Princess, the dragon says, its voice battling with my scream. Hold up your wounded arm. I lift my stub of an arm to show the beast what it has done, and it spits a ball of flame at me. I stop screaming and turn my face away as fire hits the bleeding stump, sizzling my blood and searing my skin. There, little girl. My fire has cauterized your wound enough that you won’t bleed out before I am done with you. I look at my arm. The bleeding has changed from a torrent to a persistent trickle.
I turn to run from the dragon and leap through the wall of fire separating me from the lake. The fire barely scalds my skin as I pass through it, but before my feet touch down on the other side, the dragon’s tail slams into my ribs. The breath is wrenched from my lungs, and I am soaring through the hot, parched air. Icy water collides with my face and fills my nostrils, and I start sinking. My hair comes unbound and streams around my head. Firelight ripples in rings on the lake’s surface, and as I watch, the water around me turns cloudy with my blood, making everything appear red. My back thumps the lake bottom, and two bubbles trickle out of my nostrils.
The frigid water is a relief to my skin, and I don’t know how to get up to the surface, so I lie there, staring at the world through the wavering red lake, and wait to die. Two more bubbles escape my nose, and as they reach the surface, giant talons splash into the water. Claws close around my body and yank me up out of the lake, flinging me against the burning rocks, and the dragon—wings outspread—circles in the air above me.
I roll down the rocks and come to a stop on the sand path. I whimper, struggling to breathe. With gentle fingers, I push on my ribs. Instead of solid bone I feel a tangle of small shards. I look back at the dragon, still gliding through the air, but something is different. It appears too heavy for its own wings, with its body sagging beneath them. The creature tilts to the side, and its left wing collides with a white column. The wing collapses, and the beast falls sideways through the air before hitting the lake. Water explodes around it.
What was in your flask? the dragon asks, its voice weak and hollow. It lifts its head out of the lake, its copper eyes intent on me. And then it coughs. The fire consuming the rocks dims and splutters, and for a minute the cave becomes quieter.
“My flask was filled with Strickbane poison,” I say. Every breath I take shoots fire into my lungs.
Strickbane?
A single tear slips out of the corner of my eye and drips down my cheek, and I nod and answer with a thought: You ate my poison.
The dragon opens its terrible mouth and shrieks. Its wings unfurl and snap against the air, lifting the massive creature out of the water, but one wing has been torn and barely holds any air. The dragon careens sideways and collides with a colossal white column stretched from the lake floor to the cave ceiling. The stone bursts into hundreds of pieces and crumbles into the lake, taking the dragon with it. The burning rocks flicker again.
A scale-covered foot reaches out of the water, and then another, as the dragon digs its claws into the settling pile of rubble and drags itself out of the lake. I struggle to my feet and watch. When the creature has reached the top of the wreckage, it opens its mouth and thrusts its head toward me, just like it did when it spewed fire at Golmarr. A wave of tepid air gusts into me, whipping my wet hair away from my face and nearly knocking me over. Around me, the fire shudders and shrinks to half its size, making the cave go dim. The dragon pulls its head back and roars its breath at me again, and everywhere its breath touches the fire, it goes out, so I am standing on the plain sand path with no walls of fire penning me in.
The creature shrieks and lifts its foot, and swipes its talons at me, but they don’t come close to where I am standing. Heaving its body forward, it drags itself out of the lake and crashes down on the rocks piled beside the sand path. I jump backward as the dragon snaps its massive jaws at my legs, but it is not close enough to reach me.
And then its head falls to the rocks, and its rib cage moves, rapidly expanding and deflating, but the rest of its body is motionless. I take another step back, and the dragon’s eyes follow my movement. I take two more steps, and still the dragon lies unmoving. Doubled over my crushed ribs, my stub of an arm dangling at my side, I turn my back to the dragon, turn toward the exit, and find Golmarr at my feet. He hasn’t moved, his eyes are closed, and his breathing is shallow. I look from him to my missing arm and wonder what to do. Even though my wound has been partially cauterized, it is still bleeding too much. Should I escape and leave him to die? I cannot move him—not in my state, and if I wait for him to wake up, I will probably bleed to death. If I run, I will probably bleed to death. If I do nothing, I will probably bleed to death. A wave of dizziness hits me, and I wobble from side to side. I can already feel the life draining out of me.