Page 191 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Fenn’s eyes glowed as he rose and crossed the narrow ring of warmth. He settled at Serenna’s other side, slinging an arm around her shoulders before knocking his fist against Vesryn’s arm.

“No one else I’d rather have beside me when the world goes up in flames.”

Serenna caught Fenn’s claw where it hung over her shoulder and threaded her fingers through his. She felt his affection radiating like the warmth of his palm, as reckless and unguarded as everything else he offered. Vesryn’s hand closed over her thigh, and she leaned into him.

Jassyn rested his head against Lykor’s shoulder while Lykor curved an arm around him, tucking him close.

Vasharax launched across the gap from the neighboring island. Her wings wobbled through two frantic beats before she landed beside Skylash, claws skittering over stone. Another dragon followed. Then another.

Cinderax watched from beyond the firelight as the ragged procession crossed the sky. The hatchlings gathered against Skylash while she held herself rigid against the heap.

Vasharax nosed along her side, searching for warmth beneath her folded wing. For a moment, Skylash refused to move. Then her wing lifted a fraction.

Vasharax slipped beneath it, another hatchling burrowing in after her.

Above them, the stars wheeled on.

Serenna closed her eyes.

For now, everyone she loved was still close enough to touch.

CHAPTER 50

JASSYN

The lake surrounding the Drowned Spires was larger than Jassyn remembered.

He flattened his chest to the grassy ridge where the forest gave way to the shore, exposed stone digging into his ribs. Damp cold seeped through his leathers, broken only by the narrow line of heat where Lykor’s shoulder pressed warm against his own. Lykor hadn’t moved in minutes, every brutal inch held in the stillness of a drawn bow, patient and already aimed.

Galaeryn would open his portal tonight. By the time he stepped into the open, every piece of their trap had to be waiting.

At Jassyn’s left, Vesryn and Serenna laid low on the outcropping, murmuring over the placement of their Starshard circles in the empty sky above the lake. Fenn spread his cloaking shadows over them all, erasing five bodies from the ridge. Any soldier who glanced uphill would find only another stretch of dark.

Jassyn flared his dragonsight, stripping the distance from the lake.

Glass towers speared through the broad crystal platform suspended over the sunken palace. The first stars pierced the bruised horizon, sharpening across the lake until water and sky became twin depths. For one disorienting instant, Jassyn couldn’t tell which waited above him and which below, only that both carried the same promise of drowning.

The sight tightened his throat around the memory of this place—crystal chambers underwater, Farine’s fingers settled in the crook of his elbow, his hand locked flat beside a knife before the urge to reach could become a thought.

At the platform’s center, a vast shape dwarfed the glass spires.

Rimeclaw.

The Tidecrasher’s head hung low, ice creeping from his claws in sluggish veins, melting over the platform’s edge.

Blossom crouched beside him, her knotted tail of root-fused bone wrapped around her haunches, a bludgeon with nothing to shatter. Jassyn’s fingers dug into the earth until grit packed under his nails.

Veyrix lay coiled on Rimeclaw’s other side, his serpentine length wound so tightly that each breath rippled through the scales along his ribs, his eyes staring blank at the open sky.

Behind the Wardens, five hatchlings huddled in a ring, lashed by harnesses of force. Too small to justify the expense of a Heart. Too valuable to leave unchained.

Kyansari soldiers stood at even intervals along the platform, their white plated armor glinting in the starlight.

But no king.

Not yet.

Stone scraped Jassyn’s leathers as he edged toward the lip of the ridge. Between him and the lake, the human army stretched in a vast ring.