“There!” I said, pointing to the target. “Look!”
Winston nodded his head up and down once before he shifted his weight, turning us toward the empty spot where I was sure the dryads would be—where they had to be, since there was nowhere else they could have run.
Winston dropped lower on his next pass, and I craned my head over his shoulder, still clinging to his neck. There, around the edges of the circle, were shapes. We flew lower so I could see them better in the smoke. The dryads I’d sent out to Sorcastia—it was definitely them. The only problem was they were scattered around, lying on their backs on the ground, and none of them were moving.
Winston must have recognized them, too, because before I could say anything, he took another pass, going lower this time, before circling again and arching upward, letting himself hover over the space in a graceful descent.
He dropped his front legs to the ground, and then I slipped off his back, dangling for a second before letting go and landing in a heap underneath him. Not bothering to worry about the fact that I was going to have a bruise the size of Connecticut on my butt, I pulled myself to my feet and looked around quickly, trying to find someone, anyone, as I unsheathed my sword and held it in trembling fingers.
Winston roared, and I turned to see him standing on his back legs, beating his wings as he scanned the forest. He dropped forward onto his front legs and began to stalk around the outside edge of the clearing, searching for enemies in the inferno.
What had happened here? The fire hadn’t touched anything inside the circle, so it hadn’t been what caused the dryads to collapse. Had it? Could the smoke have knocked them all unconscious? Was there some sort of poison in the air? I brought my arm up in front of my face, trying to cover my mouth and nose with the material from my shirtsleeve.
I hurried over to the closest woman and knelt beside her, reaching for her shoulder to turn her over rather than keeping my makeshift fire mask up. When my hand landed on her back, I felt the sticky wetness of blood and pulled away for a second, looking at my now-red hand before I dropped my sword.
“Win!” I held my hand up for him to see the blood on it.
“Your Majesty?” I heard a faint croak, and my heart clenched even as I started to look around. “Your Majesty?”
“Darinda? Darinda! Where are you?” I coughed, gagging on the smoke as I brought my hand back up in front of my face to block the smoke. I tried to scan the clearing through the haze and snatched up my sword again.
“Here, I’m here, Queen Allie,” Darinda called out from somewhere inside the smoky cloud.
I saw a flutter of movement on the other side of the clearing and sprinted toward her, trying my best to avoid the burning branches that were starting to crash down around us. I bolted across the space, my head tucked to avoid the flames, and dropped to my knees beside the green, heavily muscled head of the Dryad Order. The gnarled tree branch she used as a walking stick was clutched in her right hand.
“What happened? Where are you hurt? Where’s Mercedes?” I coughed again.
“She’s gone.” Darinda shook her head, her tight-cropped silver curls brushing against the leaves around her, making a low, quiet, crinkling noise that I could barely hear over the roar of the fire around us.
“I told the Sapling to run. I told her to run, to go to—” Darinda coughed, her entire chest shaking from the force of the air coming from her lungs. “We stayed to fight them, the soldiers. We stayed to give her a chance to escape. I don’t know if she made it, though. There were soldiers…so many soldiers. So much iron.”
Dryads like my best friend were allergic to the common metal. The merest touch of iron against a dryad’s skin would cause her to break out in blistering burns. The smallest wound made by iron would cause her to sicken and die within minutes. Whoever had come after them had been planning to murder an entire race of magical beings. To kill my best friend…
“We’ll find her.” I wrapped my arm around Darinda’s shoulders to help her sit up, my hands trembling, but I didn’t meet her eyes, knowing she’d see just how worried I was.
“What about you?” I asked quickly, my voice high pitched and panicky. “What happened to you and the other dryads? Who sent the soldiers with the iron into the forest? Was it my aunt? Was it her soldiers that came here? That did this?”
“Yes,” she said, hissing in pain, and I quit trying to maneuver her to a seated position, just letting her head lay in my lap instead. “The soldiers were wearing the broken crown of Bathune on their shields and armor.”
“Crap,” I groused. “Why would she do this? Why sign a peace treaty and then do this less than a week later? Didn’t she know I would send troops to her border again?”
There was no answer, and I looked down to find Darinda’s eyes empty, the silver doing nothing more than reflecting my own image back at me.
“Win!” I shrieked, panic clawing at me. “Win!”
The fire around us crackled, and I watched as sparks dropped across the trench the dryads had managed to carve out before they’d been attacked. Another branch fell into their circle, and the leaves of the tree to my left started to smolder.
Chapter Four
The fire roared around me, smoking branches crashing to the ground as the forest burned, flames licking the grass near my feet. I sprinted for Winston, who was still stalking the perimeter, standing guard in his dragon form. Once I reached him, he dropped his head onto the grass so that I could clamber up onto his back, and I quickly sheathed my sword so that I didn’t accidentally stab him as we made our escape from the burning forest.
The minute my butt landed on his shoulders, he launched himself in a vertical lift that left me scrambling to keep hold of his neck. He roared in rage as we flew heavenward, flames pouring from his snout.
“Mercedes is still out there somewhere!” I yelled in his ear, in case he hadn’t heard Darinda. “Soldiers as well. Bavasama’s army. We need to find Mercedes before they do.”
We broke through the top of the tree canopy, and Winston immediately leveled out, turning toward the mountains and swooping low enough that we’d be able to see without taking the chance of being burned by a random spark. I leaned over as far as I could and peered over his outstretched wings, searching for my best friend. She had to be here somewhere. The others had stayed to give her time to escape. She had to have gotten away.
Now, we just had to find her. It would help if I’d known which way she’d run or how long she’d been out there. There had to be some way to track her.
We reached the foot of the mountains and soared over them, giving me my first glimpse of the notorious Borderlands where my army had laid siege to Bathune for nine long months. It was desolate and cold. A land of rocks and snow and general nothingness.
This far north, the Borderlands was nothing but a hostile range of snow-covered mountains known for trapping any man and beast caught by an early freeze or drowning them in a sudden flood brought on by melting snow. Farther south, near Dramera where the dragons lived, it was said that the Borderlands was a parched, barren desert where the Sea of Gallindor had once stood.
Winston circled, skimming over the top of the mountain range and flying farther north, where we could see Bavasama’s men in their snow-white coverings, their shields with my aunt’s silver crest—a broken crown—worked into the center. If it weren’t for the sunlight reflecting off the metal, they would have blended in perfectly with their surroundings. Completely disguised as they scurried over the mountains like cockroaches, trying to get away from the fire they’d set. To get away before someone realized that they’d murdered an entire race.
“Look at them.” I balled up one of my fists and hit Winston in the back of his shoulder. “Just look at them.”
