And Jessamyn would at last earn her name.

48

   Corien

“In some languages, the word translates to dragon-talkers. In others, it becomes kin of the beast. In the Borsvallic tongue, it is Kammerat, and in that language, its native tongue, means those who carry wild secrets, for the Kammerat—if they are real, if they are not in fact a mere fanciful tale—have long guarded what remains of the great godsbeasts, the ancestors of which carried Grimvald and his soldiers into battle against the angels. All those who have traveled to the high far mountains of Borsvall in search of dragons have died. Some blame the harsh climate. Others, who long for old magic, blame the Kammerat, who guard their holy charges with iron and steel.”

—A footnote from A Land Cold and Mighty: An Examination of the Legends of Borsvall by Inkeri Aravirta

In the far north, in the mountain range known as the Villmark, so far north that he could have walked hundreds of miles in any direction and met no one, Corien sat in a scarlet chair, glaring out over the ice.

His rooms were beautifully appointed because that was what he deserved—stone floors, thick rugs, art on the walls, everything polished and pleasingly arranged. Or, rather, they had been pleasingly arranged before he’d destroyed them.

He hadn’t left his rooms in weeks, not since the day he had realized the newest terrible truth of his life.

Rielle was with child. Audric’s child.

The moment Corien had realized it, sensing the change in her even from thousands of miles away, across the wide continent between them, he’d stormed out of his fortress—a tall, stark construction of black stone, towering over the military base he’d named the Northern Reach. He raged through the mines, the laboratories, the shipyards. He killed thirty-one human slaves that day, and ten of the abducted elemental children from Kirvaya, and then he disemboweled one of his lieutenants who had grown both lazy and messily brutal since Corien had assigned him the task of overseeing the children’s dormitories.

Last of all, Corien had killed two of the Kammerat, the dragon-talkers from Borsvall. Sad-eyed and malnourished, they tended the beasts in their pens and helped dissect their corpses in the laboratories. Killing two of their number was an action Corien immediately regretted, for the Kammerat were useful and necessary in his work with the dragons.

But he had been stupid with rage and hadn’t realized he had killed anyone until he crashed into his rooms, drenched in blood and hardly able to see for the tears in his eyes.

He’d slammed the door shut and proceeded to smash everything he could find—every painting, every burgled artifact. Plates and goblets, the mirrors in his bathing room, even the windows that overlooked the Reach.

And then he’d gulped down every bottle of wine in his rooms and collapsed in the chair by the shattered windows.

There he had stayed for weeks, conducting his affairs and commanding the industry of the Reach from the comfort of his chair and the numb shell of his grief.

Snow blew in through the broken windows. Piles of winter and shards of glass littered his once-pristine floors.

Occasionally, he dared turn his thoughts once more to Celdaria, but everything he saw brought him despair—Rielle, in Audric’s arms. Rielle, being fitted for her wedding gown. Rielle, examining her body in the mirror, looking for changes that had not yet appeared.

He could not bear looking at her for longer than seconds at a time. The pain of the distance between them was like nothing he had felt since suffering the loss of his body in the Deep.

Then, weeks later, sitting in his glass-dusted, snow-frosted rooms, his head in his hands, his stolen body white and cold and beautiful in his velvet dressing gown, he felt a change in the air of the Reach. A shift.

Even drunk as he was, as dumb with sorrow as he was, it required little effort to stretch the edges of his mind and scan the Reach for the cause of this change.

He saw it at once and straightened in his chair.

How interesting: the Kirvayan queen, Obritsa Nevemskaya, had somehow breached the security of his laboratories. She was stealing from them, in fact, taking a container of the belluorum his surgeons used to keep the dragons docile and dependent.

He watched her, curiosity cutting through the black mire of his thoughts, and when she pulled threads from the air, using them to flee the laboratories and escape into the nearby mountains before his soldiers could stop her, Corien rose from his seat for the first time in days. He walked across the glass and snow to stand at the shattered windows.

His heart that was not a true heart pounded faster in his chest. As much as he could feel delight in this body, and excitement, he felt them now.

The Kirvayan queen was a marque.

For a moment he allowed himself to admire the diligence of her secret-keeping, the thick walls of her mental fortitude. She had been through much, this girl, had endured years of abuse that had left her hardened—though he sensed that, underneath those layers of steel and iron beat a heart that loved selectively but fiercely.

He watched her give the belluorum to one of the Kammerat—a nineteen-year-old man named Leevi. The boy administered the drug to his dragon, a young calf hardly big enough to carry even his scrawny frame. Then boy and dragon lifted off the ground, heading west—for Borsvall, he assumed.

To ask the new king for help, perhaps?

Corien smirked, shrugging off his dressing gown and exchanging it for his shirt and trousers, his long, black coat.

He could just imagine it now. “Oh, King Ilmaire,” he said, simperingly, “can you please, oh please come help me rescue my dragon friends? They’re being held captive by an army of angels in the far north! They’re using the dragons in horrible experiments! You must help us, you simply must!”

Corien snorted. “Good luck with that, boy. Your king’s a coward, and you’re a goddamned fool.”

Then he threw on his cloak and swept out the doors.

• • •

He had the girl and her guard brought to one of the receiving halls in the fortress itself. She was a marque, after all. She possessed angelic blood, tainted though it was, and deserved better than a holding cell beneath the mountain.

It took her some time to awaken from the blow his men had dealt her, for which he’d made them pay, sinking into their minds until they writhed on the floor and begged for mercy.

“She is not to be beaten or mistreated,” he told them coldly, listening to them sob. They were lower angels, hardly powerful enough to maintain grips on their stolen bodies. The sight of them disgusted him. Once, they had been creatures glorious and mighty, before the long dark of the Deep reduced them to this.

Now, he sat in a chair opposite Obritsa, watching her eyes flutter open. She was a tiny thing—pale-brown skin, ice-white hair like the long-dead liar Marzana.