Soul-Lock

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"High Elder Maldrec," Kaelen said. He did not let go of Lucian. If anything he tightened his arm, and under the water, out of sight of the guards, he flexed his claws. "You are a long way from the Conclave."

"You are a long way from the Reach, Highness. Or you were, until you returned with a human in your bed." Maldrec's voice was dry as shed skin. "You have brought him back into dragon territory. This is outright treason against the Ember Conclave. The Council has ruled. Activate the Soul-Lock formation, and execute Lucian on the spot."

"You are courting death," Kaelen said.

"I am courting the survival of our race."

It happened very fast.

The floor lit up. Lucian felt it through the water, a spreading ring of pale violet light etched in a pattern older than the mountain. It rose around the pool in sigils, in chains, in lines of lightning. It closed around his ankles like a hand, and the whole of his mind seemed to go blank and white, as though something were scooping out his thoughts with a spoon.

He cried out. The dragon's arm locked around his chest.

"Hold on to me," Kaelen snarled. "Lucian, hold on to me, do not let go..."

"I can't..."

"*Look at me.*"

The mark on his neck flared. Gold ran like a river through the violet. Lucian felt Kaelen's will come crashing into him down the channel the bite had opened, dragon and human, fire and ice, braided together so tightly he could not tell where one ended and the other began. The Soul-Lock shuddered. The sigils cracked. A long, thin wail rose from the floor, and the whole grotto trembled.

"Impossible," Maldrec breathed. "It cannot be... a *mark!* He has already marked him!"

"Yes," Kaelen said. "He has. And he is mine."

He rose out of the water like something born from it. Gold scale ran over his shoulders. Wings of black membrane unfolded behind him, scattering the steam. The horns on his temples lengthened and curved, and the voice that came out of his throat was a voice Lucian had heard only once before, in the cell, as the armor-piercing rounds came through the glass.

"You will not touch him," he said.

---

The guards came in a wave.

Lucian never remembered the order of it. There was the first guard, who lunged with a pike, and who went across the grotto like a thrown doll when Kaelen backhanded him. There was a spear that scored Lucian's arm. There was a lash of green fire from the Elder's staff that Kaelen caught in an open palm and crushed. And there was a laugh, high and cracked and genuinely amused.

Varrick, the prince's cousin, had slid in at the head of a second squad, grinning like a man at a festival. "Look at you, cousin," he said. "Throwing away the pride of the Reach for a human who has slaughtered countless members of our own kind."

"Your Highness!" It was Maldrec again, thin and furious. "Would you betray all of the Conclave for him?"

"Thorne has created a doomsday weapon," Kaelen said. He was breathing hard, gold running from a cut on his shoulder. "Designed to kill dragons. Dragon blood, Elder. In seven days it will fall on the Reach. I am taking Lucian back into human territory to destroy it, and save every dragon in this mountain. How is that betrayal?"

"Lies. High Elder, do not listen to him." Varrick's grin had gone feral. "That human commander has bewitched him. He has even cast aside the pride of the Ember Conclave. A dragon who bows to humans is unworthy of the throne. Kill him, and reclaim the honor of the Reach!"

"You think you can steal my throne, you pathetic vermin?"

"Try me."

The two dragons collided.

Lucian had never seen two dragons fight. He had read about it in the reports, scraps of survivors' accounts, but nothing prepared him for the thing itself: two shadows the size of houses, ripping at each other in a whirl of scale and flame, tearing great gouges out of the grotto wall. Water boiled. Stone cracked. A pillar came down in an avalanche of gilt. Through it all, the bond throbbed in the back of Lucian's skull like a second heartbeat, and he could feel Kaelen's fury, and Kaelen's fear, and Kaelen's fierce, unwavering resolve.

*Go*, said the voice in his head. *Run. I will follow.*

*Not without you.*

*Lucian...*

*I said not without you.*

He did the only thing a man in his position could do. He wrenched a rusted iron pipe out of the wreckage, and Varrick's laughter rang across the grotto. "You think you can kill a dragon with that pathetic scrap pipe, human?" Lucian vaulted a heap of rubble and brought it down across the back of Varrick's knee with every ounce of strength he had left.

The dragon howled. His wing buckled.

And Kaelen, seizing the opening, drove one clawed fist into his cousin's jaw and sent him crashing across the ruined floor.

"You want my throne?" he said, breathing fire, standing over the wreckage. "Then go to hell."

"You dare," Maldrec whispered.

"I dare."

He caught Lucian around the waist and went up through the broken roof into the night.

---

They flew for hours.

The Ashfall Reach fell away beneath them, a spill of firelit gold on the black mountain. Cold air tore at Lucian's hair, at his bare skin, at the borrowed cloak wound round his shoulders. He clung to the ridged spine of the great winged shape beneath him and felt, through the bond, the dragon's exhaustion, his pain, his unspeakable relief.

"They will hunt us," Kaelen said, in the strange double-voiced rumble of his dragon throat. "The Conclave will not forgive this. I may never go home again."

"I'm sorry."

"I am not." The wings beat once, hard, and a hundred feet of mountain slid beneath them. "I have been waiting fifteen years for a reason to leave."

Dawn found them on the human side of the Frostline, in the dust of a collapsed supply tunnel six miles from Winterhold's capital, Wintergate. Kaelen folded back into his human shape with a long, shuddering sigh. He lay in the dirt, spent, shivering, bleeding from a dozen small wounds.

Lucian knelt and set his bare palm against his forehead.

Blue warmth poured out of his fingers. Slow, patient, tender. The same gift, the same hand, the same boy. And Kaelen's eyes closed, and his breathing eased, and he said in a voice barely above a whisper:

"Fifteen years, and you finally came back."

"I did not know I had left."

"You did not need to."

Lucian smiled, a small, tired, true smile, and let the blue light flow.

"Come on," he said. "We have a city to break into."

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