The Dragon's Price (Transference #1)(78)
Golmarr, still on his hands and knees, is almost entirely surrounded by mist. Only his head rises above it. I grip my staff in my hands and run toward him, making the mist dance and swirl away from me. When I reach him, he looks up. His skin is ashen and beaded with sweat. “My head,” he mumbles. “It’s been hit one too many times.” Slowly, he gets to his feet.
“The mist turns into glass,” I blurt. “Without the mist, nothing will freeze. We have to stop the mist!”
“How?” Golmarr asks.
The answer comes to me, just like it did before: fire. I look across the field, to the smoldering and smoking bodies, and I want that fire. I want it to warm me, to feed me, to take the icy chill out of my hands that has been there for days. I need that fire. A single spark bounces out of the smoldering pile and lands on the grass, rising up to a small flame. And then, like a narrow stream of water, the fire trickles its way toward me through the grass—a perfectly straight line of orange. Everywhere the fire touches, the mist turns to steam and evaporates.
“Sorrowlynn?” Golmarr says, backing away as the fire starts licking the hem of my pants. I bend down and thrust my hands into the bright orange flames. The fire flares around them and wraps itself over my entire body. I stand and the fire clings to me, so everything I see has turned orange, for I am seeing it through flames. My clothes fill with warmth and heat seeps into my skin. Energy enters my flesh and soaks into my blood. With every beat of my heart, warmth pulses through my body, feeding me more perfectly than any food I have ever eaten.
A dense weight slams into my back, and I am thrown to the ground. Golmarr is atop me, smothering the flames with his cloak, but when he pulls away, my clothes and flesh are unmarked. “That didn’t burn you,” he whispers.
I open and close my warm hands and look at him in wonder. “It fed me.”
Golmarr helps me to my feet and readies himself to fight the dragon again.
Fire might protect you, but ice will still kill him. I assure you, his death will be more painful to you than anything else I could do, the dragon says, her voice soft and lilting in my head. I look at Golmarr and the mist swirling around his feet in the exact moment the glass dragon blasts her breath at him. Without thinking, without understanding how, I thrust up a tall wall of flames between Golmarr and the dragon. When Corritha’s breath hits it, the fire billows and scatters like gold stars and then re-forms into a wall. The white breath turns to pale wisps of steam that disappear against the sky. The dragon blows another blast of freezing air and tries to scatter the fire, but it holds. On one side of the fire wall, the golden grass is encased in solid, immovable ice. On the other side, the grass ripples in the wind; there isn’t so much as a speck of frost on it.
A wave of hatred shudders through my body. You think you have won this battle simply because you have used Zhun’s magic to shield my breath, but you are no match for my strength, little girl, the dragon says. Her great, spiked tail sails through the air, and for a moment the memory of the fire dragon’s tail crushing my ribs makes my knees tremble. Clutching my staff to my chest, I dive forward and roll onto slick, frigid ice just as the tail soars over my head. The dragon swings her tail again, and I dig my staff into the ice, trying to move out of the way. Her tail collides with my hip, and I slide across the frozen ground. Before I can get up, a massive foot lowers over my body, its claws shattering the ice I am lying on, but stops before it crushes me. Slowly, one tiny bit at a time, the pressure increases. I swing my staff at the creature’s hind leg—at the bloody gash made by Golmarr—but it merely bounces off the green scales.
Every knight in shining armor feels it is his duty to save a helpless maiden, Corritha says. You are my bait. I know the hearts of men well enough to know that the noble ones will risk their lives to do what they think is right. If he is noble, he will come and try to save you, and then I will have the pleasure of freezing him and eating him before your very eyes. If he is not noble, I will slowly crush you. A forked tongue darts out of the dragon’s mouth and touches my face. And then I will eat you, and he will be eaten up with guilt until the day he dies. The pressure on my body increases until I feel my ribs start to bend inward, and I cannot breathe.
From the corner of my eye, I see Golmarr in his bright cloak start sprinting toward the dragon. As the dragon draws in a massive breath of air, the mist hovering on the ground is sucked toward her mouth.
“Stop,” I try to shriek to Golmarr, but I cannot get enough breath into my lungs. Golmarr runs faster, and the dragon’s mouth is opening. Reaching toward the fire still hovering in a straight line along the grass, I pull it to me and throw it in the dragon’s gaping mouth just as a blur of blinding vermilion streaks over my head and onto the dragon’s leg. Golmarr lifts the reforged sword and plunges it into the dragon’s side, all the way to the hilt. The moment the sword pierces through the scales, the pressure pinning me to the ground eases. Golmarr pulls his sword out and thrusts it into the great beast again. The reforged metal cuts through the dragon’s inky green scales like they are great drops of water. The talon lifts off my body and the dragon hisses as she tries to snap Golmarr from her back, but he ducks and thrusts again, plunging his sword into the space where the dragon’s neck meets her body, and then yanks it free. Slowly, the dragon tips to her side and lands beside me with shattering force. Shards of ice explode around the creature’s body, creating a cloud that shimmers like diamonds in the sunlight and pierces my skin.