Golmarr leaps to his feet and grabs a dragon scale, pulling himself up onto the creature’s wounded leg. Grabbing another scale higher up the beast’s side, he swings onto her wide back. He falls to his knees and stabs his sword into the base of one of the leathery black wings just as the dragon lifts her spiked tail and swings. Golmarr tries to duck, but the blunt side of the tail hits his shoulder, flinging him through the air. He thumps onto the ground and rolls to a stop. Slowly, he climbs to his hands and knees and shakes his head.
“Golmarr?” I call. He doesn’t move.
The dragon looks at the horse lord and takes a step toward him. Fear turns my stomach and fills me with adrenaline. If I don’t do something, the beast will eat Golmarr. “Your quarrel is with me, Corritha! If you don’t kill me now, I will shout your secret for all to hear,” I shriek, and for the first time I look at the gently sloping hill behind me. It is dark with spectators; the horse clan warriors are silently watching.
The dragon steps away from Golmarr, opens her good wing, and tries to fly, but the injured wing whips around erratically, splattering the ground with blood, and the creature flails and wobbles. Pulling back her head, she opens her mouth and hisses pale, misty breath at me. I fall to the ground and pull my cloak tight over my body as her breath presses against the blue wool. Frigid air seeps through the fabric, but it doesn’t stiffen into a sheet of ice like it did in the forest. When the chill has passed, I sit up. A thin layer of white frost has dusted my cloak; nothing more. “The mist,” I whisper, thinking of the dense fog that hides the forest floor. It is dragon-made. Without it, the dragon has freezing breath only—not the ability to encase things in ice. And that is when I see the first tendrils of white seep between the grass and curl around my knees. I stand and back away from it, but it is growing, rising up from the ground and swirling around my legs.
Golmarr, still on his hands and knees, is almost entirely surrounded by mist. Only his head rises above it. I grip my staff in my hands and run toward him, making the mist dance and swirl away from me. When I reach him, he looks up. His skin is ashen and beaded with sweat. “My head,” he mumbles. “It’s been hit one too many times.” Slowly, he gets to his feet.
“The mist turns into glass,” I blurt. “Without the mist, nothing will freeze. We have to stop the mist!”
“How?” Golmarr asks.
The answer comes to me, just like it did before: fire. I look across the field, to the smoldering and smoking bodies, and I want that fire. I want it to warm me, to feed me, to take the icy chill out of my hands that has been there for days. I need that fire. A single spark bounces out of the smoldering pile and lands on the grass, rising up to a small flame. And then, like a narrow stream of water, the fire trickles its way toward me through the grass—a perfectly straight line of orange. Everywhere the fire touches, the mist turns to steam and evaporates.
“Sorrowlynn?” Golmarr says, backing away as the fire starts licking the hem of my pants. I bend down and thrust my hands into the bright orange flames. The fire flares around them and wraps itself over my entire body. I stand and the fire clings to me, so everything I see has turned orange, for I am seeing it through flames. My clothes fill with warmth and heat seeps into my skin. Energy enters my flesh and soaks into my blood. With every beat of my heart, warmth pulses through my body, feeding me more perfectly than any food I have ever eaten.
A dense weight slams into my back, and I am thrown to the ground. Golmarr is atop me, smothering the flames with his cloak, but when he pulls away, my clothes and flesh are unmarked. “That didn’t burn you,” he whispers.
I open and close my warm hands and look at him in wonder. “It fed me.”
Golmarr helps me to my feet and readies himself to fight the dragon again.