Page 60 of The Last Dragon King
“Joslyn,” I whimpered, my lip quivering as my body started to shake.
The king reached down and pulled off his tunic, and then helped me sit up, threading my arms through the garment. Soldiers ran around the garden barking orders and taking up arms, but all I could see was the beautiful dark hair splayed out on the grass and the puddle of blood under Joslyn’s body.
“I… I couldn’t save her,” I sobbed.
The king hauled me up into his arms and I peered down at two corpses. They were burned like animal meat. I must have… my power…
“Someone betrayed me. Who was it?” the king growled as he walked with me in his arms, tucking me tightly to his chest.
“Bonner,” I croaked.
The king’s jaw ticked and his arms pulled tighter around me. As we passed Cal, the king stopped to face him. “Take Bonner’s wife in for interrogation. If she knew he was a traitor, banish her and their children to Nightfall.”
Cal nodded and then took off running.
Nightfall was no place for dragon-folk… I guess that was why the king would ban traitors there. The second you stepped foot on their soil, they killed you if you had an ounce of magical blood in you. I didn’t care about that right now. I couldn’t get the image of Joslyn being bled like a goatin out of my mind.
My body shivered as a deathly cold crept over me.
Drae slapped my cheek and I gasped, realizing I’d blacked out again.
“She’s going into shock,” Dr. Elsie said.
When did Dr. Elsie get here?
I peered around, looking at the black dragon scale-patterned wallpaper and dark gray lacquered four-poster bed. Drae deposited me on the charcoal silk sheets and stared down at me, wide-eyed. “She burned up half the garden, exploded with dragon fire at least twenty feet wide.”
Dr. Elsie pulled an elven healing wand from her doctor’s bag and held it over me. I’d seen an elven healing one time. An elf came through town while traveling the perilous Narrow Strait, the small bit of neutral land in Nightfall territory that led from Embergate to Thorngate. One toe outside of the strait and the Nightfall warriors would stick an arrow in your back with legal right.
The elf had been traveling with a friend who’d strayed outside of the neutral portion of the Narrow Strait and he’d shown up to Cinder Village with an arrow in his back. When the healer had brought her healing wand out, I’d never forgotten the unearthly glow it held. It was a cross between blue and purple but also silver. It was like the stars in the sky were contained in that wand and…
Slap.
I gasped, my eyelids fluttering open.
“Stay with me!” Dr. Elsie bellowed.
“Stop slapping me,” I whimpered weakly, looking up at her.
“I need you conscious, Arwen. You’re going into shock and I don’t know why.”
Her words scared the life out of me.
She held the wand now, as small as a stick you would pick up to float downriver. It glowed that magical blueish purple and the light seemed to bathe my skin, wrapping around it and hugging my body. The light didn’t touch the sheets beneath me, it only seemed to search out and stick to that which was alive, the same way it had the fallen elf who’d been brought to my village.
My legs suddenly started to shake, and my teeth chattered violently.
Elsie gasped, looking at the light that bathed my skin as if it had just told her something. “Run a hot bath! She’s cold as ice. Organs shutting down. She used all of her fire to fight off the men and now she’s… freezing to death.”
King Valdren loomed over me now, eyes glowing with orange fire. “There’s no time for a bath. Move.”
Dr. Elsie glanced up at him with a frown. “My lord, she needs hea—”
“MOVE!” he bellowed and she leapt to her feet, stumbling backwards.
My entire body convulsed, the coldness creeping into my very heart and squeezing. I closed my eyes, ready to meet the Maker, then a searing heat washed over my skin. My eyelids snapped open just as the king lowered himself on top of me, flames shooting from his hands and encompassing my entire body.
Itburned, but in a good way. His hands reached under me and then he pulled me to him, smooshing us together in this cocoon of heat. The flames danced around us and I smelled smoke as the bedding singed, but the king and I remained unharmed, as if this dragon fire were a healing balm and not the scorching heat it would be to someone else. I stared up into his eyes, feeling the weight of him on top of me as he looked down.
