Raven Steele's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Raven Steele counted the guards on the citadel wall for the ninth night in a row, and for the ninth night she counted alone except for the woman crouched beside her. Three years ago the warlord's raiders had taken her sister to the mines. Raven had been moving ever since, from camp to camp, buying names, testing loyalties, looking for anyone who would help her pull the tyrant down. She had one recruit. She needed a thousand. Below them, the iron and brass towers of the fortress breathed steam into the cold, and every plume said the same thing: come alone and you die. "You've asked six villages this month," the woman said. "Six no's." Raven didn't answer. She was watching the far ridge, where a pale shape moved against the black rock. Too big for a horse. Too quiet for a machine. She had heard the stories the caravan drivers told about a beast that lived past the salt flats, a beast the warlord's hunters had chased for a year and never brought down. Raven had marked it as rumor. The shape on the ridge lowered its head and looked straight at her. She went down the slope before her recruit could stop her. Halfway across the flat she saw it clearly: a frost dragon, scales the color of river ice, wings folded, one foreleg planted on something metal and half-buried in the sand. Raven read the animal the way she read men. No crouch. No bared teeth. It was waiting. She stepped closer and saw what its claw held down — a suit of armor, silver and gold, purple stones set into the joints, faint blue script glowing along the plates. The dragon lifted its foot. It wanted her to take the armor. It had been waiting, maybe for weeks, for someone stupid enough to come down the slope alone. Raven knelt in the sand and put her hand on the breastplate. The runes warmed under her palm. Behind her, her recruit came skidding down the rocks, sword drawn, and stopped when she saw the dragon's yellow eye tracking her without anger. "We can't take him," Raven said, meaning the warlord, meaning the citadel, meaning every no she had swallowed this month. "Not with numbers." She stood, and the armor's plates shifted toward her as if they had been measured for her shoulders a long time ago. The dragon lowered its head to the height of a saddle. Raven looked at her one ally and did not smile. "We don't need an army yet," she said. "We need to be seen." The mines were four days east. She meant to ride in wearing light.