Page 47 of The Dragon Queen

I should be so nervous that my mouth was full of bile, but my heart beat so slowly it seemed about to stop for good. My palms were dry like the air in the Arid Sands. My body carried armor made of dragon scales with a sword that Calista could barely pick up, but I felt weightless.

The moment had arrived—and I was ready.

Khazmuda looked up the cliff, as if that would somehow make him hear better. Then he turned to me.Inferno and Macabre and the others are moving in. Calista and Queen Eldinar are safe.He looked at me like he expected a response.Are you ready, Talon Rothschild?

I’d never felt so calm and so angry at once. My muscles were pumped with the blood I would need to wield my sword fasterthan I ever had before. My focus was a concentrated force of blood lust. Even without my dragon and my powers, I was the most powerful man in this hemisphere.

Because I was that angry. “Yes.”

Khazmuda lowered his body so I could climb up his scales onto the saddle.As am I.

I gripped the horn of the saddle as he jumped from the beach, his powerful wings making him ascend into the sky faster than ever before. I could feel the pull on my body, the way my weight shifted backward as the wind slapped so hard into my face it created tears.

The cliff was high, an imposing mountain in the sky, but we reached the top in mere seconds.

Khazmuda rose above the castle, the torches around the courtyard basking it in light. Time seemed to stop for a short moment when Khazmuda opened his toothy mouth and released the mightiest roar I’d ever heard.

“Rooooooooaaaaaaaarrrrrrrr.”

Powerful enough to collapse the cliff at our feet, it was deafening on the ears, audible to every person in the Southern Isles.

It’s time to burn.

“It is.” I looked at the castle in the dark, the night identical to the final one I remembered. The only thing that was different was the trees cut down and used to torch my family. New trees had never been planted, so the dead stumps still protruded from the soil. Decades had passed, and Barron’s memory of the execution had dulled—but mine had never faded.

Khazmuda swooped down and landed in the courtyard—in the very place where he’d saved my life.

I dropped down his side and landed hard on the stone, but my body was packed with more adrenaline than it could possibly expend so I recovered from it quickly. I walked in front of Khazmuda and unsheathed my blade, ready for my challenger to try to take it from me, to be foolish enough to try to finish the job he started twenty years ago.

Khazmuda pushed from the ground and took flight.

I continued to the front of the castle, the hilt gripped in a steady hand. I wouldn’t enter the castle and chase him down in the drawing room or his chambers. He would meet me right where I stood, the very place where my wife drew her last breath because she turned to ash.

Angry tears burned my eyes. I felt the strain in my face as I clenched my jaw and ground my teeth. I had too much rage to keep inside any longer. I’d stored it in every corner of my body, but now it oozed from every pore, released with every breath.

The soldiers who guarded the castle turned frantic at the sight of Khazmuda in the air, quickly realizing this wasn’t one of the dragons that served them. In the dark, he was hard to see, one with the night.

“Rooooooaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrr.”

I’d recognize my dragon’s voice anywhere. He felt my anger and released a roar so loud it shook the stars in the sky and made them fall into the sea.

“Roooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar.”

The soldiers hesitated before they came for me, despite the fact that there were dozens of them and only one of me.

I flicked my sword around my wrist before I slammed my fist right into my chest plate. “You will die for a king who won’t die for you.” I raised my fist before I slammed it down once again.

Then they came—the dead.

The living soldiers moved in, all coming toward me at once.

I came at the first one and struck my sword with such speed, it slashed straight through the metal plate of his armor. I kicked him back before I slid my sharp blade straight through the neck of another. With an unbreakable focus, I handled the soldiers like it was a dance rather than a fight.

Some of them screamed when they realized we weren’t alone.

“What the fuck!”

Those who had fallen before converged on my enemies. The dead from the graveyard on the outskirts of the courtyard, the one that contained my relatives who had passed on before my time, rising once again to fight for the kingdom that was in my blood. My grandfather and my great-grandfather and his father before him. Surrounded by my dead kin, I slew the soldiers like they had no wives or children, like they weren’t human at all.