dogs were snapping as Bael’s voice rang out from the scryer.
Agony burned through her and she couldn’t breathe. The nightmare hammered at her brain. The man with the scarred face opened his mouth and breathed fire at her. Her dragons escaped and burned Bael to a crisp. Twisting, flickering shapes, pictograms, blood, torchlight on rocky walls and the gleam of lust in her lover’s eye. Kett writhed away from the delirious images but they wouldn’t let her go.
“…to your stepmother, I think. Kett? Can you hear me? Var will take you,” Bael said, and the smoke shifted as a green dragon hovered above her, wings beating away some of the heat and heavy, oppressive smog.
She shook her head. She wanted to stay, to help-this was her home and the villagers had been hurt because of her dragons and-
“You have to go,” Bael insisted. He kissed her lips very gently then said, “I’m staying here.”
With that, Var picked her up gently in one claw and Jarven in the other. His wings began to beat, and the dragon rose into the air, leaving Bael behind, surrounded by smoke and fire and death. Kett screamed and screamed, even after unconsciousness had claimed her again.
When she opened her eyes she was in a bed, drenched in sweat and with one of her sisters shaking her by the arm, calling her name urgently.
“Kett? Can you hear me?” It was Eithne, and she left Kett for a moment to rush to the door and shout, “Mama! She’s having some sort of fit!”
Kett lay there, breathing hard, staring up at the pale canopy of her bed. Her own bed in Nuala’s house. The room smelled the same as it always had, the damp linen was soft against her skin. The lamp burned low, casting a dull glow over familiar furniture.
The scent of smoke had vanished.
Nuala rushed in dressed in nightclothes, Tyrnan behind her. She felt at Kett’s forehead, shone a light into her eyes and repeated her name over and over until Kett snapped, “Of course I can bloody hear you. I’m not deaf.”
Eithne put her hand to her mouth.
“I was having a-a dream,” Kett said, her voice rusty. “That’s all.”
Nuala didn’t look convinced but after she’d checked Kett’s wounds, stuck a thermometer in her mouth and checked her eyes again, she was forced to conclude there was nothing terribly amiss.
“How long have I been here?” Kett asked. The clock over the fireplace showed it wasn’t far off morning.
“A few hours. Drink this,” Nuala said, holding out a glass into which she’d just tipped some powder. “Eithne, have you been giving her drinks every half hour?”
Eithne indicated a small hourglass by the bed. “Small sips of water, just as you said.”
“Maybe a little more from now on. You’ll be even more dehydrated now,” Nuala said to Kett, then turned to her husband. “Lift her up so I can change the sheets.”
“For gods’ sakes, Nuala, I’m fine,” Kett said, but her father picked her up anyway, as if she weighed absolutely nothing. Kett considered what she’d had to eat and drink in the last five days and figured that was probably about right.
“I can stand,” she said.
“No, you can’t,” said Tyrnan. “I haven’t seen you this bad since you came back to life.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t look so hot then either,” Kett snapped. She attempted to fold her arms, which didn’t go very well. Her right shoulder was heavily bandaged. “Look, at the risk of asking a very trite question, how the hell did I get here?”
Her father smiled, although it was too tense to be convincing. “A dragon dropped you off in the garden,” he said. “Quite literally. You and Jarven. Who, incidentally, is in even worse shape than you are.”
Kett opened her mouth then closed it again. The smoke. The fire. Gods, had that actually been real? “Jarven? But-I was in Asiatica. With…Bael.”
Come to think of it, where the hell was Bael?
“Well, now you’re here. With Jarven. And both of you look like you’ve been set on fire.”
Fear gripped her. “Is he-will he be okay?”
“Eventually,” Nuala said. “But I wouldn’t advise any dragon training for either of you for a while.”
Bed made-who knew her princess stepmother could do something so menial?-Kett was allowed to lie down again. “And Bael?” she asked.
Her parents and sister looked at each other. Cold dread spread through Kett’s body.
“We haven’t seen him, sweetheart,” Nuala said.
“Kett, what happened?” Tyrnan asked, and she closed her eyes, images of fire and smoke and strange pictograms dancing across her vision.
She’d been nearly dead from starvation, dehydration, infection, blood loss…
And yet she was still alive, and as healthy as if she’d had weeks of medical care.
“I have no idea,” she said honestly.
Two days later, close to fully healed but no closer to figuring out what her increasingly vivid dreams meant, so bored she contemplated going down to the gryphon paddocks and picking a fight just to see what would happen, Kett woke in an armchair in one of Nuala’s many drawing rooms. A fire flickered in the grate and someone had covered her with a blanket, but she was stiff from sleeping curled up and when she stretched, she hurt everywhere.
She’d been feeling better, much better than she ought to given only two days of rest. Nuala was so confused she’d even called Striker to see if he’d had a hand in Kett’s healing, but he denied all knowledge of it.
He was fairly interested in the fire at the dragon ranch, however. “Sounds like nice work,” he’d said, and laughed when Kett swore a blue streak at him.
She sat up straighter and ran her hand through her hair.
“Good morning,” her father said, and Kett looked at the clock in mild alarm.
Then she caught the sarcasm in his voice, realized it was past midnight and said, “Hah.”
It came out as a croak. Tyrnan grinned and went back to his newspaper.
Kett cleared her throat. “What are you still doing up?”
He shrugged. “I’m reading a very interesting editorial about the king’s views on immigration.”
Kett stared at him.
“Well, I could be,” he said defensively.
“Alternately, you could just ask him,” she said. “Him being your best friend and all.”
“That was the conclusion I came to,” Tyrnan said, and Kett peered closer to see he was reading the sports pages.
She smiled and rearranged her blanket, then looked up and realized her father was watching her.
“You looked cold,” he said, dropping his gaze. “And I remember when you got here, you were frozen solid. Nuala thought you were going to have frostbite. She thought you might lose your fingers.”
“I could always grow some more,” said Kett, wondering what, exactly, would happen to a shapeshifter who lost a limb or two.
“But someone had already patched you up.”
Tyrnan sighed. “You don’t remember, Jarven hasn’t regained consciousness long enough to be coherent-Kett, what the hell is going on? What happened in the mountains?”
