The Dragon and the Queen (The Raven and the Dove Book 3) Read online

  "You…" Rafe's whisper fell away to nothing.

  The demon cocked its head to the side as though curious. Then it reached a hand around the metal mage's throat, the pointed claws of its fingers creating indents in his tan skin. The mage blinked. His gaze sharpened as the power of the raven cry fled. For a moment, his eyes widened. With a sudden jerk, he dropped dead.

  "No!" Rafe shouted.

  The creature was already gone, disappearing into the shadows as though it had never existed in the first place. But it had. He'd seen it. And not just moments ago—he’d seen it in his dreams. Impossible, yet true.

  The aero'kine screamed and dropped to the ground beside her dead companion. Before Brighty had a moment to complain, Rafe grabbed her by the waist and launched into the sky, every fiber of his being alight with the desire to flee.

  "Put me down!"

  Rafe ignored her and carved a path deeper into the fog, rising high above the city.

  "Rafe, put me down now!"

  He loosened his grip, and she screamed loudly enough to wake the gods. "You said—"

  "Not right now, you bloody idiot!"

  He grinned as she wrapped her arms around his throat, nearly choking the life out of him in her desperation to hold on.

  "I thought you weren't afraid of heights."

  She grumbled unintelligibly and buried her head in his chest. He shook his and reached out with his senses, using the subtle pull of magic to guide him closer to the docks. Only, it wasn't subtle. The port was ablaze with power, and as they neared, rainbow explosions broke through the mist. He dove beneath the fog bank, not surprised in the least to find the crew of The Wanderer at the center of the fray. A group of mages on the dock were attempting to come aboard. The crew held them off. Magic crashed and collided, nearby ships and buildings getting pulled into the destruction. A furious storm brewed across the sky, spun by the captain's hands as Pyro burned the sails of a nearby ship and Jolt rained lightning on the empty deck. His friends were clearly stronger, holding the other mages off and careful not to inflict any permanent damage—on the people, anyway.

  "Go!" Rafe tried to shout. They'd been waiting for them. It was obvious. Rather than flee, they'd stood their ground, but he'd never forgive himself if anyone got hurt. "Go!"

  Above the blistering winds, he knew he had no chance of being heard. But against the charcoal skies, his wings were hard to miss. Patch grabbed Captain by the arm and pointed. Immediately, the air shifted and the sails of the ship puffed. Rafe cut back into the fog before the mages on the ground spotted him. He'd meet the ship out at sea.

  "Did you see their faces?" Brighty groaned against his chest. "I'll never hear the end of this, being carted around like some damsel in distress…blech."

  The shadow creature's sharp onyx claws flashed through Rafe's mind and a shiver pulsed down his spine. He tightened the grip on his friend. "At least you'll be alive."

  The Diary

  Eleventh Day of the Third Moon

  * * *

  I don't know why I still do this. Perhaps because it's the last thing I remember my mother telling me before she passed into the aether. Write down your visions, Miralee. Write them down so you'll always remember. One day, they might save everything.

  Unlikely.

  My mother wasn't a chrono'kine. She didn’t see into the future as I do. She was a cryo'kine, and I've missed her magic in the many years that she's been gone. Our lands always burn with a constant summer sun. She used to plop frozen pellets in my drinks to keep them cool. She used to press her palm to my brow and freeze the sweat upon my skin. She used to dip her fingers into the shallow fountain at the base of the palace then take my hands so we could slip together across the ice. Sometimes when it rained, she tossed her frosty power into the air and the droplets would turn to snow. If I close my eyes, I can still taste the chill upon my tongue.

  Father always thought her magic frivolous, as he does mine. All he ever wanted was a son, an aethi'kine same as him, someone to inherit the throne. Power speaks in our world, and no power speaks louder than his. But I don't mind being quiet.

  Father tells me he has no use for my magic. He calls my visions pretty pictures with nothing to say. I don't tell him I've seen his death, and it isn’t pretty at all.

  It happened for the first time two moons ago. We were eating supper and he was droning on about my marriage prospects—my least favorite topic. I was staring at my food when the back of my neck started tickling, the prickle of my magic. Where my fingers held the fork, a subtle rosy shimmer danced beneath my skin, the stirring of my power. When I looked up, my father was still before me, but he was no longer the man I recognized. His olive skin resembled melted wax, his cheeks dripping from some unseen heat, blood vessels strung red and boils oozing with puss. His eyes ran like liquid down his face. His thick black beard was gone, and the top of his head was bald, still smoking where his hair had burned to ash.

  I blinked and it was gone.

  My father was so used to the blush of my magic, so unmoved by it, he didn’t bother to ask what I'd seen, and I didn’t say. The vision was clearer than most, but still fuzzy around the edges, offering no details of time or place. That's the problem with seeing into the future—it's always in flux. Sometimes I see things that will never come to pass. Sometimes I don’t realize what I've seen until it's already too late, as with my mother. I had visions of her on her deathbed, face peaceful with flowers woven through her ebony hair. I'd always thought she'd been sleeping. It wasn't until I stood over her, watching the final breath leave her body, that I realized my mistake. My father had been visiting another kingdom when the accident happened. She fell from her horse and broke her spine. We sent a hummingbird avian with a message, but it was too late. She was dead by the time he returned, and within the hour, the hummingbird and the horse had joined her. I've never been to the stables again.

  I'm not sure why I never saw the accident. That's maybe the most frustrating thing about my magic—I have no control. The visions come to me with no explanation, no meaning. I can't draw them out. I can't call upon them. They change from day to day, sometimes little more than blurred colors of uncertainty, sometimes with the sharpest clarity but still opaque in meaning. They frightened me when I was small, but I've since learned my father disapproves of such weakness. Maybe he'd be proud to know I saw his face melted off and hardly batted an eye.

  Maybe I'm more my father's daughter than I thought.

  * * *

  Fourteen Day of the Third Moon

  * * *

  I just saw another vision. At least, I think I did. I was staring outside my window, watching the avians soar above the city streets, carrying messages and running patrols, when suddenly the bright blue, cloudless sky turned an angry, hazy orange. The clouds went gray. The streets turned black. In a moment, it was gone, hardly more than a flash, too quickly for me to tell what exactly it had been. A blood dawn, perhaps? I've never seen one, but every hundred years it's said a red sun rises, an ill omen.

  The very thought makes me shiver.

  There was something else, too, something I just realized. In my vision, the skies were empty. Never once have I glanced out my window to a sky unmarked by swiftly moving wings, some black, some white, some hardly more than a rainbow blur dashing beneath the clouds. The avians are as much a part of this life as magic. They're our messengers. Our warriors. Our servants. Our subjects. They flock to my father and the other kings like him because aethi'kine power is the only thing that can give them wings. They're loyal to us, and in turn my father keeps their way of life alive.

  No one knows for sure how the avian race began, just as no one knows how our civilization ended up here, on a peninsula on the other side of a towering mountain range, impassable without magic or wings. There are myths, of course. I've been told people with magic were once hunted and killed. People believed our blood and bodies could be used as talismans. Others believed we were dangerous. Still more thought we were loyal to an
evil god who lived in a burning realm deep within the earth. Even with all our power, we lived in fear until an aethi'kine leader rose. He thought himself a god, so he forged an army fit for a god. In that age, the people believed in a single deity who ruled the skies. Thus he gave his warriors wings and the avians were born. Some people prayed to him. More cursed him. The mages united behind him, free for once from persecution. And though they could have destroyed that world, more death wasn't what they'd wanted, just peace. So they pilgrimaged to this peninsula, then used their magic to raise the mountains and roughen the seas, until the world forgot we even existed. Now those with magic rule, and those without, well…live, I guess.

  If there's one thing my magic has shown me, it's that time is cyclical. Power too. Paupers become princes who become paupers again. Someday, though I'm not sure how or when, maybe mages will once again be the ones begging for scraps. It's hard for me to imagine that ever being so, sitting here in the fine rooms of the palace, my father's scarlet banners whipping in the breeze, his strength so absolute none would dare question it. But I think of the empty skies in my vision, and—I don't know.

  If the future is one thing, it's uncertain, even through my all-seeing eyes.

  * * *

  Nineteenth Day of the Third Moon

  * * *

  My father has found me a husband. At least, he thinks so. I should be rejoicing—households rise and fall like the sun in our lands. With my power as it is, we've been prepared for doom should anything happen to him. Lacking an aethi'kine heir, the avians would flee to new lands and we'd be exposed, ripe for the taking, no army to protect us. Even with all the magic in the world, one of the neighboring kings would come and claim our home for his own. I saw it happen five years ago. A kingdom in the far north fell not even a year after losing its aethi'kine queen. But if my father secured my marriage to an aethi'kine, our kingdom would be safe, and our people would prosper for another generation.

  So, I should be rejoicing.

  But I'm not.

  There are only two eligible aethi'kine men that I'm aware of at the moment, unless another has recently come into power. One is a five-year-old boy, just a child, and the other an unabashed bachelor. He's a few years older than me, and I'm told quite handsome, but that matters little. All I know is that he had a chance five years ago to claim a kingdom, and instead he watched from the sideline as the city was torn apart, its people ripped from their homes and its royal family slaughtered. He claimed he had no interest in being a king. Well, people with no sense of duty are of little interest to me.

  Though I guess I'm being harsh.

  Everything I've just written shows my own reluctance to perform my duty. I will, of course, when the time comes. I would never let my home fall because of my own selfish desires. But here, in the safety of these pages I pray no one else will ever read, perhaps I can be honest.

  I've lived under the unrelenting rule of an aethi'kine man my entire life.

  I don't relish the thought of surviving the rest of my days under yet another.

  Their power can be as cruel as it is kind. They can save a life just as easily as they take it. Even under the most honorable aethi'kine, freedom is a ruse. It can be stolen at a moment's notice with a single stray thought. Being so powerful must do something to their minds—men and women alike. Though I have more experience with aethi'kine kings and princes, I'm sure the queens are just the same. They command spirits, and yet their own feel broken, as though being so entrenched in humanity has somehow made them less human.

  Or maybe my father has left me jaded.

  One way or another, I'll see—whether it be with a ring on my finger or a sword at my throat. I don't need my magic to know that.

  * * *

  Twenty-First Day of the Third Moon

  * * *

  I can't breathe as I write this. My heart pounds in my chest. My pulse races. I ran back to my room to record every detail of the vision before it faded, though I doubt it ever will. Those hazel eyes seem burned into my thoughts like a brand, brighter each time I close my eyes.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

  I was on my way to dinner when I felt the tingle at the back of my neck, signaling the onset of my magic. A strong breeze blew in from the window, so I turned to face it. My slipper caught on my skirts and I stumbled back. As soon as my shoulder blades struck stone, he was there. A warm hand encased my cheek, and his face was close, so close I could see nothing else. His tan skin held a warm summer glow and his long hair fell around his cheeks in waves, like bronze curtains streaked with sunlight. But his eyes are what still pierce, even now, long after the vision faded. They were so deep I felt as though I might drown within them, copper at the edges, then jade in the center, flecked with spots of gold. He looked at me as though he never wanted to look away, something fierce and protective in his gaze. He stroked my face once with his thumb, the rough edge of a callus scratching my skin, before he disappeared. I still feel the mark. I still feel his eyes. Within me something stirs, something I've never felt before.

  Who was he?

  My husband?

  I fear not. The vision showed me nothing else, but the danger lingering in my heart promises his is a touch I'm never supposed to feel in real time.

  The future, though, is mine to do with what I will.

  * * *

  Third Day of the Fourth Moon

  * * *

  I haven’t written in days, and it's because there's nothing to report. My eyes are so filled with visions of him, I see nothing else. Not magic visions. Not visions of the future. These are the sort weaved by my mind, not my power.

  I can't stop seeing him.

  Every time I close my eyes, I wonder who he is and where he lives and when I’ll finally find him. Why is he important? Why did my magic show me his face? What is it trying to say?

  Chrono'kine power is maddening.

  No one else understands what it's like to see something that may never come to pass, to want so badly for it to be real, but to know it might be little more than a dream. What if I never meet him? What if he's forever just a face to haunt my thoughts, a reminder of what could have been? I see the future, but I have such little power to affect it—to keep it the same, to bring it closer, to change it. One person may live who was meant to die, one person may die who was meant to live, and just like that, the fate of the whole world changes, taking all my visions with it.

  But he'll come.

  I just need patience.

  His face was too clear. His eyes too knowing. His touch too real. He's a certain future. It was everything else around him that was hazy.

  Or maybe I was just too bespelled to look.

  * * *

  Eighth Day of the Fourth Moon

  * * *

  Nothing.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing!

  Nothing.

  * * *

  Twelfth Day of the Fourth Moon

  * * *

  My father complains that I've been in a daze these past weeks. He thinks I'm moping over the prospect of getting married.

  Let him.

  The aethi'kine he is speaking with is the one I suspected, who stood by while another kingdom perished, who's shown no interest in ruling and no understanding of what it means to be a true king. For all my father's faults, I do believe that deep down he wants what is best for his people, though I don't always approve of his methods. My mother was the only one who ever managed to question him, and ever since her death, he's reigned unchecked.

  Will my husband be like that?

  Will he do as he wants, when he wants, knowing full well there will be no one around to stop him? Or will he listen to reason?

  I'll know soon enough.

  I'm to meet him in a few days' time.

  * * *

  Thirteenth Day of the Fourth Moon

  * * *

  As if my freedoms weren't limited enough, my father is putting more guards outside my rooms in anticipation o
f my potential betrothed's visit. He's afraid and it's unsettling. I've never seen him nervous before. Unlike bodies that age, magic doesn't weaken with time, so I should think he has nothing to fear at the prospect of a younger man's arrival, even if he is an aethi'kine, but maybe his fear is of the more traditional sort. I live so often in the future, I forget that so many dread it. Time is the one thing no one can stop, no one can control, and one day, it will claim even my father. I've been considering this new arrival as my possible husband so often, I forget he is also my father's possible replacement, a thought I don't believe any king relishes.

  Is it wrong that makes me more eager to meet him?

  Oh, there's a knock on my door. I had best go welcome my new chaperones. With luck, I'll be able to bribe them into turning a blind eye when I wish to go walk the gardens at night. There's nothing quite like the glow of moonlight on a bed of roses or the shimmering carpet of an uninterrupted starry sky.

  Worst comes to worst, I'll use my old route out the window. It's been a long time since I've had to shimmy down the trellis to escape my nanny, but some tricks are never quite forgotten.

  * * *

  Thirteenth Day of the Fourth Moon

  * * *

  I met him.

  No, not my husband. Him, him. The man from my vision. His skin was just as golden and his eyes just as deep, though they didn’t regard me with passion. Not yet. They were carefully blank, measured by control, a flimsy shield hiding the breath of emotion I already saw in them.

  He's one of my new avian guards—an eagle with glorious golden wings.