my ancestors’ blood — dripping from me into the dirt of the east, my dragon’s heartland. Her center of power. I drew in a shaking breath to hide my desperate hope, waiting. And dreading.
The smashing blow exploded through me, every part of me gathered in its agony. Screaming, I opened myself to the earth’s energy and the primal power of my blood — an ancient call to an ancient dragon.
Spinning. Weightless. Pain gone. All sensation gone. Only darkness — in my eyes, my nose, my mouth. A cocoon of blessed relief.
Was I dead?
Eona.
A voice. Familiar.
Eona. Come. I have been waiting for so long. We have all been waiting for so long.
Waiting? Who has been waiting?
Come.
The voice drew me out of darkness into the swirling reds and greens and blues of the celestial plane. Below me, my body sagged in the chair, silvery Hua still pumping through it, the pathways threaded with the black of the folio. Not dead, then.
Sethon’s dark energy body bent over my limp form and hauled my head up by my hair. “She’s in the shadow world.” He slammed the mallet down onto the table.
I was in my dragon. Safe from him. The triumph gathered into cold intent: this was a chance to kill him. Rip his army apart.
Eona. The voice pulled me back from my hate.
You must make it right.
The voice was in me, beside me, above me. I knew its tone, its rage.
Kinra.
In the Mirror dragon, too. Had she been here since the dragon fled?
… waiting for so long. I am nearly gone, Eona. You are the last of my line. You must make it right. See my memories. See the truth.
The energy world suddenly fell away, plunging me into an assault of light and heat, a memory of flesh and bone and skin.
I am standing in hot sunlight in a courtyard, a tart citrus smell rising from the border of kumquat trees around the marble square. It is the courtyard of the Rat Dragon Hall and I am holding a man’s hand. He stands before me, thin body tense. For a moment, I do not know his face, and then his sharp features shift into the face of—
— my beloved Somo.
“Are you sure, Kinra?” he demands. He looks over his shoulder, but we are alone.
I hold up the scroll. “I have found the proof. There is no bargain between us and the dragons. There never was any bargain. The first Dragoneyes stole their egg of renewal — the Imperial Pearl — and we still hold them here with it. A ransom for their power sewn into the throat of our emperors.”
“No!” He shakes his head in disbelief. “If that is so, then why do I feel my dragon’s joy when we unite?”
I touch his cheek. “Somo, I don’t think that joy is for us.” Hot tears sting my eyes. “I think it is because every union holds the hope that one of us will finally understand what we have done to them and make it right.”
The energy world burst back into swirling brightness below me. Although my physical body was slumped in the chair, I felt as though my spirit was rigid with shock. The dragons were enslaved. There was no bargain between man and beast. We had stolen their egg, and Kinra had tried to return it. And like Somo, I had misread my dragon’s joy, blinded by so much power at my command. Now I understood: the ten bereft dragons were not crying for their dead Dragoneyes. They were crying for their lost hope.
Sethon’s energy body squatted down before my inert form, the dark flow of his Hua raging through his pathways. “She is crying,” he said. “That is not possible in the shadow world.” He grabbed my chin, lifting it. “So, where are you, Lady Eona?” For a moment, he watched me, then he closed his hand around the pearl rope binding my wrists. “Return to your body!”
His command opened a crack of searing pain in my safe cocoon.
No! You must see. You must know the truth.
Kinra’s voice snatched me away from the agony, plunging me once more into another place, another time. A large bedchamber, shutters closed, bronze lamps burning oil scented with roses. A small girl kneeling on the floor, playing with a wooden horse—
— my sweet, beautiful Pia. Somo at the door, ordering my maid away. I place the black folio on the table and stifle a shiver. It has taken me so long and all of my resolve to read its dangerous words.
“This book and the Imperial Pearl are the ways we keep the dragons bound to us,” I say as Somo crosses the room to me.
“I can feel the Gan Hua in it.” He rubs the base of his skull. “It makes me feel ill.” He reaches for the folio, and snatches his hand back as the white pearls stir. “You say it has been woven with
the Hua of all of the dragons? Like a rope around their spirits?”
“Yes. And if the dragons are to renew, their old Hua must join with the Imperial Pearl, the new Hua. According to the scroll I found, they must be reborn every five hundred years or their power starts to weaken, and with it the balance they bring to the earth. Not so many cycles ago, one dragoneye could take care of his own province, by himself. You know that is not the case anymore. Now every wind and water disaster needs the power of at least two dragoneyes to quell it. Sometimes even three.”
“We only use three in the worst situations,” he protests.
“See, you are downplaying it, too. Just like the rest of the Council.”
For a moment he stares at me. Then, reluctantly, he nods. “How would this renewal be achieved?”
I lower my voice. “Somo, I think the dragons are reborn through the String of Pearls.”
He steps back. “The weapon?” He gives an uneasy laugh. “Do you intend to kill us all to release all the dragon power?”
“No, it is not meant to be a weapon. It is supposed to be the way for the dragons to renew.” I point to the symbol tooled into the book’s black leather cover. “See, there are twelve interlocking circles. They symbolize the pearl that each dragon carries under its chin. They are not just pearls of wisdom, Somo. They are each dragon’s new self, waiting to be born.” I run my finger around the large circle created by the smaller interlocking circles. “And this, the thirteenth pearl. The Imperial Pearl — the catalyst — that brings their renewal. What we stole from them.”
Somo stares at me. “If they are reborn, what will happen to our union with them?”
I straighten, knowing the pain I am about to cause, because I feel its deep ache myself. “It will go with the old beasts.”
“Go? You mean for good?”
“Yes. We will lose our dragons forever.”
“Kinra, we will lose our power!”
“It is a power built on the enslavement of the dragons, Somo! We are creating a massive imbalance in the land’s Hua by not allowing them to renew.” I point to our daughter, click-clacking her horse across the parquetry. So innocent. “Do you want her children’s children to bear the bad luck that our greed will bring upon them? They will curse our names as the land dies around them! And we will have no rest in the garden of the gods if we do not right this terrible wrong.”
The dim, rose-scented room snapped back into the bright ebb and flow of the celestial plane. Kinra’s memory seared through me. I would lose my dragon. Ido had been right; there was no middle ground. It was all the power or nothing.
