more. Except that wasn’t right either. Something huge had taken hold of him.
Wraithwing. The dragon’s claws were wrapped around him.
He opened his visor. He was lying flat on hard stone. Wraithwing was standing over him, one fore-claw unwrapping itself from him. The dragon roared and again hosed the battlements with fire; then it looked down between its legs at Jehal and made a clumsy grab for the legbreaker. Its talons were too big and crude to do anything more than move it about. Wraithwing gave an angry snort.
Alive!
Jehal sat up. Pain burst through him again as though he’d been shot. But alive! He took a few shallow breaths and then leaned forward and reached for his feet. Another bolt of pain stabbed him. Always in the same place. Always where Shezira had shot him. But still, alive! Deep breaths this time. His ankle hurt but his foot wasn’t at some funny angle. His knee felt like someone had had a good go at ripping his shin-bone out of its socket. Which probably wasn’t that far from the truth, but nothing was obviously broken or twisted. He poked and prodded himself to be sure, but the rest of his leg looked like it was going to work again one day. He lay back on the stone and started to laugh. Alive! See that, ancestors! You don’t get me yet after all! He lay still, whimpering, weeping and laughing all at once.
Wraithwing shifted and growled. Soldiers were up on the battlements again. They had dragon-scale shields. Crossbows too. Pointing at him. The dragon belched fire; the soldiers hid behind their shields, but as soon as Wraithwing paused, they raised their crossbows. No asking him who he was or offering to take his surrender or any such nonsense; they simply wanted to kill him. The first bolt went about ten feet wide. The second hit Wraithwing in the foot and stuck, and then they didn’t have time for any more before the dragon roared fire back at them again. Jehal tried to ignore them. He rolled, squealing, behind Wraithwing’s legs, pulled the knife out of his belt and set to work on the legbreaker. He felt rather than saw Wraithwing’s fire burst out again. Cut the rope. Don’t look at the archers. Just cut the rope.
Alive! He still couldn’t stop laughing.
The sun went out. It took him a moment to realise that Wraithwing was shielding him with his wings, blotting out the light but blocking the arrows too.
Clever. The legbreaker yielded to his knife. Jehal took a deep breath and collapsed again, too drained to move. Now can we just stay here until they all go away? As long as he stayed still, the pain was almost bearable. If he moved, that was a different matter, but with a dragon standing watch over him, he couldn’t think of any reason why he should. He closed his eyes. Only for a few minutes, he thought. Only until I can summon some sort of energy. He felt almost delirious. Alive! He’d fallen off his dragon and he was alive. For those few moments nothing else mattered.
He wasn’t sure how long he lay there. Might have been a few minutes or might have been a few hours. He drifted, floated, swayed up and down, tossed from wave to wave of joy and pain, until the light suddenly crashed in again and there was a voice. Jehal opened his eyes and blinked. The light, it seemed, had become quite fierce. The sun was back again.
‘Hello?’
He took a deep breath, which hurt, and sat up, which hurt a lot more and quite enough to convince him not to try and stand up. On the battlements where the soldiers with crossbows had been there was now a single rider, arms spread wide. I surrender.
‘Hello?’
With agonising slowness, Jehal crawled out from under Wraithwing. Just far enough to look. Even that was almost more than he could do. He looked at the rider. Had no idea who it was. What a sight I must be, peering up at you on my hands and knees, barely able to move. But I have a dragon and you don’t. Far above in the bright blue sky there were lots of specks. Or maybe he was imagining them. Either way, it didn’t help him tell whose side had won.
‘Well?’ he croaked.
The rider peered down at him then shouted, ‘In the name of King Valmeyan, King of the Crags, I submit my person and all those here to the authority of the Speaker of the Nine Realms.’
Jehal beamed through the pain. He managed to get as far as kneeling. ‘Does that mean I won?’
The rider stiffened. ‘I am offering my surrender to anyone who serves the speaker.’
‘Oh. Pity. I don’t serve the speaker, you see.’ The scale of what fate had handed him slowly dawned on him. I was the first to land.. .
‘Oh.’
‘Because I am the speaker. I am King Jehal, King of the Endless Sea, Lord of the Adamantine Palace and Speaker of the Realms, and I will accept your surrender on one condition. You will bring me my son and you will bring me my wife, and you will bring them to me in exactly whatever state they are to be found, since, as you can see, I can’t really go looking for them at the moment.’ With an enormous effort, he gripped Wraithwing’s wing and pulled himself onto his feet. Or onto the one foot that would bear any weight. ‘And if you can’t do that because Zafir took them away with her, then I don’t want your surrender. You can all burn. If they’re dead and she left the bodies here for me, then whoever has the courage to bring them out can live and everyone else dies. Unless I suffer a sudden fit of uncontrollable rage, in which case maybe it’ll be the other way round.’
Jehal stared across the open space and grinned, although inside he only wanted to curl up and cry. For a little while he’d been too busy with his own misery to think about Lystra. Now she was back. It didn’t hurt quite as bad as hanging upside down from his ruined leg being battered by the wind against the belly of a dragon – he doubted anything could ever hurt as much as that – but it hurt a lot, nonetheless. Enough, maybe, to burn Zafir’s home to ash along with everyone who lived there. Not exactly fair, really. It’s not as if they all took turns to murder Lystra. But it’s the principle. That’s how you teach people not to throw in their lot with the wrong side.
Yes, said a little voice. Remind me. How well, exactly, is that philosophy working out for you right now?
It could be better. But I’m prepared to give it one more crack of the whip. Now shut up.
The rider was still there. Why? Shouldn’t you be running away by now? ‘Your Holiness, may I ask what the terms of our surrender might be if Queen Lystra and her son are still alive?’
Jehal threw back his head and howled with bitter laughter. As if that’s going to happen.
‘Why then you can all go free back to your families. I won’t even ransom you.’ He was looking at the sky, at the dragons still circling up there. When he looked back at the battlements, the rider was gone.
Bastard. That’s hope you’ve given me. However much I know better, I can’t turn it away. Hope is like Taiytakei poison. Hope eats you slowly from the inside and turns men into fools. I don’t want hope, but now you’ve given it to me we both know there’s only one antidote. When you don’t come back I’m going to make sure I burn you first, whoever you are. We all know that everything is ruined. We all know I’m getting exactly what I deserve. All my fault. Blah blah blah. Yes, ancestors, I know you’re all laughing at me. Let me guess. You guided my fate and landed me here, alive and crippled, just for this. You kept me alive just so that I never find Lystra, I never find out what happened to her. I hunt Zafir and Valmeyan to the ends of the world and hang them both, but they never tell me. I am what you always wanted, your Vishmir. I sit on the Adamantine Throne for thirty years and I am remembered as the best speaker the realms have ever known. And for every aching second I am torn apart with hope and despair and spend most of my time either wishing I was dead or wondering what tiny corner of the world is left to be scoured. What I don’t get is my wife back. That about right? Oh-
Even as he beat the hope away, there she was. On the top of the battlements while dragons fell out of the sky around them. An illusion of his deranged and damaged imagination.
Too much pain, too much exhaustion, too much madness. That must be what it is.
He wasn’t sure what happened after that. It seemed as though one moment she was there and the next she was gone, and the one after that she was beside him, in front of him, holding him so tightly that he couldn’t breathe.
‘My love, my love, my love!’ That was all she said.
It had to be a trick. Jehal pushed her away so he could see her clearly, but apparently he had something in his eye. Both of them. A trick. A doppelganger. An imposter.
No. The rather plain, bruised and battered woman in front of him was none of those. He felt his head spin. He staggered, tried to catch himself with his ruined leg and fell into her arms.
‘You’re alive,’ he murmured, filled with disbelief. And then he fainted.
