Draxus Flameheart's Arc

Chapter 8 of 9

Draxus turned from the black wall. Kerra grabbed his arm. "Not yet," she said. Her direwolf's ears twitched toward the treeline below. Something moved there. A raider, ragged and limping, dragged himself through the snow toward a dead fire pit. Kerra's wolf had been tracking him for hours, drawn by his scent of blood and old fear. "He fled the keep," Kerra whispered. "He knows what's inside." Draxus crept down the slope. The wolf flanked wide. The old raider heard nothing until Draxus stood over him. The man raised a rusted knife, then let it fall. "You," he rasped. He stared at Draxus's black scales. "Your kind burned my home, long ago. I helped burn yours." He pulled back his sleeve. A ridged scar ran from wrist to elbow, shaped like a dragon's claw. "Your grandsire's beast gave me this. I was there when we took the hoard." Draxus's grip tightened on his axes. He wanted to end the man. Instead he knelt. From his pack he drew a red dragon scale. It caught the rising moonlight and shimmered like silver. "This came from a dragon of my line," Draxus said. "I don't want your blood. I want the truth. Speak it, and this is yours to sell." The raider's eyes went wet at the shine of it. The man's fingers closed around the scale. Then he reached into his rags and produced a coin. Old gold, worn smooth, stamped with a snarling dragon. "From your hoard," he said. "I kept one. Just one." Draxus knew the mark. It was his clan's. His breath caught. "The eastern stair," the raider went on. "Don't climb it. They rigged the steps with a bone reliquary. Onyx altar, dragon skulls all around. Step on the thirteenth stair and the whole ceiling drops. That's where the scarred dragon's mate died. That's where they mean you to die." Draxus took the coin and held it hard. Ashara's warning was true, but now he had the shape of the trap. "Is there another way?" he asked. The raider nodded, then coughed blood into the snow. "The drain below the wall. Narrow. Foul. But no skulls wait there." He named nothing more. His eyes fixed on the scale in his fist, and his hand went still. Kerra came down beside Draxus. Behind her, silent as smoke, a black panther slid from the dark, green light rippling under its fur. Her wolf growled low, but the great cat only watched, its eyes fixed on the dead man. "He led us to him," Kerra said softly. "Both of them did." Draxus stood and pocketed the clan coin. The stair was death. The drain was a chance. "We don't climb," Draxus said. "We go under." He looked up at the wall, then at the coin in his palm. His clan's gold was inside. For the first time, he knew the safe road to it.