn't slow.
No, stop, don't...
The sword came down.
I closed my eyes. It didn't help. I still heard the sound.
More screaming. More thuds. The wet noise of steel meeting flesh. Someone was crying; high and terrified, begging in a voice that cracked on every word. Then that voice cut off too, and the crying became silence.
When I opened my eyes, the building was full of bodies.
They lay where they'd fallen. Goff, headless, his wolfdog already dissolving into ash beside him. The hawk-girl, crumpled half-in and half-out of the window. The rat-boy in his corner. Others I hadn't seen clearly; teenagers, kids, street rats who'd made a choice and paid for it with everything.
Blood pooled across the floorboards. It reached my feet and I couldn't move away from it. Could only stare as it spread, dark and terrible in the dim light.
A guard knelt in front of me. His face was professionally blank. "Young master. Can you hear me?"
I tried to speak. Nothing came out.
"We need to move him. He's in shock."
"The dragon..."
"In that cage. Get it open. Carefully."
Hands lifted me. I felt the blood on my skin, someone else's blood, soaking through my commoner's clothes. The guard carried me like I weighed nothing, stepping over bodies without looking down.
Behind us, metal screeched. The cage opening. A flash of white through my fading vision.
Azurene.
The bond flooded back.
It was too much. After the thin agony of separation, the sudden rush of connection overwhelmed everything. My dragon's terror and relief and love crashed through me in a wave I couldn't process, and for a moment I was drowning in her emotions, unable to find my own.
Then she was against my chest. Scales pressed to skin. The bond singing with the rightness of proximity restored.
I've got you, she said. I've got you. You're safe. I've got you.
I wasn't safe. I would never be safe again. The guards had killed everyone. Teenagers. Kids. Cut them down like they were nothing, like their lives were just obstacles between the palace and its wayward prince.
But I couldn't say any of that. Could only hold my dragon and shake and listen to the aftermath of violence settle into terrible silence.
They carried me out of the building.
The street was full of more guards. Horses. A carriage with the Azure Drakon crest on its door. Someone important had sent a lot of people to find me.
Father, I thought dully. Father knows.
A new sound cut through the fog. Running footsteps. A voice I recognized.
"Vale!"
Cassandra.
She came tearing around the corner, Raikiri at her heels, lightning crackling wild and bright around them both. Her face was pale. Her eyes found the bodies first, visible through the shattered doorway of the building. Then they found me, bloodied and broken in a guard's arms.
"Vale!"
She ran toward me.
A guard intercepted her. Grabbed her arm. She twisted, fought, and he shoved her hard enough to send her stumbling back. Raikiri snarled and the guard's hand went to his sword.
"No!" The word ripped out of me, hoarse and desperate. "She's a friend! Don't hurt her!"
"Stand down," someone ordered. An officer, maybe. "The girl's not a threat."
Cassandra pushed forward again. Her eyes were locked on mine, wide and horrified and searching. "What happened? What did they do to you?"
"I'm..." The words stuck in my throat. What could I say? I'm fine? I'm hurt but alive? Look at all the dead kids behind me, the ones your people knew, the ones whose blood is still on my shoes?
"Take the prince to the carriage," the officer said. "We're moving."
"No, wait..." Cassandra reached for me. Another guard blocked her path. "Vale!"
They lifted me into the carriage. The movement sent fresh agony through my ribs, my face, everything that had been beaten. Azurene pressed closer, her presence the only anchor in a world that had stopped making sense.
Through the carriage window, I saw Cassandra's face. She was standing in the middle of the street, Raikiri pressed against her legs, surrounded by guards who watched her like she was just another threat to be neutralized. Her mouth was moving. Shouting something I couldn't hear through the glass.
My name, probably.
The carriage lurched into motion.
Cassandra didn't chase us. Couldn't have caught us if she'd tried. But she stood there, in the street, watching me go. Her face was the last thing I saw before consciousness finally failed.
Pale. Terrified.
And something else I didn't recognize until much later, replaying the moment in the dark of my palace bedroom:
Betrayed.
The carriage ride passed in fragments.
Voices above me, discussing something urgent. The driver calling for people to clear the way. Hoofbeats and wheel-clatter and the distant sound of the city continuing its evening as if nothing had happened.
Azurene stayed curled on my chest, her weight both grounding and painful against my injured ribs. Through the bond, I felt her cycling between relief and terror and a protective fury that kept spiking whenever the carriage hit a rough patch.
They hurt you, she kept saying. They hurt you and I couldn't stop them.
It's not your fault.
I should have been stronger. Should have been bigger. Should have...
You're ten years old. There were six of them with weapons and numbers and...
You could have died. Her voice cracked. You could have died and I would have been in that cage and I would have felt it happen and there was nothing I could...
But I didn't. I managed to get my hand onto her scales, stroking the ridge along her spine. I'm here. We're both here.
She didn't respond. Just pressed closer. The bond hummed with things neither of us had words for.
The carriage stopped.
Light flooded in as the door opened. Servants, I realized dimly. Healers. People in palace livery reaching for me, lifting me, carrying me through corridors I'd walked a thousand times but couldn't recognize now.
Aldric's face appeared above me, grey with worry. He was saying something. I couldn't hear it.
Iris. She was there too, clutching a servant's hand, her little face scrunched up like she was trying not to cry. Her Anima; a small golden creature whose species I'd never been able to identify; made distressed sounds from her shoulder.
More faces. More voices. The world tilted and spun and nothing would hold still long enough for me to understand it.
Then I was in a bed. My bed. The familiar ceiling of my chambers swam overhead. Hands moved over my body, cleaning wounds, applying bandages, feeding me something bitter that numbed the pain without quite stopping it.
Sleep, Azurene said. You need to sleep.
Can't.
Try.
I closed my eyes. The darkness behind them was filled with images I couldn't escape. Goff's head rolling across the floor. The hawk-girl crumpled in the window. The rat-boy's hands, raised in surrender, still raised when the sword came down.
Cassandra's face. Pale. Terrified. Betrayed.
I opened my eyes again. The ceiling was still there. The pain was still there. Everything was still there.
But something had changed.
The boy who'd snuck out of the palace to find adventure, who'd learned to pick locks and name stars and trust a street girl with his secrets; that boy was gone. He'd died in that building, along with everyone else.
I just hadn't noticed yet.
*