Read Chapter 20: The Aftermath of Betrayal

The village alarm bell had barely stopped ringing when Voss’s first dragon screamed overhead, its shadow swallowing the central square. Elara stood in the dirt with the artifact clutched to her chest, cold even through her jacket, and watched Cedric’s mount, Ashfall, fold his wings and drop onto the rooftops like a stone.

“You led them here.” She didn’t turn to face him. She couldn’t. If she looked at him now, she’d do something stupid, like throw the artifact at his head.

“I led them away from the academy,” Cedric said, dismounting in a spray of gravel. His voice was tight, controlled, the voice of a boy who’d practiced nobility in mirrors. “The storeroom was warded. The moment I touched the case, she knew. I had no time for stealth.”

“So you chose panic.” Elara finally turned. He stood ten feet away, travel-worn, jaw set. Handsome in the way that made her want to scream. “You abandoned your post, your cover, your *plan*—and you brought the entire Riders’ Corp down on a village of farmers and scholars who took us in because they believed we could help them.”

“They’re not farmers.” Cedric’s eyes flicked past her to the muddy street where outcasts were dragging children into root cellars. “They’re exiles. They knew the risk when they sheltered you.”

“They sheltered *us*. That’s the word you’re missing. Us. You’re part of that now, like it or not.”

A second dragon wheeled above, lower this time. The wind from its wings tore at the thatched roofs. Somewhere a woman screamed, and Elara’s chest seized with a fear that had nothing to do with her own safety. These people had fed her. They’d shown her their journals, their theories, their hope. And now—

“Inside.” Aldric’s hand closed on her shoulder, firm and steady. He’d appeared from nowhere, as he always did. “Both of you. The village has a storm cellar. It’s warded against scrying, not against dragonfire, but it’s the best we have.”

“We can’t just hide,” Cedric said.

“We can, and we will, for the next hour.” Aldric’s voice brooked no argument. “Those riders are searching for open movement, not for holes in the earth. Move.”

The cellar was cold and smelled of turnips and damp wool. Fifty or sixty people huddled together in the lamplight—elders, children, the wounded. The village elder, a woman named Sera with grey braids and a rider’s scar across her brow, met them at the bottom of the ladder.

“You bring trouble to my door,” she said quietly. Not an accusation. A statement of fact.

“I know.” Elara’s throat was dry. “I’m sorry.”

Sera’s gaze dropped to the artifact in Elara’s arms, a fist-sized sphere of black glass wrapped in copper wire that pulsed with a sickly green light. “That’s what she wants.”

“It’s what she *needs*,” Elara said. “Aldric says it fuels her. If we destroy it—”

“Then you destroy the last chance we have to understand what she’s done to the dragons.” Sera shook her head. “We’ve spent years studying the decline. This is the first piece of Voss’s magic we’ve had in our hands. You don’t destroy knowledge because you’re afraid of it.”

“She’s not afraid,” Cedric cut in. “She’s reckless. She’d smash it and hope for the best.”

Elara’s hands tightened on the sphere. “And you’d study it for months while her riders burn this village to ash. You have no right to lecture me about recklessness—you stole an artifact from a sorceress and flew straight to our doorstep with a trail of dragons behind you.”

“I brought you the weapon you asked for.”

“I didn’t ask for you.”

The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on. Sera’s weathered face flickered, and somewhere in the dark, a child began to cry.

Aldric stepped between them, his broad frame cutting the tension like a blade. “Enough. Both of you, enough.” He looked at Elara, then at Cedric. “We have maybe an hour before they land and start tearing up the village. We can use that hour to blame each other, or we can use it to think.”

Cedric’s jaw worked. “She’s not wrong,” he said finally. “I knew the risk. I thought—I thought I could get here ahead of them. Voss moves faster than I calculated.”

“Voss let you move,” Elara said. The words came out flat, tired. “She let you take it. You said yourself the storeroom was warded. If she could feel you touch it, she could have stopped you.”

Cedric went still.

“She wanted you to flee,” Elara continued. “Because she didn’t know where we were. She let you lead her here.”

The color drained from his face. For the first time since she’d met him, Cedric looked genuinely young, genuinely frightened. “No. She wouldn’t—she can’t track me that way. I took precautions.”

“Precautions against a woman who’s spent twenty years weaving spells into everything she owns?” Aldric’s voice was gentle, almost kind. “Boy, you walked into her web and you think it didn’t stick to you?”

Cedric’s hand went to his chest, where a rider’s pin usually sat. His fingers found nothing. “The pin,” he whispered. “She gave me the pin when I was promoted. She said it was a gift.”

“Let me see it,” Sera said.

“I don’t have it. I left it behind. I thought—I didn’t want to carry anything of hers.”

Sera let out a long breath. “Then you cut the thread. Whatever she did, she did to the pin. You’re clean.”

Cedric nodded, but his face was pale, and Elara could see the calculation behind his eyes, the slow reassessment of every kindness Voss had ever shown him. She knew that feeling. She’d felt it the day she learned her parents’ deaths weren’t an accident.

“We still have her riders overhead,” she said, forcing her voice level. “That problem doesn’t go away because we understand how it happened.”

“No,” Aldric agreed. “But understanding changes what we do next.”

For the next hour, they talked. Not about blame—there was no time for that, and Elara found she didn’t have the energy for it anyway. They talked about the artifact, about the journal, about what Sera and her outcasts had learned in their years of exile.

“The dragons aren’t dying,” Sera said, spreading a yellowed map across a barrel. “They’re being drained. The essence that binds them to the world, to their riders, to their own wills—Voss is drawing it out of them and storing it.” She tapped the sphere. “That’s her reservoir. The one you stole. If she loses it, she loses the immortality she’s been building toward.”

“Then she’ll come for it,” Cedric said. “Personally. Not just riders.”

“Then we don’t give her the chance.” Elara looked at the map. “Is there anywhere she doesn’t control? Anywhere we could make a stand?”

Sera traced a line through the mountains. “The ancient summit. It’s a day’s ride from here. The old riders used it for their binding rituals, before the academy built its own grounds. It’s warded by the old magic—older than Voss, older than the academy itself.”

“Warded against her?”

“Warded against everyone. But if you’re trying to undo a spell, there’s nowhere better. The old magic runs deep there. It might—it might even be able to break Voss’s hold on the essence she’s already taken.”

Cedric looked up sharply. “We could free the dragons she’s already drained?”

“Possibly.” Sera’s voice was careful. “Or it might destroy the essence entirely. Kill the dragons she’s fed on. I don’t know. No one’s attempted this in two hundred years.”

The cellar fell silent. Elara could feel the weight of the artifact in her hands, the pulse of stolen life beating against her palms like a second heart.

“How many of us can fight?” she asked.

Sera’s mouth tightened. “Fifty. Maybe sixty, if we arm the children with slings.”

“It’s not enough.”

“It’s never enough,” Aldric said. “But we have something Voss doesn’t.”

“What?”

“We have the dragons.”

Elara blinked. “Ignis is sick. Ashfall is loyal only to Cedric. The rest are under Voss’s control.”

“They’re under her *spell*,” Aldric corrected. “Not her command. If we can reach the summit, if we can perform the ritual, we might break that spell. And every dragon that breaks free is one more soldier on our side.”

“A ritual we don’t know,” Cedric said. “A summit we’ve never seen. And an army of, what, trained farmers?”

“And you.” Elara looked at him. “And me. And everyone who believes that dragons shouldn’t become tools for a madwoman’s immortality.”

Cedric met her eyes. For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

“I’m not sorry I came,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry I was followed. But I’m not sorry I chose you over her.”

Elara’s chest ached. She wanted to believe him. She wanted to trust the certainty in his voice. But trust had burned her before, and Cedric had Voss’s marks all over him—training, mentorship, a pin he’d only just thought to question.

“We’ll talk later,” she said. “When we’re not hiding in a root cellar. When I’ve had time to decide if I believe you.”

Cedric nodded. He didn’t push. That, at least, she could respect.

Above them, the screaming stopped. The dragons had moved on, or landed, or found something else to burn. The silence that followed was heavier than the noise had been.

Sera folded her map. “They’ll be back,” she said. “When they don’t find us, they’ll burn the village and move on. We have until sunrise to leave.”

“Then we leave at sunset,” Elara said. “And we ride for the summit.”

She looked down at the artifact in her hands. Its green pulse seemed almost eager, almost hungry. She didn’t know what she was carrying, not really. But she knew what it meant to the woman who wanted it back.

And she knew, with a cold certainty that settled deep in her bones, that she would die before she returned it.

The outcasts began to move around her, gathering supplies, checking weapons, murmuring prayers to gods whose names she didn’t know. Aldric was already planning routes. Cedric was already arguing with him.

Elara stood at the center of the storm, holding stolen magic in her hands, and let herself feel the weight of what she’d become. Not a stable hand. Not a fugitive. Not even a rider, not yet.

But something else. Something she was still learning the shape of.

The pulse of the artifact beat against her palms like a heart, and in it, she heard the faint, distant roar of dragons she’d never met—bound to a woman who was draining them dry.

“I’m coming for you,” she whispered. “And I’m bringing them all with me.”