Read Chapter 35: The Last Hunt

Dawn came gray and cold over the border post, the mountains behind them still swallowed in shadow. Elara stood at the edge of the ruined watchtower, her hands wrapped around the rough stone, watching the horizon as if she could drag Voss back into view by sheer force of will.

She couldn't.

The eggs were gone. The decoys lay shattered in the dirt below, their hollow shells a mockery of everything she'd fought to protect. And somewhere beyond those mountains, Voss was riding with Aurelia's children in her saddlebags, laughing at how easily the trap had closed.

Elara's knuckles went white against the stone.

"Elara." Cedric's voice came from behind her, careful, measured. She heard his boots crunch on the rubble as he approached. "We need to move. The loyalists will reach the hatchery by tonight if we don't—"

"The hatchery is fine." The words came out sharper than she intended. She turned, forcing herself to breathe. "Aldric has the shields up. The remaining eggs are warded. Voss doesn't want the ones we have left—she wanted Aurelia's clutch. She's not going to waste time on a second attack when she's already got what she came for."

Cedric studied her for a long moment. He'd let his stubble grow over the past days of riding, and there was a weariness behind his eyes that matched her own. But he didn't argue. He simply waited.

That was what she loved about him. What she was beginning to love—she still wasn't sure how to name it.

"She'll go to the Delacroix estate," Elara said. "That's where the nobles have been convening. It's where she'll deliver the eggs, where she'll collect her payment, where she'll disappear into a web of politics and deniability. If she gets there, we lose her."

"Then we don't let her get there."

"No." Elara's jaw tightened. "We intercept her before she does. She'll take the mountain passes—the main roads are watched, and she knows it. But she's arrogant. She thinks we're still chasing the decoys, still reacting to her moves. That's her weakness."

She turned away from the horizon and walked past him, toward where Aurelia stood waiting at the edge of the camp. The great silver dragon's head lifted as Elara approached, her eyes catching the first true light of sunrise.

*Aurelia. Can you feel them?*

The dragon's response came not in words, but in a wash of sensation—a distant tug, like a thread tethered to her heart, pulling toward the southwest.

*North,* Aurelia corrected. *She circles. Trying to confuse me. But the thread holds.*

Elara pressed a hand to the locket at her throat. It was warm, warmer than it had been the day before, and she felt the faint pulse of something like a heartbeat through the metal. Her mother's locket. Her mother's legacy.

*Then we follow the thread,* Elara thought back. *And we end this.*

---

The pursuit took three days.

Three days of riding hard through country that grew increasingly hostile—scrubland giving way to rocky foothills, foothills rising into the jagged teeth of the northern pass. Aurelia flew overhead in wide circles, banking against the wind, but Voss had chosen her route well. The terrain funneled them through valleys where a dragon couldn't descend without announcement, where the sky was a ribbon of gray between cliffs.

They moved at night when they could, when Aurelia's bond with her stolen eggs gave them direction in the darkness. Elara rode at the head of the strike team—twelve riders, all of them volunteers, all of them hardened by the battles of the past weeks. Cedric rode at her side, as he had since the beginning.

On the third night, the thread went taut.

*She's stopped,* Aurelia reported, settling on a ridge above their camp. Her voice in Elara's mind was sharp with restrained rage. *Ahead. In a hollow between two hills. She thinks she's safe.*

Elara crouched by the fire, tracing a map in the dirt with the point of her knife. "She's resting. Probably planning to cross the border at dawn. If we hit her now—"

"You're talking about attacking a camp in the dark," said Margot, a stocky former patrol rider with a scar across her jaw. "Casualties will be high. Some of us may not make it back."

"I know." Elara met her eyes. "Which is why I'm going alone first."

The silence that followed was almost physical.

"No." Cedric's voice was flat. "Absolutely not."

"I'm not saying I'll take her alone. I'm saying I'll get close." Elara set the knife down. "Voss knows all of us. She knows our tactics, our strengths, our formations. She was a rider herself—she knows how dragon bonds work, knows how we think. But she doesn't know what I've become."

She touched the locket again. It was hot against her fingertips.

"She doesn't know about this. She doesn't know about the visions. She doesn't know what the Aethelward bloodline can do."

"And what can it do?" Cedric asked quietly.

Elara hesitated. The truth was she didn't fully know. The locket had shown her glimpses—flashes of distant places, of events she shouldn't be able to see. When she concentrated, she could feel the shape of dragon bonds throughout the land, like threads of light in an invisible web. And when she focused on Voss, on the stolen eggs, she could see—

"No," she murmured. "Wait."

She closed her eyes. She pushed past the fatigue, past the cold, past the fear. She reached for Aurelia's tether, followed it to the thread that stretched toward Voss, and then she pushed further. The locket blazed against her chest, and the darkness behind her eyelids burst into color.

She saw it. A hollow between two hills. A campfire being kicked out. Voss standing beside a large iron chest, her hand resting on its lid. And behind her, six men on horseback already saddled, waiting.

*She's moving,* Elara thought. *She's not going to wait for dawn. She's leaving now.*

She opened her eyes.

"Change of plan," she said. "She's already on the move. We need to spring the trap at the mouth of the pass. That's where she'll be in six hours, and that's where we'll take her."

"How do you know?" Margot asked.

"I just know."

Some of the riders exchanged glances. Skeptical. Uncertain. But Cedric only nodded slowly, and after a moment, Margot shrugged.

"Good enough for me. Let's ride."

---

The pass mouth was a natural amphitheater of stone, a wide funnel where the hills fell away into a plateau of open ground. No cover. No escape routes. A killing field, if she positioned them right.

Elara placed her riders along the ridges, hidden among the rocks above the funnel. Aurelia waited behind the far hill, out of sight, ready to seal the passage from the other side. And Elara sat alone in the center of the pass, astride a borrowed mount, waiting.

The locket throbbed against her chest.

She didn't have to wait long.

Voss came fast, as Elara had known she would—a small column of riders pushing their horses hard, their cargo jostling in its iron chest. The hollow clatter of hooves on stone echoed off the walls as they entered the funnel, and Elara saw Voss's head snap up the moment she spotted her.

Voss reined in. Her eyes narrowed.

"Elara." The name came out like a curse. "You're supposed to be chasing ghosts in the mountains."

"I was." Elara kept her voice calm. "I stopped chasing. I thought I'd wait for you instead."

Voss studied her for a moment. Then she laughed—a short, bitter sound.

"You think you can stop me? Just you and your little band of broken riders hidden in the rocks?" She gestured at the cliffs. "I've been doing this for twenty years. I know a trap when I see one. But your riders won't fire on me—not while I'm carrying these eggs."

She lifted the lid of the chest, just enough to reveal the gleaming, pearl-white shells inside.

"One wrong arrow, one loose bolt, and the queen's clutch is gone. Can you risk that? Can you live with that failure, dragon keeper?"

Elara felt the weight of the words. She felt the eyes of her riders on her, felt their hesitation shimmer through the bond. Voss was right. They couldn't risk the eggs.

But she didn't need to.

She touched the locket, and she felt something outside—something ancient and patient and vast just waking from a long, slow dream.

"You're right," Elara said. "We can't risk the eggs. So I'm not going to give you a reason to break them."

Voss's smug smile faltered. "What—"

The locket blazed hot. Elara raised a hand, and the ground beneath Voss's horses erupted.

It wasn't fire. It wasn't earth. It was something else—a force of will, a command whispered in a language older than the stones around them. The horses screamed and shied. Voss's riders scattered, their discipline shattering in an instant. The chest tipped, and Elara was already moving, driving her mount forward as the guards scrambled for control.

From the ridges, her riders descended like hunting hawks. From behind the hill, Aurelia rose with a roar that shook the pass. And Voss, cut off in every direction, reached for the chest—only to find Cedric there first, his sword already drawn, his blade at her throat.

"It's over, Voss." He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.

Voss looked at Elara, and for the first time, Elara saw not malice in her eyes but something closer to exhaustion. A deep, bone-weariness.

"Kill me, then. Do it clean."

"No." Elara dismounted and walked forward, holding Voss's gaze. "You'll stand trial. You'll answer for what you've done. And the world will know it."

Voss laughed again, but there was no humor in it. "Trial. You think your courts will give me anything but a cell for what I've done? You think they'll hold nobles accountable through a commoner's hands?"

"The laws are new. But they will be enforced." Elara stopped before her. "You'll live long enough to see them become real."

She reached out and closed Voss's fingers around the cold iron of the shackles Cedric offered.

And just before her guards led her away, Voss leaned close, her voice barely a whisper.

"You won't win, girl. The moment you soften a single enemy, you make room for a dozen more. You should have killed me while you had the chance."

Elara didn't flinch.

"Perhaps," she said. "But I have a king to answer to, and a queen above me, and a world watching to see whether dragon keepers rule by blood or by justice. Let them see this."

Voss's mouth twisted, but she said nothing as she was led away.

The locket cooled against Elara's skin. She touched it gently, feeling the pulse of something like approval, or perhaps just the echo of her mother's voice in the memory.

*You did well,* it seemed to say.

Elara let out a long breath and watched the dawn break over the pass, the eggs safe, the enemy captured, and the long road home stretching out before her.