Some aspect of power told me the dragon suffered.
As I neared, I found another chained dragon. This one was pale red and small, much like the female. Shriveled. A metallic vase rested just beyond the dragon’s reach, and power cycled out of the dragon and into it.
How many dragons could I protect this way? There had to be a limit to how much power I could connect to—and how much power the other dragons would be able to restore.
There came a surge from the green dragon, and I knew that he wanted me to help.
I stepped forward, freeing the dragon from the chains around his ankles, and focused on him. His scales were cool, like the female dragon’s. I connected to him and immediately felt the other dragons beginning to add power, buffering him. Power drifted out through him, into the vase, but I used what I had learned from the other dragons and interrupted that flow.
There were still two dragons.
“When you are strong enough, slip off into the forest,” I said to the dragon.
I climbed back out of the window, hurrying along the street, and closed my eyes, focusing on where to find another dragon. The energy had to be there. As I opened myself to that power, I could feel something out in the street, distant from me. It was north. Faint. It suggested to me that whatever dragon was out there would be suffering like the others.
I was surprisingly tired—I didn’t feel that I had exerted myself all that much, but it was not so much a physical tired as it was a magical one. I was acutely aware of how I had separated the dragons’ power from the vase, and it required me to maintain focus.
The source of the next dragon was in yet another abandoned building. It looked similar to the first one I’d found, and I stumbled through it, finding another chained dragon, medium-sized and red. I freed it before connecting to it and severing its connection to the vase, as I had with the others.
When I was done, I took a seat. I needed to rest and recover, but I had to finish this. After sitting for a while, I got to my feet. I rested my hand on the red dragon, feeling the warmth of his scales. There was something about this one that pushed outward, an urgency that joined with the urgency I felt from the green dragon, whom I was most connected to.
“I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do,” I muttered.
The green dragon was there, adding a hint of power to me, as if to try to reassure me. It did little. Even if I were to find the other dragon, I worried I wouldn’t be strong enough to sever its connection to the vase.
The green dragon surged again.
It was a prompting, an urgency that suggested to me the dragon wanted me to do this. Even if it meant I expended everything within myself, I had to do it.
I got to my feet, wobbling for a moment.
The dragons cycled power through me and something shifted. I grew stronger.
I hadn’t expected the dragons to be able to strengthen me in the same way that they strengthened each other.
I staggered out of the building, standing in the street, looking up at the sky. The sun was starting to set. There was at least one more dragon. I closed my eyes, opening myself up to the power of the dragons. I could feel the four I’d helped. Surprisingly, I realized they were on the perimeter of the city—north, west, east, south.
The fifth one would be somewhere else.
I carried the three vases with me and found them unwieldy, difficult for me to manage. I shifted them in my arms, clutching them up against my chest, straining to feel for the power of the last dragon I needed to help.
I could feel something.
Not the dragons near the dragon pen, and not the dragons that had drifted out of the city, moving off into the forest. I could feel those, which surprised me. There was even an awareness of Thomas’s dragon. He was still distant, though closer than before. Maybe he would come in time. I tried to send a bit more of a connection to that dragon, wanting to signal to Thomas that he was needed, but I didn’t know whether it would be received the way I needed it to be.
I felt the remaining dragon near the center of the city.
My breath caught.
There was only one other place I could think of.
The palace. That had to be the location of the final dragon. That had to be where I felt the pulling of that dragon. And yet if so, it meant that the city—and the kingdom—was in far more trouble than I had realized.
23
Fatigue threatened to overwhelm me as I raced through the streets. I clutched the vases to my chest, feeling the way the energy rolled through them. There was power flowing from the dragons, connecting to me, and out toward these vases. There was not nearly as much of a draw as there had been, though, and as I felt that power flowing through the vases, I thought it had dispersed a little bit. At least enough that I began to feel as if the injured dragons would recover.
Every so often, I focused on the power I detected in the distance. My tiredness made it difficult for me to pay attention to anything as I breezed past buildings, noticing them as little more than a blur. Every so often, there came a pulse of power that came off of the green dragon as if he wanted to fill me with even more energy. It wasn’t enough.
I had poured too much into these other dragons, but more than that, I had linked to these other dragons. That pulled power out of me as much as it did out of them. If I didn’t correct it, and if I
