Eona - Alison Goodman [195]
Reinforcements surged around the end of the unfinished trench. The thin silver line of their progress bunched, then pushed through the ragged lines of the resistance. We streaked after the blue dragon, screaming our defiance but unable to stop the attack compelled from within. Below, the gossamer thread of power that linked Ido to his beast was under siege. A shifting circle of bright Hua surrounded Ido, a smaller circle within it desperately holding back the assault: resistance fighters shielding the Dragoneye, trying to repel the hunters intent on capturing him. The circle broke, then regrouped, but not fast enough. The shield had been breached by two points of Hua. The thread of power flickered, and snapped. The Rat Dragon shrieked.
“They have him!” Sethon exulted.
“No,” I screamed. “No!”
“End your union.”
I felt the compulsion close around my power and tear me from the Mirror Dragon. The vibrant, pulsing colors of the energy world slid and buckled into the solid flesh of Sethon’s triumph. I lurched at him, pearl-bound hands useless, but in my mind I was clawing at his smug face. He caught me by the shoulders.
“It is just a matter of time now,” he said. “Look.” He forced me to face the battlefield.
Before us, the plain was no longer swirling Hua. It was straining bodies and screams and clashing steel. Mud made of dust and blood sprayed through the air as men whirled and lunged. But even to my untrained eye, the resistance lines were falling back. They could not hold out.
Sethon surveyed the chaos. “How does it feel to be the agent of your friends’ defeat, Lady Eona?”
It felt like my heart was being ripped from my body.
It took longer for the resistance army to surrender than Sethon expected. They fought to the end of their strength and hope, finally succumbing to the greater numbers and the loss of their Dragoneye support. I watched silently as each group of valiant fighters was defeated—either killed or taken prisoner—until the narrow battlefield that Ido had carved from the earth became a picking ground for looting soldiers and the scavenger birds that hopped from body to body in black-hunched eagerness. I was long past tears, my spirit so arid I could not even dredge up enough wet to whisper a prayer to Shola for the dying and dead. My mind had withered into only one thought: I had failed them all—Kygo, Kinra, and the dragons we had enslaved.
Sethon’s impatience finally took him down the steps to wait for the prisoners. He kept me by his side, his entourage of aides and attendants scrambling into positions behind us as he paced, one of Kinra’s swords swinging from his hand, his other arm hooked through mine as if we strolled in a garden. The wind that Ido had created was long gone, leaving a heavy humidity that was already pulling a meaty stink from the corpses. Soldiers gathered around us to watch Sethon’s final victory. Their morbid curiosity pressed on me, as hot and weighty as the air.
Another terrible thought wormed its way into my horror; was Kygo still alive? Was Ido? Sethon had ordered their capture, but things went awry in battle.
A murmur through the waiting throng announced the arrival of the prisoners. Sethon’s hold on my arm tightened as the crowd parted and a straight, proud figure slowly walked into view between two guards: Kygo, his hands clasped behind his head like a common prisoner, the Imperial Pearl on defiant display above the open gorget of his armored vest. He was alive. Behind him, two hunters dragged the limp form of Ido between them—delivered senseless, as ordered.
Kygo’s head was high, but I could see the pain and regret breaking through his body with every heartbeat. The defeat had stripped his spirit bare. Everything that was left was written upon his hollowed face—desperation, despair, and the core of courage that kept him upright. As the distance closed between us, his dark eyes sought mine, and I saw what else was left within his spirit. Me.
Sethon stopped Kygo’s guards with a raised hand. They pushed him to his knees, a length from us. The