Page 8 of House of Ashes
I turned, heart racing, and stared up at the black dragon who hung over my head.
His eyes were fiery coals in a head large enough to swallow me with one bite. Silver teeth gleamed against thick obsidian scales. Every wingbeat sent the mist scudding further away, blowing my hair and clothes back.
I raised an arm as the dragon moved in, clawed forearms reaching out for me. “No, damn you!”
He gripped me around the middle, lifting away from the earth with a titanic clap of his wings. I watched the ground drop away, the blood rushing from my head and dizziness making it almost impossible to keep my stomach in place.
I couldn’t slide free from the cage of claws, but being carried by a dragon was so much worse than I’d ever believed it would be.
A rider was able to speak to her dragon, mind to mind. His sensory capacity would prevent her from losing her mind to fear when they were miles above the ground; he would feed steadiness and the knowledge of his movements into her, as she fed sensory input and direction into him.
This dragon was not my mate. All I knew was that if he despised the Silvered Embers, if he held a grudge against me or my House, all he had to do was relax his grasp, and I would plummet a mile, screaming and flailing all the way, to smash to pieces on the rocky moors below.
I gripped his claws tightly, anticipating that exact death as I sent a prayer to Nakasha of the Scale, but he kept them firmly clasped around me.
Maybe she was listening, and had offered her protection. I could only hope.
The bonfire of Farpost fell into the distance. My eyes began to water as the wind whipped my face, but when I blinked, a thin film, like a transparent eyelid, slid over my eyeballs to protect them—the nictitating membranes all draga possessed.
That made me rear back, taken by surprise at the sensation. The nictitating membranes, called the ‘third eyelids’, didn’t tend to come into use until their first flight with their mates.
It was impossible to get them to descend during training or to practice ahead of time—like breathing or sleeping, they were something the body did automatically, given the right conditions.
They felt strange, slightly uncomfortable, but not painful. The world was just as clear seeing through them as it was without them, and my eyes were protected from the wind.
The black dragon seemed content to soar over Mistward, heading north. The moors began to give way to sharp, ridged hills, mostly bare of vegetation. The island as a whole was gray and stony, inhospitable to farming, which was why the ferrymen ran good business by importing shipments.
I distracted myself from thoughts of certain death by examining the layout of the land through these new, strange eyelids. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to traverse much of the island on foot.
But pondering a path kept my mind from the more alarming questions, like who the black dragon was, and why, exactly, he wanted me. There was something familiar in the rich darkness of his scales, but…surely he could not be that one.
I would keep the promise I’d made to myself over Kalros. Anyone who thought they could forcibly mate me was going to be in for an unpleasant surprise, one involving teeth and sharp nails.
The dragon wove between cliffs, riding a thermal current. The air here smelled fresher, cleaner; there were few settlements on the northern tip of Mistward. Farpost’s omnipresent reek of burned meat, oil, piss, and shine had long been left behind.
And when the mist parted, giving way to clear air, my mouth dropped open when I saw where the dragon was headed.
There was an eyrie in the mountains of Mistward.
It was old and decayed, most of the stone columns cracked or outright shattered, built into the side of a mountain that seemed like it would crumble at the slightest touch. The dragon terrace jutted from the top of the mountain, a precarious, open-air plate of stone designed to support dragons of any size and weight, but this one looked…less than capable.
Nonetheless, my captor pumped his wings, thrusting us upward, and circled over the dragon door, a massive, rounded opening that allowed him to drop into the eyrie’s terrace from above.
It was dark, of course. My mouth went dry as the dragon flapped once, twice, sending gusts of pebbles and dust through the columns. The mountain was so silent that I clearly heard them clatter down the mountainside.
The dragon’s hind legs hit the floor first, and there was an alarming crack as the ancient stone took his full weight. His wings tucked in against his back, and he gripped me with one clawed hand as he settled his foreleg.
Then he dropped me on the floor. I sent up a puff of dust when I hit the ground, and waved it away, trying to cough quietly. Gods only knew if other dragons were hiding in these mountains. An entire eyrie…that would be a windfall of fortune for any exile who explored this far.
I surreptitiously watched my abductor as he twisted his head around, examining one of his bloodied hind legs with visible irritation.
He was one of the largest dragons I’d ever seen; my guess on his lineage was accurate. Whoever he was, he came from a very ancient line.
“Thank you so much,” I said, cringing a little as my voice came out much louder than expected. It bounced off the bare walls, making it sound like a thousand Seras all shouted back at once. “That was a very daring rescue. Perfectly timed, in fact.”
The dragon’s enormous head turned to face me, his coal-like eyes narrowed to red slits.
Then he shifted, his mass returning to that of a male, wings and tail vanishing.