Prologue
The dragon was cheating.
Seraphina knew it because she was faster than every child in the village. She had won every race for as long as she could remember. Yet somehow, the little dragon was already at the fence post, its tail curled around its feet and its gold eyes shining with satisfaction.
“You flew,” she accused, skidding to a halt in the snow. Her breath came out in great white clouds, and she planted her mittened hands on her hips the way she’d seen her mother do when she meant business.
The dragon looked at her.
“You did. I saw your wings move. Just a little. That still counts as flying.”
It opened its mouth and made a sound that was part chirp, part rumble, tilting its head. Seraphina pressed her lips together, trying hard to look stern. It was difficult when the dragon looked at her that way.
“Fine,” she said. “But you still cheated. Next time we race to the well and back, and you have to keep your wings folded the whole way.”
She held out her mittened hand, and the hatchling moved forward and pressed its black head into her palm, warm despite the cold. It was only a little bigger than a barn cat, though it ate considerably more than any cat ever had, and it had followed her home from the eastern ridge seven months ago when she’d found it tangled and shivering in a deadfall. It had not left her side since. Not once. Not even when her mother tried to make it sleep in the barn.
It slept curled at the foot of her bed most nights, despite her mother’s repeated insistence that dragons belonged in barns. Seraphina had tried to obey once. The hatchling had cried outside her window, a miserable, broken little sound that made her chest ache so badly she had crept downstairs and opened the door before her mother could stop her. After that, no one argued about where it slept.
It knew all her secrets, even the ones she never said out loud. It knew which floorboard creaked outside the kitchen, which pantry shelf had the honey cakes, and how to nudge her elbow when she tried not to cry. When thunder rolled over the mountains, it crawled under her blanket and pushed its nose under her chin. When she was angry, it stayed close. When she laughed, it chirped.
Seraphina had never had to explain herself to it. Somehow, it always knew.
The festival blazed around them, spilling gold light across the snow. Lanterns hung in long strings from each rooftop and fence post, swaying gently in the cold wind, and the square below was crowded with villagers who stamped their boots and passed steaming cups of cider between gloved hands. Musicians played fiddle and drum near the great bonfire at the center of the square, and the smell of roasted chicken and spiced cider and woodsmoke rolled through the frozen air in waves that made Seraphina’s stomach growl.
From the dragon pens at the edge of the square came the low, comfortable sounds of the village’s older dragons—settling rumbles, the occasional huff of steam into the cold—as familiar to Seraphina as the sound of wind moving through the pines above the house.
The whole village had been preparing for the winter festival since dawn. Seraphina had watched men drag great pine logs into the square while women tied red and gold ribbons around the lantern posts, their fingers quick despite the cold. Children had been given the important task of sprinkling dried winterberries along the frozen paths, though most of them had eaten as many as they dropped. At sunset, the snow itself looked dressed for celebration, glittering beneath lanternlight and scattered with bits of color.
Tonight was the Night of First Flame.
Her mother said it was older than the village, older than the stone well, older even than the dragon pens at the edge of the square. Every year, when the longest cold settled into the mountains, the villagers gathered to remind the dark that they were still there. They lit one fire from another, passing flame from house to house until every window burned gold. Then, at the center of the square, the eldest dragon of the village would lower its head and breathe the first true flame of winter onto the great bonfire.
Seraphina loved that part best.
She loved how everyone went quiet before it happened. Even the babies seemed to know something special was coming. She loved watching the old dragon lumber out from the pens, snow steaming on its scales, with its rider walking beside it, one hand on its shoulder. The dragon was too old to fly far now, and one of its horns had been broken since before Seraphina was born. But when it opened its jaws, the fire that came out was bright, golden, and alive.
When the dragon breathed into the waiting logs, the entire square burst into cheers.
The bonfire leaped high, sparks spinning up into the dark like a thousand tiny stars trying to return to the sky. Someone began clapping. Someone else shouted for music. The fiddles struck up, and the hatchling startled beside her, wings popping half-open before it realized nothing was attacking it.
“It’s only music,” she whispered.
The hatchling gave her a doubtful look.
Across the square, couples started to dance in circles through the snow. Boots stamped. Skirts swirled. Men laughed when they slipped on patches of ice. The village blacksmith lifted his little daughter onto his shoulders so she could see over the crowd, and near the bakery, three boys were daring one another to run close enough to touch the elder dragon’s tail before Old Marta noticed.
Seraphina knew everyone here. She knew which house had the crooked blue shutters, which dogs would steal scraps from the tables, which aunties pinched cheeks too hard, and which men would sneak extra cider if their wives weren’t watching. She knew the shape of every roof buried beneath snow and the sound of every bell tied above every door. Sometimes, when the merchant caravans passed through bringing stories from the cities beyond the northern forests or news of distant wars along the southern coast, it was hard to imagine those faraway places were even real. The village was not large, but to Seraphina it felt endless. Safe. Like the mountains had curved around it on purpose, holding it in both hands.
And tonight, with the fire burning and the dragons rumbling, it felt as if nothing bad could ever find them.
The hatchling’s stomach growled, and Seraphina looked down.
“No,” she said.
The hatchling looked toward the food tables.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Its tail gave one innocent little flick.
“You already ate two pieces of chicken, half a sausage, and something from Mistress Elowen’s basket that I’m not telling Mama about.”
The hatchling blinked, as if none of this sounded familiar.
Seraphina narrowed her eyes. “Don’t pretend.”
“Seraphina!” Old Marta called from a table stacked high with sweet rolls, her cheeks red from the cold. “Come take yours before that creature eats them all!”
Seraphina looked at the hatchling.
The hatchling looked at the sweet rolls.
“Don’t,” she said.
It was already moving.
She chased it back through the crowd, apologizing to three different adults she nearly toppled, before catching it around the middle and scooping it against her chest. It squirmed and craned its neck back toward the table with open longing. A half-eaten sweet roll dangled from its jaw, crumbs scattering into the snow.
Old Marta shook her head, but she was laughing, and the sound of it carried warm and easy over the noise of the square. “I’ve never seen anything like the two of you. Joined at the soul, my mother would have said. You’ll be trouble together for years yet.”
“It’s not my fault,” Seraphina said, straightening her coat with as much dignity as she could manage.
“Never is.” Old Marta pressed another roll—an uneaten one, this time—into her hand. “Go find your parents, little one. Your mother was looking for you.”
Seraphina nodded, set the dragon down, and made her way toward the bonfire.
Her father was tall enough that she could spot him from a distance, his broad shoulders outlined by the firelight, and he had her mother pulled close beneath his arm. Both of them watched the flames with the relaxed look of people who had nowhere else in the world they needed to be. When Seraphina pushed through the last cluster of villagers and reached them, her father caught her up off the ground with one arm and held her against his chest, and she felt the low rumble of his laugh against her ear.
“There she is,” he said. “We thought the hatchling had carried you off into the mountains.”
“It can’t carry me. It’s too small.”
“Give it a year.”
Her mother smoothed the snow from Seraphina’s hair with a gloved hand. “Did you eat anything tonight that wasn’t stolen?”
“Old Marta gave me one. This one’s mine, I promise.”
The hatchling appeared at her father’s feet and sat with an expression of profound innocence, sweet roll crumbs still clinging to its snout.
Her father looked down at it for a brief moment. “It has sweet roll on its face.”
“It cheated at the race too.”
Her mother laughed, low and soft, and the sound settled into Seraphina’s chest the way warmth always did, like sinking into a bath after a day in the snow. She leaned her head against her father’s shoulder and watched the fire. For a little while, there was nothing in the world but the festival, the falling snow, the smell of pine smoke, and her parents close on either side of her, as solid and certain as the mountains.
Then her mother’s hand stilled in her hair.
Seraphina felt it before she understood it—a small hesitation, quickly smoothed over, the kind of stillness that came before a held breath. She looked up. Her parents were watching something past the edge of the square, some understanding passing between them without a single word, the way adults did sometimes, in glances and the set of a jaw. Her father’s arm had tightened around her mother’s shoulders. Her mother had turned her face away, just enough that the firelight no longer reached her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Seraphina asked.
“Nothing,” her father said, and his voice was easy and unhurried as he set her back down on her feet. “Are you cold? We could go inside for a while.”
But her mother’s gaze had drifted, and stayed, toward the eastern ridge.
The hatchling made a small, uncertain sound at Seraphina’s feet, and pressed itself against her ankle.
The village dragons went quiet first.
Seraphina noticed it before any of the adults did, because she had grown up listening to them and had learned the difference between the low settling rumble of a sleeping dragon and the particular silence that followed. That silence spread now from the pens outward, swallowing the square by degrees, and she found herself looking toward the eastern sky without quite knowing why she’d turned.
The light was small at first. Only a smear above the black tree line, dull red, the color of a coal left burning too long in the ash. She might have thought it was some distant fire, except that it moved. In pulses. Like something breathing, slow and patient, out beyond the trees.
Around the square, heads began to turn. The music faltered, then stopped.
Then the rider came.
He came from the north road at a dead run, and when the crowd saw him, they drew back in a widening circle. He made it only to the edge of the square before he fell over, and two men lunged to catch him under the arms before he struck the frozen ground.
Seraphina could not hear the words he gasped out. But she saw the faces of the men who did hear them—saw the color drain from Old Marta’s cheeks, saw the fiddler let his instrument fall slack at his side—and that was enough to tell her that whatever the rider had said, it was the worst thing anyone in the square had ever heard.
Only one word reached her clearly.
Soraxis.
Her father knelt in front of her in the snow, his hands coming to rest heavy and warm on her shoulders. He looked at her the way he only did when he was about to say something he needed her to remember for the rest of her life.
“Stay close to your mother. No matter what happens.”
There was no trumpeted warning after that—no drawn-out approach. The red light she had watched pulsing beyond the trees surged forward all at once and swept into the village; where it struck, wood splintered, stone cracked, and people screamed and scattered. Dark shapes moved at the edges of the firelight.
Dark Riders.
The first house on the east row exploded outward, thatch and timber flung into the night in a shower of sparks. Seraphina felt the heat of it against her face from thirty feet away, a dry, blistering air that stole her breath.
Dark shapes dropped from the sky.
Their scales were black, with red veins running through them. The village dragons’ eyes shone gold and amber in the light, but these creatures’ eyes burned a flat, angry crimson—no pupil, no white, just endless red. Smoke poured from their nostrils in thick, sour ribbons, and when they opened their jaws, the fire that came out was the same terrible red as their eyes, not orange.
Her mother seized her wrist and pulled her through the scattering crowd. Her father had already turned back toward the square, his body angling itself between his family and the oncoming riders, and for one confused moment Seraphina could not understand the way he stood there—too still, too certain, unmoving among villagers who ran in every direction around him.
Seraphina watched a corrupted dragon breathe its fire across a house’s roof, and the flames spread, eating through stone as easily as wood.
The village dragons met them in the air with roars that shook snow from the pine boughs half a mile off, and the sound of their collision was like mountains grinding together. Wings tore. Talons raked. A gout of amber fire met a gout of red, and for a moment the sky above the square burned two colors at once before the red swallowed the amber whole.
Snow turned to slush and then to steam beneath the falling embers, hissing in great clouds that stung Seraphina’s eyes.
She planted her feet. “Mama—the hatchling—”
“Seraphina, we have to—”
But she had already wrenched free.
She ran toward the bonfire, toward the wreck of tables and scattered festival lanterns. Smoke rolled across the ground and burned her throat with every breath.
She found it beneath the grain store steps, pressed into the deepest black corner of the shadow it could find, wings clamped so tight against its small body that it looked like it was trying to fold itself out of existence. When it saw her, it made a sound she had never heard from it before—thin, high, terrified—and she dropped to her knees in the snow and gathered it against her chest.
“I have you,” she said. “I have you. It’s all right.”
It was not all right. She knew that even as she said it. But she pressed her face into its scales and felt its small heart beating beneath her hands, and she held on as though holding on were a kind of magic all its own.
People ran and screamed. A woman stumbled past clutching a child to her chest, blood streaking down the side of her face from a gash at her temple. Someone shouted a name over and over, a name no one answered.
Dark Riders moved through the chaos on foot, unhurried, cloaks the color of blood dragging through the snow and ash.
A sound split the air above her, bright and terrible.
She looked up in time to see her mother standing in the center of the ruined square with both hands open at her sides—and light was pouring from her hands and set into a shimmering wall between her family and the advancing riders. Two Dark Riders struck it at a dead run and were flung backward into the snow like they weighed nothing at all.
Her father moved in ways she had never seen a person move. Faster than breath. The air around his clenched hands darkened and folded in on itself, and when a rider raised a blade wreathed in red fire, her father swept one arm through the space between them and the rider was gone—vanished in a concussion of silence that pressed against Seraphina’s ears like deep water.
She had not known.
All her life beside them, and she had not known.
Her father’s head turned. Across the burning distance of the square, his eyes found her, and in the space of a single heartbeat his face held everything at once—love, terror, grief, and something that looked unbearably like an apology—before he turned back into the fire and the smoke and the screaming.
The rider came from behind Seraphina, silent as smoke.
She did not see him. She only felt the hatchling wrenched from her arms, its claws raking desperate trails across her coat as it fought to stay. It screamed—that same thin, broken sound—and twisted in the rider’s grip, wings beating against the dark cloak that pinned them.
“No—no, give it back, give it back to me—”
Seraphina lunged forward with both hands outstretched, but the rider was pulling back into the smoke, and her parents were too far, fighting through too many, and she was six years old and small, and the snow was too deep and too cold and nothing in the whole burning world would move fast enough to save it.
“Seraphina!”
Seraphina turned her head in time to see a bolt of crimson magic punch into her chest with a wet, heavy sound. Her hands dropped. The wall of light shattered into a thousand pieces. She stood there for a fraction of a second, swaying, her mouth opening but no sound coming out, before her knees buckled and she dropped onto her back in the ash.
“Mama!”
For a moment, Seraphina did not understand that her mother had fallen. She understood only pieces. Her mother’s hand lay open in the ash. One of the festival lanterns rolled near her boot, cracked down the middle, its little flame guttering out in the snow.
The sweet roll Old Marta had given her was crushed beside a broken table leg, its sugar dark with soot. Seraphina stared at it because it was easier than looking at her mother. Easier than understanding why her mother’s light was gone. Easier than understanding why no one was getting up.
The fire finished what the riders had started. It ate the last standing wall of the festival square, ate the lantern strings, ate the tables where an hour ago there had been bread and roasted meat and warmth, and folded it all into ash.
Seraphina stood alone in the ruins, blood drying on her scratched hands. Smoke made tears run down her cheeks, but she couldn’t feel them anymore. The cold didn’t matter now. Very little did, in the strange, quiet space after something happens that can’t be undone.
Across the smoking wreck of the square, through the last curtain of drifting embers, a figure was walking toward her.
The closer he came, the quieter the fire seemed to grow. The crackle of burning wood thinned to a whisper, and even the smoke drifted aside from his path.
He was tall. Unhurried. The flames bent and parted around him as though they had been warned not to touch him, and behind him, growing smaller with every step he took, the Dark Riders carried their prize away through the burning dark—and between two of them, still struggling, still crying out in that high broken voice, still clawing—
The hatchling.
Seraphina took one step forward. Then stopped, because her legs would carry her no further.
The figure stopped in front of her, close enough that she could see his face in the firelight. He had thick black hair and eyes so dark they nearly matched his hair. His face was calm. Too calm. It was the face of someone who had walked a long way and always knew what he would find at the end.
He knelt.
“There you are, Seraphina.”
