It swung behind her and closed and flashed the side of the tower in flame. Almost nothing, just enough to scorch the stone and leave it black and smoking. Never a danger to her.
But he watched it, for this wasn't what a dragon would do. The whole time he'd felt it. That something in this was wrong and wretched and he hadn't known what it was. From the moment it fled him at the keep, having torched the tower. It could have killed him then and had not. And again when it burned his son while he watched, leaving nothing but an old man's blackened bones in the melting snow of that desecrated village. Then too it could have killed him but had run again, leaving a clear trail of destruction that he could wade in with blood up to his ankles, living in the land of the dead.
He'd known then that it was going for Kayhi, but this had not been a race for it was never one he could win. Had it just wanted her dead it would have been here in hours and not bothered with Cabele at all and left him a corpse, dead and rotted when he arrived days later.
And now it could kill her again, if it wanted, but it forever toyed with him. Even to this end. In that there was spite and dragons knew spite and fed off of it just as men did. But men were fools and dragons were not. Never were they fools. If it meant to kill her she would be dead now and he could not stop it, but it did not mean to kill her, only to give the illusion. Putting her there on the tower, soaking it in flames too far away to do her any harm.
He stepped out into the street again as it came down. He knew it would try to kill him but he no longer understood what it was and that terrified him more in some ways than if it had just been a dragon and nothing else.
It dropped down again on those black wings and he leapt to the top of the short wall. Sliding his sword home over his shoulder and raising the bow, arrow already nocked and drawing as he brought it up. Feeling the flex of the wood beneath his fingers. It trusted its armor and did not move off of the line but bore down, bringing its claws up underneath. Each longer than his sword and just as sharp and it could cut him to ribbons or impale him as it had done with many others. Just a gasping second and wrenching pain in his gut and spine.
But he also trusted himself and he raised the bow and sighted down the length of the arrow. Feeling it and letting the bow become part of himself. The death it dealt an extension of his will. Wanting to scream as every nerve stood on edge, but staying silent and still. Dropping the arrow slightly, holding it, finding that remaining eye.
With the slightest movement, letting the arrow loose.
The snapping sound of it leaving the bow was nearly lost in the creature's scream and the wind of its wings, but he heard it anyway. His ears trained to hear everything of the hunt, even as he threw himself again to the side, this time off of the wall, falling and rolling on his shoulder toward that dead blind space to the beast's left. Knowing it would be just the slightest bit slower tracking him that way and also knowing he only needed those fractions of an inch, of a second, to live.
It came through like a tempest, a great thundering roar, and he could see the firelight on the claws as they raked the air. Could hear the beams of a house crack under the downdraft alone, the roof falling in with an uproar of dust. He turned as he rolled, instinctively ducking and pulling his arm down as it lashed out frantically with its wing and the clawed end, flailing at him but just too late. He could smell the leather of the wing as it went over his face, could have touched it if he'd just reached out.
He knew it even as he turned. The arrow had missed. Had he hit his mark, the beast would have been screaming and falling and rolling in the dirt and ash, but it was not. It was screaming in fury at the missed kill, but rising already and turning to circle again and descend for a third pass, just as it had two hundred years ago.
He saw the shaft, just for a heartbeat as it arched its neck, looking for him and trying to find him as it turned. The arrow had struck in the throat, embedded in that scar where there were no more scales, where he'd sheered them away as he'd hacked the head from the dead body. In that other life. Perhaps the bow was off, shooting low; perhaps the beast had moved its head at the last moment, trying to focus and read the depth with only one eye. He did not know but the shot had been low and it rose with the arrow like a needle, lost and insignificant, buried in the throat but far too small to be anything but an annoyance to a monster of fire and night.
He hit the ground hard and was up again and drawing the sword without thinking. Throwing the bow aside. There were no other archers near him and if he ran for one it would take him in the road with the rolling fire and that would be the end. He had to stand now with the sword and the sword alone.
It had been done, and he'd trained for it. How to move under it and bring the sword into the underbelly, looking for a weakness in that armor. How to lunge for the killing zone beneath the wing. If it was foolish enough to come with teeth bared and try to take him that way, he could go for the scar itself, tear the throat out and leap on it when it fell.
He looked back at Kayhi, so far above him, and he felt something in him change. He'd been a reckless fool to run in without the crossbow, without a plan, leaving his only ally guarding a dead girl on the edge of the killing field. But he'd been late at the keep and watched his children roasted alive in the tower; he'd been careful and smart at the town and watched his son and countless others burn on the horizon.
So this time he'd been reckless. And now he was going to die for it.
He raised the sword in front of him, felt the weight of it. That flawless steel forged to an edge that never dulled. A sword that had tasted blood a thousand times and thirsted for more as he watched the dragon sweeping around to dive again, a hurling black star in the open expanse of the sky.
He would die, but he wouldn't die alone.
The dragon washed the tower again in flame and then hung for a moment in the air, watching him, the smoke rising around it and fire glinting off those black scales like pitch burning on the water. It did not try to remove the arrow and he did not know if it felt it. But it watched him all the same, the sails of those wings moving slowly and rhythmically to hold its place, and then it began to rise. Gaining altitude and distance but never turning its back on him.
And suddenly he knew what it meant to do. How it would drop on him in anger and weight and crush him to the earth, bones breaking and splintering. Rendering that sword useless for even if he pushed the blade through that space beneath the wing and into its heart he would still be killed beneath it. For in many ways men and dragons were the same except in this: A man was fragile. Even a hunter. In this an inherent weakness thus spawning the myths of a race of giants as men sought through invention to cure their one fatal flaw, imagining a man as tall as a tower who could rule uncontested.
He began to run. Before him the dirt-paved road, the wall of the city too far to reach on foot. On either side the houses that could not save him and a running trail of the dead. Barns and fields and carts abandoned briefly before that death came.
Ahead a single structure to which men often fled in these times, a hulking church with stone walls and a high rising roofline, dwarfed by the wall beyond but still three stories of stone and timber. The flag that had once flown from the pinnacle burned off and smoke pouring out as the dragon had filled it with fire like a stove, but the walls standing, the roof intact.