A doorway.
As it formed, the power continued to build, pressing into it until something shifted and the door opened.
My breath caught.
Behind me, more and more pressure built. I motioned for the dragon, urging him ahead of me. He proceeded through the doorway but got stuck. I pushed on him.
“You had to have gotten through here one time,” I said.
Only when he had come through here before, he must’ve been smaller. In the time I’d been around the dragon, I’d felt he had increased in size, almost as if he were swelling with power. It had to be the connection to the other dragons that had enlarged him.
I pulled some of his power out. The dragon cried out, a soft and mournful sound, but I had to pull more of it into myself. Even as I did, I wasn’t going to be strong enough. I didn’t have enough stores to hold that energy.
But the other dragons who were connected to us did.
I shifted the energy, cycling it to the green dragon and the golden-scaled dragon—when I did, there was a pulling of power, and it held. The dragon slipped forward.
I chased after him.
As soon as I did, the barrier behind me exploded.
I staggered through the door and turned, shifting some power against it, and it closed. I attempted to create a seal over the door, but the dragon was running off into the darkness, and I didn’t want to lose him.
We needed to warn the king that the Djarn were not only trying to steal the dragons, but they were preparing for an attack.
21
The tunnel had stretched an impossible distance, leaving me jogging for nearly an hour before it ended in a rocky hillside surrounded by trees. I stepped out to find the dragon curled up around the base of the cavern, resting. He had moved quickly through the cave, far more quickly than I could; after a while, I had pulled upon some power, hoping to ensure I was heading in the right direction, but I hadn’t been able to draw on enough of it to light up the tunnel all the way to the end. Eventually, the dragon had disappeared from me, leaving me wondering if I was going to lose him altogether.
The afternoon air in the forest was cold and cool, and there was a hint of dampness in the air—and a hint of energy, unsurprisingly. I looked at the dragon and could feel he was tired.
That was new. When I had worked with the dragons before, I had been aware of their power, but nothing more than that.
I touched him on his side and he woke with a start, turning his massive brown head toward me, flames beginning to erupt from his nostrils before calming. I pushed power through him, connecting to the other dragons, drawing a bit more power to him to feed him. As I did, I realized something. The connection might be helpful to this dragon, but it was probably sapping the strength of both the green dragon and the yellow-scaled dragon.
I had to figure out how to destroy the vase. If I didn’t, the dragons would be depleted of power and all that energy would fill the vase—and I had no idea what else would happen then.
It was even more reason for me to find Thomas.
“You need to disappear into the forest,” I said to the dragon. “Follow . . .” I thought about what the dragon could do, whether it would be safer for me to bring him back to the city and to the dragon pens, then I decided that would be a mistake. That would only alert Jerith and whomever he was working with to the fact that I was responsible for sneaking the dragon away. Right now, I had to hope that he had no idea who had been responsible.
The dragon rumbled.
“You can follow this dragon,” I said, holding on to the yellow-scaled dragon’s connection, pulling it closer, shifting the dragon’s bond to me onto the other dragon. As I did, I could feel the energy coming to us, and I could feel the way their bond had formed; they linked together so that the yellow-scaled dragon created a draw through this dragon.
The dragon got to his feet, then slipped off into the trees. I watched until he disappeared altogether. Even as he did, I could still feel him, could feel the power of him, but more than that, I could feel the way that his energy was cycling through the others and also into the vase.
Distantly, I was aware of the weave that I’d formed inside of the tunnel shattering.
That was my signal to leave.
As I neared the city, the draw of the dragon pen calling to me, I noticed a mournful note in the air. It was the howl of the mesahn. It was close enough that I could practically feel the creature coming.
The aching irritation stayed with me. I had thought helping the dragon would take care of it, but it hadn’t.
Other dragons.
The voices had mentioned five.
I had only freed one.
If that were why I felt the irritation, then I had to find the other four dragons.
I didn’t have to wait long before one of the mesahn appeared. He prowled forward, dappled brown fur slipping into the shadows, making it difficult to see him, as if he were camouflaged by the forest itself. There was something familiar about the mesahn. Perhaps it wasn’t so much the mesahn but the pressure that pushed against me—pressure I felt in a way that I had never felt from the mesahn before—or perhaps it was simply that I had seen the dragon kill one of the mesahn.
“Shouldn’t you be in classes?”
I spun. I had already begun lacing power together, separating my hands, creating a weave of energy that bound between them, then lashed out.
Manuel
