Eona: The Last Dragoneye

Vida drew in a shocked breath as the concentration of lamplight showed more injuries. Both shackled feet were broken — the delicate fan of bones smashed and protruding through the skin — and a large character had been carved on his chest: Traitor. I leaned against the wall beside him. How could I heal such terrible damage while I was so weak?

“He’s going to need some clothes,” Dela said tightly. “I’ll get the warden’s.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Be quick. Even Ido doesn’t deserve this.”

Across the room, Ryko picked up the bowl and sniffed the contents. He thrust it away with a grimace. “Black Dragon.”

I looked up at him blankly. Vida crossed the room and sniffed the bowl, too, nodding her confirmation.

“It constricts blood,” she said. “That must be why he hasn’t bled to death.”

“That’s not the only thing it does.” Ryko put the bowl down on the table. “I’ve seen it used to heighten pain and unleash demons in the mind.” The islander had more reason than anyone to hate Ido — the Dragoneye had tortured him — but there was something akin to pity in his voice. “If they’ve been feeding this to him, he won’t know what’s real and what’s not.”

I looked at Lord Ido’s ruined, sweat-filmed face. If he could not distinguish between reality and nightmare, he would not be able to hold back the ten bereft dragons.

“We’ve got to wake him,” I said, panic rising into a surge of desperate energy. “I need him awake.”

I reached across and touched his hand. Even more chilled and clammy than my own.

“Lord Ido?”

No response. I shook his cold arm.

Not even a flicker.

“Lord Ido,” I shook him harder. “It’s me, Eona.”

Nothing. He was far beyond a simple touch and call. More drastic measures were needed — more brutality. The thought of adding to such pain made me nauseous. But if he and I were to be healed, he had to be woken. Pushing past my own pity, I dug my fingers into the ridged, weeping damage across his shoulder.

His whole body flinched under my grip, his hands convulsing against the shackles. I jerked back. Surely that would wake him. But his eyes remained closed, no twitch of animation upon his drawn face.

“He’s not waking,” I said.

“Try again.” Vida crossed the room.

I dug my fingers in harder. “Lord Ido!”

This time the pain flung him back against the wall, the raw contact shuddering through him. Even that did not open his eyes.

“He’s deep in the shadow world. Probably a blessing,” Vida said. She held up the warden’s ring of keys. “I’ll undo the shackles. Maybe that will speak to his spirit.”

She fitted a slim key into the wrist irons, the heavy cuffs separating with a hollow click. Ido’s hands dropped, their raw, bloodied weight slapping against his thighs. The freedom did not stir him. Vida bent and unlocked the ankle irons. “I can’t pull them free.” Her voice was small. “I think they’ve broken his feet in them.”

Ryko squatted beside me and set the water bucket on the stones between us. He grabbed a handful of ragged hair and pulled Ido’s head up. His pity, it seemed, did not translate into gentleness. “Lord Dragoneye. Wake up.”

The harsh, slow breathing did not alter.

Ryko pushed Ido’s head back against the wall, then stood and picked up the bucket. “You might want to move,” he said to me.

The water hit Ido in the face with a drenching force that caught me in its cold backsplash. I gasped, wiping the wet sting out of my eyes. It had certainly roused me from my exhaustion. I blinked and focused on Ido. The dripping water tracked through the crusted filth and blood on his face, but he was still beyond us.

I turned away as Ryko swung the bucket again. The water slapped and streamed over the Dragoneye. We all leaned forward, watching for any flicker across the closed eyes, or change in the rasping rise and fall of his chest.

“He’s too far gone,” Ryko said.

“No!” Frantically I shook Ido again, the back of his head thudding against the wall. “Wake up!”

Vida pulled my hand away. “Eona, stop!”

“If he’s not awake, I can’t risk healing him,” I said through my teeth. “The other dragons will come, and he won’t be there to stop them.”

Ryko stood. “He’s not going to wake any time soon. We’re going to have to carry him out.”

“It’ll kill him,” Vida protested.

“Maybe, but we can’t leave him here.”

The sound of running footsteps turned us toward the doorway. Dela rounded the corner, clothes piled in her arms. “Yuso is keeping watch in the front room,” she panted. “But he says hurry, we’ve only got a few minutes before the new guard shift.”

“We can’t get Ido awake,” I said. “I can’t heal him.”

She dumped the clothes on the filthy stone floor. “Let me have a look.”

Ryko made way as she leaned over and peeled back Ido’s left eyelid. The pale amber iris was almost all black pupil. Then something moved across the dark dilation — a slide of silver.

Dela recoiled. “What was that?”

Hua.

I lunged forward, lifting his eyelid again. The silver was dull and its shift across his eye slower than I had ever seen before, but it was definitely his power. “He’s not in the shadow world. He’s in the energy world.”

“Is that good?” Vida asked.

“It means he’s probably with his dragon already.” I released his eyelid and sat back, remembering the blue dragon reaching toward me. Was it possible that Ido had taken refuge in his spirit beast?

“Does that mean you can heal him?” Ryko demanded.

I looked down at my bound arm. A slow throb was building through the numbness, leaching energy with every pulsing ache. I was not sure I had enough strength to get into the energy world. And even if I did, the ten bereft dragons were so fast. By my reckoning, I had less than a minute to find Ido and heal him before they attacked.

“I have to try,” I said. “Everyone stand back. You saw what happened last time.”

All three edged away to the other side of the cell.

Help me, I prayed to any god who listened, and pressed my hand flat against Ido’s wet chest, above the brutally carved character. His labored heartbeat thudded under my palm. A tight knot of terror clamped my breath. What if I could not do it? What if I killed us all?

I forced my way through the fear, each deep inhalation easing my chest open until I found a familiar, deepening rhythm: the pathway to the energy world. My exhaustion dragged at me, a treacherous riptide that I had to fight with every breath. Under my hand, Ido’s heartbeat began to match mine, the ragged rise and fall of his chest blending into my own steady measure. The dim physical world around us twisted and bent into bright colors and streaming Hua.

Before me, the solid suffering of Ido’s body shifted into patterns of energy. Pain slashed and spun through his meridians in sharp, jagged bursts of Hua. Each of his seven points of power circled slowly, the silver pathways hampered by a thick black ooze. I looked closer. The points, from red sacrum to purple crown, turned in the wrong direction. I had seen it before in Dillon.

Ido was using Gan Hua.

Ryko, Dela, and Vida braced themselves in the far corner, Hua pumping through their transparent bodies in dazzling streams of silver. They could not see the Mirror Dragon above them or sense her power, but to me her vibrant energy radiated like a small sun, searing away the shadows of the dank cell. She focused her otherworldly eyes upon me and I felt my Hua leap to meet her huge, shimmering presence. Her sinuous neck stretched toward me, the gold pearl under her chin alive with surging flames. Cinnamon flooded my mouth, her warm, joyous invitation bringing tears to my eyes.

But I could not accept it. Not yet.