Blood for Blood

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They freed the dragons before the guards changed shift.

It took Lucian eleven minutes and every scrap of psychic strength he had left. Silver locks, one after another, opened under the touch of his will; chains fell; the humming machines died with a sound like exhaling. Kaelen went down the row of cages on his knees, speaking low in a language Lucian did not know, laying his palm against each scaled brow. A very old dragon with a milk-white eye caught his wrist and said one word, and Kaelen bowed his head.

"They will go through the service tunnel," he said, rising. "To the mountains. They will tell the Reach what they saw."

"Will the Conclave listen?"

"Not to me." A faint, tired smile. "But I think they will listen to a hundred and forty claws."

They took the claws. Lucian wrapped them in a tarpaulin and slung them over his back like a poacher. Then he crouched in the shadow of the vault door, pulled out the little green-lit radio, and fed the data drive's contents into the one channel Thorne had not thought to cut.

"Hale."

"Commander." The captain's voice was ragged with sleeplessness. "I've got it. Gods. I've got all of it."

"Listen to me. There is a launch override in the third folder, under my father's name. He built it into the Nexus Project himself, in case it was ever turned. It needs a captain's key and a clear signal." Lucian shut his eyes. "Can you reach the control bunker?"

"I can reach it. I will have to kill some people I like."

"Do not kill anyone you do not have to."

"Sir." A hoarse breath. "When do I cut it?"

"When Thorne says zero," Lucian said. "Not before. If you cut it early, he will know, and he will find another way. Let him believe it is working until the last second."

"Understood."

"Hale. Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet, sir. Go and be a Winters."

The radio clicked off. Lucian leaned his head against the stone and, for just a moment, let himself feel exactly how frightened he was.

A warm hand closed over the back of his neck. Kaelen's forehead came down against his temple.

"Whatever you decide," the dragon murmured, "I am with you."

"Even if it fails."

"*Especially* if it fails." A kiss, light as breath, on the mark. "Come on, my Commander. It is nearly dawn."

---

Founders' Square held forty thousand people, and every one of them was looking at the sky.

It was the greatest parade ground in the north, a mile of pale stone ringed with colonnades and statues of dead Winters lords, and on this one grey morning it had become something Lucian did not recognize. Ranks upon ranks of soldiers filled it. Black armor. Red-lensed helmets. A forest of rifles. At the center, on a raised dais draped in the colors of the House, stood a man in a breastplate of gold and black, flanked by banners and cameras and a rank of whispering Council elders. Behind him, rising out of the paving stones, stood the Spire: three hundred feet of dark steel, ringed with scaffolding, its nose pointing at the clouds.

The warhead.

"Warriors of Winterhold," said Thorne's voice. It rolled out of a hundred loudspeakers, vast and warm. "Today is Founders' Day. Today is the day we avenge my brother's blood."

A roar went up from the ranks.

"For four hundred years, the dragons have lived in the mountains above our homes. They have burned our villages. They have stolen our children. And on a night of storms, six weeks ago, they murdered Lord Aldric Winters, the best man I ever knew." His voice cracked on the name, and forty thousand people felt it. "His own son betrayed him. His own son opened the gates to the monsters. And we will not let that stand. In ten minutes we will launch a weapon that will wipe every dragon from the face of the earth. Blood for blood."

*Blood for blood*, the soldiers roared, and the ground shook.

"Gods," Lucian whispered.

He was lying flat on the back of a great black dragon, high above the clouds, with the wind screaming in his ears and the bond running between his mind and Kaelen's like a drawn wire. Beneath them the whole city lay like a map. Founders' Square was a pale coin in a sea of fog.

*The anti-air grid is useless*, said Kaelen in his head. *Every gun in the city is pointing at the sky, and not one of them can see us.*

*Why?*

*Because they are looking for a human who used psychic power. And the only human in the sky has been feeding on my pheromones for two days.* A rough, wicked laugh. *You are a ghost, Lucian.*

*Take me down.*

*Are you sure?*

*Take me down.*

Kaelen folded his wings and fell.

---

They came out of the cloud like a thrown spear.

The first sign was a shadow, sliding across the square as the sun cleared the rooftops, a shadow with wings. Someone screamed. The ranks of soldiers rippled. A hundred rifles came up at once, and a hundred fingers froze on a hundred triggers as the great black dragon dropped to the dais in a hurricane of wind and stone and landed, with a crash that cracked the paving, thirty feet from Thorne.

Lucian slid from his back. He had no weapon but a tarpaulin and a fraying coat. He walked forward, alone, into the center of the stage, and the whole of Founders' Square fell silent.

"Soldiers," he said.

His voice carried. He had not known it would. Perhaps it was the mark; perhaps it was the bond, lending him something larger than his own lungs. It carried to the colonnades and the rooftops and the farthest rank of the farthest regiment.

"Soldiers, look closely!" Lucian threw back the tarpaulin. A hundred and forty claws spilled across the stage, clattering, glinting, each strapped to a leather grip. "These are not dragon attack weapons. They are *tools.* Torn from the hands of dragons held prisoner in this man's cellar, so he could fake a dragon attack. They were used to murder my father."

"Lies!" Thorne had gone white. "Guards. Seize him!"

"Look at the screens."

The great banks of loudspeakers and displays that lined the square flickered, stuttered, and changed. The faces of Thorne's own cameramen went slack with horror as the footage rolled: the vault, the cages, the wired and weeping dragons. A table laid with severed claws. A man in a dressing gown, giving orders. And last, on the largest screen, a shot of Thorne's naked back in the Regent's bath, with a branching violet scar between the shoulder blades.

"That scar," Lucian said, "is the mark of the Tempest Mind Spike. My father's last act on this earth. He burned it into the man who killed him." He turned, slowly, to the assembled elders. "You all know that technique. Only a Winters can use it. Only a Winters could be struck back by it."

One of the elders, a thin gray woman with a cane, stepped forward. She looked at the screen. She looked at the stage. When she spoke, her voice was clear and cold as river ice.

"Elder Vane of the Council," she said. "By the authority of the Elders of Winterhold, I hereby strip Thorne Winters of all titles and authority."

"You *dare*..."

"Soldiers, lower your weapons."

Forty thousand rifles lowered, in a ripple like wind through wheat.

---

"Stop playing tricks on me."

It was said very quietly. Thorne's face had changed. All the warmth, the patience, the gentle uncle's sorrow had drained out of it, and what was left was something flat and glittering and terrible, like a snake under a stone.

"I gave you everything," he said, to Lucian, to the screens, to the sky. "I gave this house thirty years of my life. I held it together when Aldric was playing at peace-treaties and clean energy and the end of winters. Do you think humanity can afford to be soft? Do you think anyone will thank me?" His hand went to the console at his side. "You mindless insects. If you refuse to understand me, then you will all die with the dragons."

"Thorne, no."

"*Ten!*"

The Spire lit. Floodlights, klaxons, a long deep tremor running up through the stones.

"*Nine! Eight!*"

Lucian's eyes went to the sky. To the Spire. To the control bunker on the far side of the square, a squat little concrete box with a door that had just, he saw, been blown off its hinges.

"*Five! Four!*"

"Hale," he breathed. "Hale, please."

"*Three! Two! One!*"

Thorne's hand came down on the key.

Nothing happened.

The Spire stood silent. The floodlights went out. Across the whole of Founders' Square, the great red display on the front of the dais flickered, and changed, and read in big, plain letters: **LAUNCH ABORTED. OVERRIDE CONFIRMED. CODE: WINTERS.**

Thorne stared at the screen.

For a long, strange moment, he did not seem to understand it. Then he began to laugh. It started low in his chest, like a cough, and grew until it was a howl, and the howl cracked and broke and became something else.

"Aldric," he whispered. "You clever, clever bastard."

He kicked open a steel case beside the console.

Inside, wrapped in black silk, lay a crystal the size of a man's heart. Its facets pulsed a slow, sullen, bloody red. Even from thirty feet, Lucian felt the horror of it, a hatred so old and so concentrated that it seemed to curdle the air.

"Kaelen," he said sharply. "What is that?"

The dragon had gone rigid. "A dragon core." His voice was hollow. "A *corrupted* dragon core. He must have drawn it from the prisoners. Wrung it out of them with that machine until it went black. Lucian, if he..."

Thorne tore open his breastplate and drove the crystal into his own chest.

The scream that followed was not human.

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