The Dragon I Was Born to Kill

The first thing Kaia Voss noticed was the silence.

The second was the smell of melted iron.

She stood above the village of Thistle Ford with one hand against the rock and the other wrapped around the hilt of her sword. Smoke poured between the houses below. Not the ordinary gray smoke of wet winter firewood, but a thick, red-black column that made her throat sting from half a mile away.

Behind her, Tamsin Rook crouched in the heather and lifted her spyglass.

“Dragon?” Tamsin whispered.

Kaia had been hunting dragons for eleven years. She knew the shapes their fire made when it caught stone, how it licked upward in a clean white sheet before turning blue at the edges. She knew the smell, too: rain on hot slate, scorched moss, the sweet bite of lightning.

This smoke smelled like a smithy turned inside out.

“I don’t know,” Kaia said.

“That’s not an answer I expected from you.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

The oath beneath Kaia’s breastbone tightened. It had been there since the day she knelt in the queen’s hall, seventeen and furious, and pressed her thumb against a blade wet with dragon blood. Most days it felt like a knot of old scar tissue. Near a dragon, it became a fist closing around her heart.

Now it gave one heavy pulse.

Somewhere below, beneath the smoke and the screaming, Darius Veyr was close.

The last commander of the dragon host. The creature who had led the retreat through the eastern pass while Kaia’s father and forty other frontier guards burned alive. The name she had carried in her mouth for more than a decade, an answer to every question she had been too young to ask.

Kill him by the winter solstice, the oath required.

Fourteen days remained.

She could feel each one waiting.

Tamsin lowered the glass. “The north watchtower’s gone. There’s movement near the well. Big movement.”

“Wings?”

“No.” Tamsin hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

From the village came a crash like an enormous chain being dragged across stone. Kaia took the spyglass. Through drifting smoke she saw a long black shape swing between two rooftops. It struck the bell tower, reducing the upper half to fragments.

The thing had the outline of a dragon’s neck, but its scales reflected sunlight in hard, flat squares. A joint near its jaw flashed with a row of rivets.

Kaia stopped breathing.

“That’s iron.”

“What?”

“The thing attacking them. It’s made of iron.”

Tamsin snatched the glass back. “An iron wyrm? Those are siege stories. Nobody can build something that size.”

The bell fell from its ruined tower. For a moment Kaia expected it to ring. Instead it hit a roof without a sound she could hear from the ridge, and the house disappeared into smoke.

Kaia was already running.

“We have orders!” Tamsin shouted after her. “Veyr, not the village!”

“Then find Veyr while I get people out.”

“Kaia!”

Kaia slid down the gravel slope, boots striking sparks from loose rock. The path through the old sheep pasture was steep enough to break an ankle. She took it anyway, jumped a low wall, and landed in the last row of winter cabbage beyond the village.

A woman staggered past carrying a little boy whose face was pressed into her shoulder. Blood ran down the side of her neck.

“Where are the others?” Kaia asked.

The woman stared at her sword, then at the silver hunter’s pin on her collar.

“The well,” she said. “My husband went back for his mother.”

“Keep to the eastern road. Don’t stop for anything.”

“They said the dragons would protect us if we paid the winter levy.”

Kaia looked at the woman, but she was already stumbling away.

The village was supposed to be under the protection of the crown. Its levy paid for soldiers, watchfires, and the great iron gates now lying twisted across the square. Kaia had collected those taxes once herself, before the queen promoted her from border scout to oath-sworn hunter. She knew exactly what assurances had been offered.

Another crash shook the street.

She reached the well as the machine pulled itself through a ruined stable. It was the length of three wagons and moved on six jointed legs, each ending in a hooked claw. Its head resembled a dragon’s skull made by someone who had never seen a living dragon and understood only the teeth. A furnace glowed behind a grate in its chest.

On the iron plate above that furnace was a stamped crown.

Not a dragon’s crest. The royal crown of Asterfall.

Kaia stood still long enough to be certain she wasn’t imagining it.

Then the machine opened its mouth.

“Down!” she shouted.

A man near the well threw himself behind a trough. The wyrm breathed a jet of molten metal across the square. Stone exploded. The water in the trough hissed, and steam swallowed the man from view.

Kaia rolled behind the well’s low wall. Heat seared the back of her coat. She heard a high, terrible squeal from the machine’s chest—too alive to belong to gears, too young to be the cry of a full-grown dragon.

The oath in her chest clenched again, hard enough to make her vision flicker.

Veyr was near. Close enough to matter.

But the machine stood between her and six villagers trapped beneath a collapsed awning. A girl of perhaps twelve held a beam against her shoulder while her grandfather tried to pull a smaller child free.

Kaia could go after her quarry now. The oath wanted movement, direction, a blade aimed at a single throat.

Instead she ran toward the awning.

“The beam,” she told the girl. “Let me take it.”

“It’s too heavy.”

“I didn’t ask how heavy.”

Kaia braced her shoulder beneath the wood. Pain shot through her knees. The girl crawled out, dragging the smaller child, while the grandfather helped a woman whose leg was pinned under a broken cart wheel.

Behind them, metal claws clicked on cobblestones.

Kaia had three seconds, perhaps four. She shifted the beam onto the wheel, drew her short sword, and turned.

The wyrm’s head filled the street.

She lunged at the joint beneath its jaw. Her blade struck a seam. Sparks stung her cheek, but the sword caught long enough for her to twist it. The machine screamed again. Something inside snapped, and its head jerked sideways, smashing through the remains of the awning.

“Run!”

The villagers fled toward the eastern road. Kaia pulled her sword loose and staggered back.

The wyrm was not dead. It wasn’t even wounded in any way that made sense. Its furnace brightened, washing the street in orange, and six iron legs began folding into a crouch.

“Kaia!”

Tamsin vaulted a low fence with her crossbow raised. The bolt she fired struck an eye slit and bounced away.

“I saw the crest,” Tamsin said, panting. “Tell me you saw it.”

“I saw.”

“Then why would the queen—”

“Not here.”

The machine sprang.

Kaia shoved Tamsin through the doorway of a ruined bakery and followed her in. Iron claws tore through the wall behind them. Flour burst from broken sacks, turning the air white. Kaia coughed, crawled beneath a fallen table, and felt a familiar cold precision settle over her fear.

Every machine had a weakness. Every living creature did too. The trick was identifying which one stood in front of you.

This thing needed the furnace.

And something inside the furnace was screaming.

She reached for a clay pot half buried in flour. Water. The baker had left it beside the ovens. She poured it across a wool blanket, wrapped the dripping cloth around her forearm, and looked at Tamsin.

“When it opens its mouth, make it look at you.”

“That’s the worst instruction you’ve ever given me.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“I was right before.”

Tamsin ran through the back door and whistled three sharp notes—the hunters’ signal for prey in motion. The wyrm’s head swung after her. Kaia leaped through the broken front window, caught the edge of its lower jaw, and hauled herself toward the grate in its chest.

Through the bars she saw a flame no larger than a child’s hand, folded into a glass chamber and held by three spinning rings. The flame beat against the glass as if trying to escape.

Kaia had seen dragonfire. She had never seen it afraid.

The machine twisted, trying to crush her against a wall. She jammed her blade into the mechanism that held the chamber and pushed with everything she had.

The ring broke.

An instant later, the flame shot upward, a tiny white shape like a bird escaping a cage. It vanished into the smoke.

The wyrm collapsed.

Kaia fell hard onto the street. She rolled away as the iron chest struck the stones where her ribs had been. For a long moment she lay there, hearing nothing but the deep, ragged rhythm of her breath.

Then the oath gave a violent pull.

She looked toward the broken watchtower at the northern edge of town.

A man stood among the fallen stones. Tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a dark coat torn at one cuff. His hair was black with a silver streak above one temple. He did not carry a visible weapon, and still every instinct Kaia possessed told her he was the most dangerous thing in the village.

His eyes were gold.

Not yellow or amber. Gold like metal at the instant before it melts.

The oath beneath her breastbone burned so fiercely she almost cried out.

He watched the ruin of the iron wyrm, then looked at the villagers running safely down the eastern road. His expression changed—not relief, exactly, but a grief so sharp Kaia recognized it before she could stop herself.

Tamsin came around the corner with her crossbow still in hand.

“Kaia,” she whispered. “Tell me that’s not him.”

Kaia pushed herself to her feet and drew her long sword.

The stranger looked directly at her.

For eleven years, she had imagined the moment she would finally face Darius Veyr. In those imaginings he always looked like a monster, and she always knew what to do.

In the smoking ruins of Thistle Ford, the monster looked at the empty place in the wyrm’s furnace as if someone had torn a child from his arms.

“You killed the machine,” he said.

His voice was low and rough, almost human.

Kaia raised her blade. “Darius Veyr.”

“And now,” he said, looking at her hunter’s pin, “you’ll have to decide whether you’re brave enough to ask who built it.”