Then burning them to ashes from the inside out.
“Well, I guess their help was a onetime deal.” Bjorn snorts as he helps me heal a deep bite-wound on my thigh from one wight.
“Couldn’t have picked a better time to aid us, though.” Ström grins as he helps heal a bite on Bjorn’s foot, which Bjorn is ignoring to heal me.
As we all come back into fighting shape, despite the crazy battle we had just now, I feel how our celebration elevates us. Because we fucked some shit up, and we mostly got what we came for, capturing the four wights’ souls inside Baldur’s stone.
And we’ve never been in a better position to best the Black Dragon, whenever we face it next.
As I feel the Black Dragon roar through my mind again, however, I sober, understanding that time may come far sooner than we know. But it’s not here now; even though the Dragon of All Souls has rediscovered its birthplace, Aesa’s protection around the city gone, I feel how the Usurper is still far down upon Sweden’s southern coast.
It will not accost us right now; I know it will soon, though, incensed as Hedda is over the loss of her drakes. I push back a sudden fear that this is exactly what she wants, somehow; then refocus on our agenda, because I can only take this all step by step as I spit in the face of fate.
Even as we celebrate, however, elated with our victory, something other than the Black Dragon suddenly rushes in from the skies. A drakaina, she crash-lands upon the cavern’s floor beside the bed, as she shudders, spent from a fast, long flight.
As that drakaina shifts down into a tall woman with long russet hair, I’m amazed to see Mikka Halsbrand, Head Watcher of the False Black Dragon Knights, before us. As she pants hard, Mikka strides right to me.
Clamping a hand on my arm and penetrating me with her sober violet eyes.
“Rikyava! They’re coming!” She heaves now as she grips me. “The Knights’ Council! They’ve found your whereabouts. They know you’re here. They?—”
But before she can even finish speaking, the night sky above us suddenly fills with dragons. They blaze in through a portal, and are all-at-once dominating the skies.
There are hundreds of them—as the False Knights suddenly come to trap us in force. It’s then that I know Hedda’s deceived us. For it was her black, eternal energy that called the False Knights right to us—through her mortal instrument, Litha, who has been masquerading as Ruta this entire time.
Now, the False Knights have caught us, cordoning off the skies above our cavern with massive swathes of multi-colored Bloodwinds, making a towering Bloodnet above and all around us, so we cannot escape. As they do, a group of four wings down, alighting upon the darkened runes of the cavern floor before us.
The last remaining members of the High Council of the Black Dragon Knights.
Including Ruta—Litha herself.
As all those mighty dragons shift down now into their human forms, I see Lars, Arvid, and Anya standing with Ruta. A terrible pronouncement is in their eyes as they pin their fury upon me. I push up off the ruinedbed with my drakes, however, to stand in their presence rather than sit on my naked ass.
It’s then that I see how only Ruta, Lars, and Arvid seem to be in their right minds, however. Though she’s sober, Anya looks confused, as if she’s not entirely certain why she’s here.
Mikka gives a terrible growl beside me.
“Beware, Rikyava!” Mikka says before the Council can speak. “They’re all bewitched. Ruta’s done something to them?—”
“Silence, traitor. We will deal with you and your insubordination against this Council presently.” Ruta’s gravelly old voice blisters through the cavern like a whip, as her rheumy, all-blind eyes shift from Mikka to me. “Rikyava Andersen and your renegade Bloodmates. You have defied an Excommunication by the High Council of the Black Dragon Knights; the punishment for this most heinous crime is death, by the Council’s ancient laws. We are here to carry out this sentencing, posthaste. Resist and we will?—”
“Cut the shit,” I interrupt then, as I stare Ruta’s blind, old wizened form down.
Because I know it’s a sham—all of it.
“We all know who you are.” I am vicious now as I stare at her, stone-cold and blistering throughout my entire Bloodwalker power. I’m backed up by my drakes tightening in a protective, snarling knot all around me now. “Reveal yourself. Show us your true face… Litha.”
But something strange moves through Ruta’s lined visage now as she cocks her head, searching me with her blind white eyes. “After all your sleuthing, all your searching… do you really not know who I truly am? Little sister.”
“Little… what?”
Before I can say anything more in my befuddlement at Ruta’s response, her visage shifts. Suddenly, the wizened old Matriarch no longer stands before me, nor some other drakaina I was sure would be a tall, fierce battle-maiden of the ages,as Litha.
But my very own older sister—LithavaAndersen.
Fallen at the battle for the Grand Palace during her coup, Lithava has been dead these past twenty years, thanks to me and Bjorn. But she’s not dead, somehow, as my sister stands before me now, just as she ever was.
With bright blond hair almost Bjorn’s golden color, plus truly vivid lavender eyes that shine even more vibrantly than mine, Lithava is my similar stature but far more slender.
