Bad Faith Read online

  There was a time when Quirk might have expected a sense of peace, of returning home. Now all she had was grim satisfaction. This part of her journey was done. The next part was about to begin. The great burning of the world.

  But it seemed as if someone else had already gotten a head start on that.

  The city of Fount crested the horizon, slouched toward them … and yet … not all of Fount. Someone had done some very bad things to the Batarran city.

  A huge portion of the southern city was gone, just a desolate wasteland. Buildings lay shattered. Streets were zigzags of ruin, running nowhere. And at its core … a permanent storm. A pit. A portal that crackled with lightning, that heaved with bodies.

  “What was done here?” Yorrax looked back over her shoulder.

  “Something very wrong.”

  It was as if a god had pressed his finger into Fount, harder and harder, until the skin of the world broke and reality bled out.

  “Barph’s work?” Yorrax asked.

  And Quirk knew of only one god, so she said, “It has to be.”

  “Then it changes nothing.”

  Gods, she had only been away a week, and it had been too long.

  They circled the city, trying to make things out. Quirk didn’t dare get too close. Around the portal—and she was sure that must be what it was, she had read enough books—the thermals became strange and difficult to navigate, pushing and pulling, and she feared crashing into the crackling maw of the portal more than she had feared anything in a long time.

  Yorrax was the first to arch away from Fount. The other dragons followed her. The young dragon had enjoyed a change in status since the decision to come to Avarra. It seemed Yorrax’s elevation was a sacrifice worth making for those dragons who wanted to come and establish their dominance over Avarra.

  As they progressed toward the periphery of the city. Quirk saw signs of organization among the populace. There were groups all running in step. People parading in military lockstep. Archers mounting to roofs and tracking their progress. Martial law, it seemed, ruled the parts of Fount that had survived. Barph would dislike that. The law, the order, and the discipline. The thought that whatever he had wrought here had backfired made her smile.

  The day’s light was dying, though, so the dragons broke off from their aerial perusal of the city and went sweeping on, Quirk angling them toward her old encampment near Tarramon. But they had only cleared the first line of hills when Quirk saw the campfires spread out beneath them.

  People. Refugees, obviously. Several thousand of them escaped from Fount. She could hear shouts rising up as the dragons passed overhead. And she wasn’t sure if their silhouettes would be clear against the night sky, but the sound of their wings would be enough to bring fear.

  Refugees. People whose lives had just been ruined by Barph. People who might hate. Who might have the courage to tear Barph’s world down. The sort of people she was searching for. And she was not mentally ready for convincing several thousand people that the dragons were there to help, but opportunities were rarely this golden.

  “Turn back,” she shouted over the wind, as she and Yorrax flew past the crowd. “Take us in to land.”

  Yorrax turned her neck, gave her a wicked smile. “We shall eat well tonight.”

  “No!” Quirk let heat fill her palms. Not enough to hurt, but enough to be felt through Yorrax’s thick scales. She turned and looked at the rest of the dragons, shouted as loud as she could over the wind, “We will make allies tonight!”

  Yorrax barked a sound that could have been a laugh or a grunt of disapproval, though Quirk was still not entirely sure she could apply human motivations to the various utterances she heard from her new draconic companions.

  Then her stomach was lurching, and her head was throbbing, and the ground was rushing up toward her.

  They landed with a clatter of limbs, a furious clapping of wings, and the sound of turf tearing beneath Yorrax’s talons. All around her, heavy bodies thumped to the ground, scaled limbs crashing and thundering.

  And then the screaming began.

  At first she thought a dragon had broken ranks, had started to sate its hunger, and in the darkness she couldn’t tell who. So she sent a huge fireball up into the night to cast the scene in flickering yellow-orange light.

  That made it so much worse.

  “Dragons!” people howled, and “Flee!” and “Oh fuck!”

  “Peace!” she yelled at them. “We are your friends!” But she was just one voice, and she’d already hurled a fireball into the night, so it turned out she didn’t have much authority, or at least not enough of the right sort.

  But someone did. “Hold!” their voice boomed. “Hold!” It was a massive rolling sound. And Quirk wondered if somehow these people had a dragon of their own. Or perhaps a clan of hill giants had joined them.

  The crowds stumbled in their panic and looked around, not sure if they were willing to comply with this new command.

  “We are here as friends!” Quirk shouted again. Hardly anyone heard her. And Yorrax’s cynical laughter didn’t help at all. The other dragons were stamping and snorting, and Quirk had to admit she was losing faith in her own message. It suddenly felt as if having Barph as a common enemy might not be enough to smooth over all past enmities after all.

  She gathered herself, stood precariously on Yorrax’s back, waved her arms, desperate to make herself visible. Other dragons loomed over her.

  “They do not seem a mighty ally,” said one of the dragons.

  “Well, if you look at their city, I’m sure it’s been a bad day,” Quirk said, but she wasn’t sure the dragons were listening to her any more than the refugees were.

  “I said hold!” the booming voice snapped. “I have killed dragons before, and I can do it again.”

  Killed dragons before? Who could it be? Some veteran of Kondorra?

  “We come as friends!” she shouted for the third time. “We come to aid you in your fight against Barph!”

  “We do not join their fight,” grumbled a dragon. “They join us in ours. Their fight is puny and stupid. Ours is glorious.”

  Quirk wasn’t sure now was the time to haggle over linguistic nuances.

  “Dragons exist to dominate,” accused the booming voice. “They exist to impinge their will on others. They are not friends or allies. They are bullies and killers.”

  Quirk put a hand to her eyes, squinted into the firelight, tried to make out where the speaker was in the crowd of backlit silhouettes. She could see nothing. His volume made his location uncertain.

  “We share a common enemy,” Quirk shouted back. “A common persecutor. We have a shared goal of revenge.” Gods, let the Batarrans have found their courage since I left. Let there be fertile ground for these words.

  “Yes,” boomed the unseen leader, “but you’re a bunch of dragon arseholes.”

  “Dinner it is then,” said Yorrax.

  “No!” Quirk yelled. And fuck this. She filled the night with fire. She demanded attention from dragons and Batarrans alike. “Listen to me!” she screamed. “I have traveled to the ends of the world and beyond to come back here with an army capable of making a difference. And I will not have some petty despot fuck that up for me. So hold. Make nice. And get ready to kick some arse, before I have to get down there and do it myself!”

  Gods, she was tired of making speeches.

  But it might not have been quite so bad if whomever she was talking to hadn’t started laughing. She balled her fists.

  “Beyond the edge of the world?” said the voice. “Well, on that issue, I might just have you beat.”

  And then someone grabbed a torch from a fire and started walking toward her. And then Quirk’s jaw dropped as out of the shadows—out of the grave itself—walked Willett Fallows.

  25

  Death by Bear Hug

  Afrit watched dragons descend from the sky. Massive, brutal beasts. Each one the size of a sea galleon, with outstretched wings darker tha
n the night itself. And she knew that this was death. That was it, at its simplest. The dragons had come and they would end everything. There was no time for a plan, no time for trickery. This was a surprise too great for them, and not even Will with his stolen divinity could fix things.

  She heard him trying, yelling at the crowd to hold with an artificially magnified voice. The people listened to him—though the gods alone knew why—but it would do them no good. Killed together or separately, they would be dead all the same.

  She started to fight through the paralyzed crowd, searching for a way out that didn’t exist. For some shadow that could only ever fail to hide her.

  There would be no escaping the Hallows this time either, she thought. There were no Hallows left to escape from. Only the Void beckoned now.

  Something massive crashed into her, and she screamed, because she knew a dragon had looped around behind them, was poised to devour her whole. But then a more familiar reptilian face gazed into her own.

  “Have you been seeing her?” Balur said.

  Balur. Fighting the other way through the crowd, heading toward the dragons. His mothlike impulse to immolate himself against the largest monster available had taken over. And quite frankly, if it bought Afrit another few seconds to run and hide, she was fine with that.

  “Honestly?” she said, pushing past him. “I can’t imagine Lette is looking to be part of this fight.”

  Then her forward progress ceased utterly as Balur gripped her upper arm. His fist was large enough to cover her entire bicep. The power of his fingers was painful.

  “Not Lette,” he hissed, and she could see something that … No, surely it couldn’t be panic. “I have been losing Cois.”

  Not her. Hir.

  And he wasn’t looking for a fight. He was looking for his love.

  “We were getting separated in Fount.” His bass rumble was heading for higher registers. He flicked his head back and forth, licked the air again and again. “I am thinking I can taste hir. Zhe is being here.”

  Afrit flicked her head around. They were surrounded by thousands of people. It was dark. Panic was rampant. There was still a horde of dragons landing before them. Literally a hundred dragons or more. And there was something epochal about this. Part of her felt that this was significant, that she should be mentally recording it. And yet still all she wanted was to get away.

  Then Balur was propelling her through the crowd, back the way she had come. “Cois!” he shouted as they barreled through stunned, milling crowds. “Cois!”

  She tried to pull away, but Balur wasn’t even paying attention, just dragging her along like some stuffed animal seized for moral support.

  She could hear Will desperately trying to negotiate with the dragons, though his specific words escaped her. It sounded as if he was talking to a woman.

  A woman with the dragons? No … that doesn’t make sense …

  “Cois!”

  They were getting dangerously close to the front of the crowds, back where she had been.

  “Cois!”

  An explosion of movement in the crowd. Afrit flinched. Some pincer movement was happening. The dragons had been buying time—

  No. No, it was a flurry of fabric and flesh, a shriek, and then Cois was on Balur like a rabid kobold, saying his name over and over, and he was rumbling happiness and recriminations, and Afrit was stumbling and discarded.

  The pair of them stood in the churning chaos of the evening utterly separate from events, lost in each other.

  And suddenly, despite it all, the only thing Afrit could think of was Quirk. Quirk up here somewhere in Avarra, still lost to her. And now Afrit was going to be killed by dragons before she had a chance to find her.

  She had to get away.

  She turned her back on the dragons, started to worm her way back through the crowd.

  And then something made her stop. At first she didn’t know what. But then she caught it again. An inflection of voice. A tone she knew. And her heart shivered in her chest. But no. No. It couldn’t be.

  And still she turned and hunted for it. Where had she heard that voice?

  She could hear Will talking again. Saying something that sounded positively stupid in the face of these horrific reptiles, but that, more irritatingly, meant she couldn’t hear anything else.

  And then it came again. That familiar voice. That voice that couldn’t be. And it came in response to Will.

  No. No. It couldn’t …

  She stumbled again. The world felt only loosely held together, as if the moorings of reality had begun to fray. Her body was numb, a distant thing propelling her tiny lost sense of consciousness forward through the crowd. She was floating, breathless.

  And then … then …

  She saw her. She saw her step down from the back of a small blue-and-white dragon. Saw her run across an expanse of grass and seize Will by the shoulders and embrace him. She saw her. Her. Her.

  Afrit stepped toward them, and she tried to say her name, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t make any sounds. Her throat was clogged. She could hardly breathe. She thought her legs might give way. Because it was her. Her. Her.

  She was smiling, animated, gesticulating wildly. And words were pouring out of her. Wonderful, beautiful words. And Afrit couldn’t understand a single one. Because her ears were full of just one word. Her name. And still Afrit couldn’t say it, couldn’t even raise an arm to attract her attention. Her. Her.

  And then she turned. And then she saw.

  And then the whole world contracted, became a single pinpoint of reality focused entirely on them. The crowds went away, and Will went away, and the dragons went away. And it was just them. And Afrit found she could breathe again, she could control her body again.

  And then Afrit was running. And she was running. And they were in each others’ arms in a way they had never been before, but which Afrit had always dreamt of. And their lips were on each other in a way they had never been before, but which Afrit had always dreamt of. And everything was a dream, and nothing could be real, except it was. And she was real. And she was here. Her. Her.

  And finally, finally, Afrit could say her name, could whisper it into her soft ear, over and over and over.

  Quirk.

  26

  Because Burning Everyone and Everything Is Totally a Plan

  Love. Beauty. Peace. They were ideas Will had given up on. They were thoughts from a previous life.

  And yet … there was Quirk in Afrit’s arms. There was the memory of Lette’s lips on his. Even in this world, it seemed, there was respite.

  And then a dragon growled, and Will remembered that respites did not last forever.

  “I think,” the dragon spat at Will, “that you are an agent of Barph come here to disrupt our vengeance. I think that you are to be killed.”

  Its teeth glinted. Its eyes gleamed. Its breath was oven hot. It had a head the size of farmer’s wagon, a body the size of a warship. It was not the largest of the dragons assembled there.

  “And I think you are as dangerous to these people as Barph himself,” Will snarled back. “I think you are an untamed beast that must either be broken or destroyed. I think both sound appealing to me.”

  He knew Quirk must have had her reasons for bringing the dragons here, but he wasn’t sure he would like them.

  More than one dragon roared at his words. Sound and heat washed over him. He felt the crowd behind him quail, felt his strength trembling. He walked a precarious line, he realized. His strength was not infallible.

  But these people could fuel him if he gave them faith.

  “I am not cowed by you,” he shouted into the dragon’s face, into all their faces. “I have killed your kind before. I shall do it again.”

  And he could feel some of the crowd coming with him on this journey of defiance. Their excitement fed his strength.

  The dragon reared back on its length. It opened its jaws. And now … now he would see how strong he was.

 
Fire arched over Will’s head. It smashed into the dragon’s face. The vast lizard scrabbled back like an offended feline.

  “No!” Quirk’s voice was a whip crack. “No!” She stormed toward them, palm raised and full of fire. She turned to Will. “Gods, you couldn’t let me be happy to see you for longer than a minute, could you? You had to jump right back into the same old bullshit?”

  “They’re dragons!” Will pointed out, not, he thought, unreasonably.

  “We are fighting dragons now?” And suddenly Balur was there with an eager smile. Cois was still on his arm.

  “Is that …” Quirk was momentarily sidetracked. “Is that Cois?”

  “Who is this?” bellowed a dragon.

  “Burn him!” shouted another.

  “Burn them all,” came another cry.

  The blue-white dragon, the one Quirk had been riding, turned and hissed at its larger companions, but they ignored it.

  “If anyone is getting burned alive,” shouted Quirk, “I’m the one doing it.” She took a breath. “This is Willett Fallows. He is …” She looked at Will. He shrugged. He didn’t know how to sum his life up any more than she did.

  “He is the epicenter of all bullshit,” Quirk shouted to the dragons. “He is a farmer. A nobody. He is the prophet of Kondorra from time to time. And somehow he is a catalyst for epochal change in Avarra. And I don’t know how, or why. But he is important over and over again. And apparently he is important again here, though I doubt he deserves to be.”

  “That’s actually pretty fair.” Lette had joined them. She placed a hand against Will’s lower back. “Hello, Quirk.” She grinned.

  “Also,” Quirk said to Will, lowering her voice, “aren’t you usually less purple?”

  Will shrugged. He wasn’t even sure how to get into that.

  The dragons hadn’t finished growling. There was a moan of fear rising from the crowd behind him. Not all of them, but enough.

  “He angers me,” stated one dragon.

  “He angers everybody,” Quirk snapped back. “It’s sort of his thing.”

  And Will wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about that. He’d always rather hoped that improbably successful plans were his thing.