The music started out slowly, melancholy. Sylph pooled their songs around it, matching the longing I played, the need for the unknown. Everything around me faded as the music took over, the sylph warmed me, and I pushed my heart into it. Gasping with a kiss. Awe at a fire-sky sunset. The amazing and humbling feeling of receiving love. My flute’s sound soared across the valley, sweet and silver and filled with life.
Playing with sylph was nothing like playing with Sam. Both sylph and Sam understood music in a way I could only dream of, but where Sam played with immeasurable skill and deliberateness, sylph were free and wild. When they sang, they danced, and they burned with passion and joy.
Sound swirled through us, making my heart pound with fear and loneliness and exhaustion when I reached the section I’d written after learning of newsouls’ fate. And then hope and desire when Sam took me home and revealed the parlor filled with roses, just because he’d wanted to see me smile.
As we pushed toward the end, I opened my eyes to find the dragons all looking . . . peaceful. Oddly happy, if one could assign a facial expression to dragons.
And as my gaze swept over the valley, I caught motion on the cliff where I’d stood yesterday. Three human-shaped figures and a dozen sylph, the latter of which echoed my music.
I dropped my flute to my side, banging it on my thigh. They hadn’t left. They were still here. Sam was here.
And the dragons.
As the sylph finished singing, confused about why I’d stopped, I faced Acid Breath.
<What are you doing?>
I unzipped my coat enough to slide my flute into its case, still strapped diagonally across my chest. “Are you going to destroy the tower? Will you use your weapon to fight Janan?” Now that I’d seen the others across the valley, I itched to return to them, to tell them what I’d done. I also wanted to somehow put myself between the dragons and Sam, but they’d see around me. Over me. Maybe I could lure them away, or . . . I had no clue. “Tell me you’re going to destroy the tower on the spring equinox, and I’ll play all you like.”
<Why did you stop?>
One of the other dragons lifted its head and looked toward the cliff, and buzzing in the back of my thoughts indicated they were discussing what had caught my attention. They knew why I’d stopped.
Sam.
I didn’t think I was supposed to hear it, but one dragon murmured to another, <The one with the song.>
<We will stop the distraction.> That was meant for me, and with one graceful motion, Acid Breath dug his talons into the white stone as he crouched for flight. His wings spread wide, their wind almost knocking me off the wall.
“No!” I raced for him, as though I could stop a dragon. He was ready to fly off and leave me, ready to kill Sam while I was stranded here, helpless to do anything about it. I threw my arms around his foreleg just as he lifted into the air, sylph shrieking behind me.
We were flying.
Icy wind stung my face, poured down my throat. I gasped and clung to the dragon’s leg as he lifted it and growled. His scales were cool and slick, almost slick enough to drop me. I wrapped my legs around his ankle—what I supposed would be his ankle—and tried not to think about hurtling through the sky. On a dragon.
The one with the song.
What song?
Acid Breath dragged his foot, skimming treetops, which whipped and caught at me. Pine needles smacked my legs and arms, slithering into my sleeves and coat collar. My hands ached from the cold and holding on, but as his wings cracked against the air again and I looked up, I found the cliff rushing at me.
The dragon hurled me to the ground, and the line of sylph that had formed around Sam, Stef, and Whit. I wrapped myself around my flute case as I rolled across rocks and dead grass. Sylph swarmed to surround me, and three pair of hands dragged me to my feet.
I didn’t have time to thank them. I shucked off my backpack and pushed through the sylph.
“Stop!” I craned my neck as the trio of dragons pulled back as though to spit acid. “If you hurt them, I won’t play for you anymore.”
The dragons huffed, and an acrid stink washed over the ledge. They were standing in the forest below, heads held high enough to peer at us.
<The one with the song. He’s here.>
<I see it.>
<She tricked us.>
<Kill her.>
“Ana—”
I glanced over my shoulder at Sam and held out a hand for him to stay where he was behind the sylph. “Just stay,” I said.
<She commands the one with the song.> The dragons’ words came like smoke around the edges of my consciousness. Fragments I was only peripherally aware of.
I hardly recognized my own wind-torn voice anymore as I faced the dragons. “And maybe you don’t care whether I play for you ever again. I don’t care if I ever play for you again, honestly. But know this: if you hurt them, I will hunt you.”
<Lies.>
“Not lies. I told you that Janan had warriors who hunted and captured a phoenix. Those warriors became sylph. They are with me now, my army and my armor, and I’m sure they remember how to capture something that doesn’t want to be captured. If you hurt my friends, we will come for you and every other dragon in existence.”
<The phoenix song. The one with the song.>
<We must destroy it.>
<She knows the one with the song. She will use the song against us.>
<If she wanted to, she would have.>
<Kill her to be safe.>
<She will use the song if we try. The one with the song will do it. See how he hovers.>
<But she wants the temple destroyed.>
The dragons’ ringing intensified, filling my head like a swarm of bees. I staggered and caught myself on a boulder, raw hands scraping on stone. Voices called my name and sylph closed around me, but I pulled myself up and glared at the dragons and summoned what was left of my voice.
“I. Will not. Give up.”
Acid Breath blew a long stream of rancid air over the ledge, rustling trees and making sylph moan. Blue targeting lights flared, but I held up a hand again.
“Don’t.” I couldn’t look behind me—I didn’t have the energy—but the lights turned off. I focused on the dragons again. “Do you understand me?”
Acid Breath glanced beyond me as more heat pressed around. The sylph I’d left at the wall had arrived. Just a dozen sylph had fought them off before. Twice that number . . .
They weren’t afraid of the sylph, though. They were afraid of something else. The phoenix song. The one with the song.
<Your friends will not be harmed.>
I nodded, carefully, so my thoughts wouldn’t swim. “And will you destroy the tower on Soul Night? The spring equinox? Will you use your weapon?”
<We will decide. You have the one with the song. You refuse to let us destroy it, yet you ask us to destroy it. We will decide.>
Before I could respond, Acid Breath and the others pushed off the earth and into the sky. Trees cracked and fell under their power, and the cliff shuddered. Dragon thunder ripped, and I watched their receding forms as exhaustion and darkness overtook me.
But this time when I fell, there were hands to catch me.
20 CONNECTION
CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED IN sharp fragments, like shards of glass and light. Warm water on my face and neck. Sips of thin soup. The scent of ozone. Voices that seemed as though they came from the other end of the earth.
A dark figure with his knees to his chest, face buried in his arms, shoulders hunched and heaving.