Chapter 6 - The Melting of the Scales
It did not happen like a magic trick in a travelling show. There were no flashes of blue fire or clouds of sweet-smelling smoke. It was a biological agony made visible.
The great black scales along the dragon's neck began to ripple, sliding over one another like wet slate tiles shifting in an earthquake. The massive bone structure of the skull cracked audibly—a dry, popping sound that made several women in the crowd turn away and cover their ears. The huge, leathery wings folded inward, shrinking and folding until the membrane dissolved into the fabric of a torn, soot-stained woolen coat.
The claws on the cobblestones shortened, thickening into human toes. The tail whipped once, twice, and then vanished into the folds of dark wool.
Within thirty seconds, where a forty-foot leviathan had just crouched to protect a baker’s daughter, there stood a man.
He was barefoot upon the frost-bitten stones. His hair was long, tangled with bits of forest moss and greyed at the temples like winter smoke. His face was lean, carved with the sharp, uncompromising lines of a portrait struck on an old coin, and his eyes—the same dull, golden hue as the dragon's—fixed upon Magistrate Crowe with an expression that made the local lawman drop his scroll.
Old Thomas Hart, having finally broken free of the guards, stumbled into the square, fell to his knees by the town pump, and stared. Then the old merchant beside him dropped his walking stick. Then another. And another.
Within five heartbeats, every person in Ravenford Square—from the youngest tavern apprentice to Sergeant Miller himself—was kneeling in the mud.
Only two people remained standing: Eleanor Hart, still tethered by her wrists to the wooden post, and King Adrian Wren, sovereign of the Twelve Crownlands, who stood between them with his bare feet bleeding slightly from the cracked granite.
Adrian looked down at his own hands—hands that had once held the Scepter of the Sun, now calloused and stained with wood-smoke and dry earth. Then he turned his head slowly toward the whipping post.
With two fingers, he reached out and snapped the thick hemp ropes binding Eleanor’s wrists as if they were dried willow twigs. The hemp fell away into the mud.
He did not touch her arm, but he stayed close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from his skin—a heat that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with survival.
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Then Adrian turned his gaze back to Magistrate Crowe, who was currently trying to climb backward over the railing of the staging.
"Magistrate," the King said. His voice was not loud, but it carried across the silent square with the cold clarity of winter glass. "Would you care to explain why you were about to strike the woman who kept your king alive?"
