Page 187 of The Dragon and the Dove

Well, no shit.

Her magic squirmed. Within the encroaching dark, Val sensed a group of figures, sauntering onto Merchant’s Way. The last of Andreas’s defected Daggers.

Together, they had ingested and built a wall of Shade that would kill every soul on Merchant’s Way.

‘There,’ she said, marking them in the moving dark.

‘Stay behind me, kitten.’ Caruso palmed his sword, vaulting ahead. ‘I’m about to introduce Fatebringer to some old friends.’

‘If you’re stabbing, then I’m stabbing,’ said Nadia, twin daggers in hand. ‘Let’s put this damn Order to bed, once and for all.’

As the clamour of swordfight died out across the city, the saints of Fantome went into the maw of death itself.

Chapter 57 Ransom

Half dead on his feet, Ransom peeled himself off the pillar at Traveller’s Arch only to be swept down Merchant’s Way in a tide of soldiers. Panic surged as he tried to fight his way back to Seraphine. His strength was returning too slowly, that thread in his chest dangerously thin.

When the Rose-bearers juddered to a halt, he thought the war was over. That Oriel had blessed them after all.

Then death arrived on a bracing wind.

Shade came like a tsunami down Merchant’s Way.

Blackness engulfed him. Magic keened in his chest, his fingers twitching at his sides.

Do something.

What could the darkness do against itself?

How could a dragon made of shadow fight an entire sky of it?

Then don’t use the dark, whispered a different voice.

Small yet somehow familiar.

Call on something else.

Ransom had the sudden sense that he was being watched. Perhaps it was Oriel, peering down from the heavens. Or maybe it was the boy inside him, looking up from the dark well of his soul. Whispering again, Call on something else.

Like what?

Again, his fingers twitched. Thin rivers of gold danced under his skin as Anouk’s words came flooding back to him.

You might think the dark is all you’re good for. But I know there’s light in there too. No matter what happens next, don’t let your doubt devour what’s good in you.

Ransom pictured that little boy inside him, the one who was so afraid of the world that he used to sketch his own, fill it with colour and light and beasts of all kinds. If his magic was his own to command, couldn’t he do the same now?

The moment he asked himself the question – and believed in some small way that it was possible – a ribbon of light unfurled at his fingertips.

Gathering new breath, Ransom raised his hands to the sky. This time, instead of shadow, light plumed from that well inside him. It was a kinder sort of magic. It didn’t rush or shove its way to the surface. Rather, it flowed from him, as easy as a river.

The dragon came like a breath he had been holding all his life. Only now it was a beast of Lightfire, its wings like rich iridescent flames. They grew and grew as the beast took flight, and for the first time since Ransom had awoken as a saint, he felt… right.

Dreamer, said the old voice.

This is who you are.

Not Saint of Nightmares.