Page 121 of Realm of Thieves

I glance over at Andor as the boat is lowered into the waves and he starts rowing, the muscles under his armor flexing. He’s the reason I feel a fluttering sensation in my chest, the feeling like something inside me slowly but fully awakening, unfurling like a desert bloom. He’s put me on a path that has changed my life for better or worse, but a path I feel destined to have taken all the same. I still don’t know what my purpose is, I still don’t why the Harbringer said I was different, why Iamdifferent, but I know I’m one step closer to discovering it each day.

“What?” Andor asks with a quizzical frown as we slice through the water, its color turning from deep inky blue to azure as we get closer to the wards and the shore.

“Nothing,” I tell him, because of course I can’t tell him these things. I feel them, so deeply, but the moment I know I should share them with him, they die on my tongue. It’s almost as if the moment I say them he’ll find it laughable and silly, like he won’t actually see how serious I am about it. I worry he’ll think I’m lying or just trying to be nice, when that’s not the case at all. As long as I keep my feelings inside, they’ll stay real and true.

He studies my face for a moment and I fear he’s going to push me, because he knows I’m hiding something even if he doesn’t know what, but he just grins at me. “All that sex rattled your brain, did it?”

I laugh. “You could say that.”

His focus goes behind me. “We’re about to go through the wards.”

I twist around as the shimmery light gets close, rainbows refracted in the shield. There’s a familiar resistance as we push through, followed by a faint pop as we reach the other side.

I shake the feeling out of my ears and concentrate on our landing.I suppose I should be more focused on what we’re about to do than on Andor. After all, this mission is unlike any of the ones we’ve done before. We’re not just stealing eggs, we’re stealing fertilized eggs from sycledrages, which means there will be a lot of aggressive mamas to defend ourselves from, and those dragonsareaggressive. Once we have the eggs, we have to keep them warm and close to our bodies and immediately head back to the ship, where Steiner will put them in an incubator.

At least this part of the Midlands isn’t as volcanic as the rest. We still have our black salve around the eyes to protect them, but so far there’s been no need for a mask. The air is tinged yellow and smells of sulfur but there is no real smoke.

We’re near the shore when Lemi shifts and appears on top of a volcanic rock, poised like a statue and scouting in all directions for dragons or danger, though they’re pretty much the same thing.

Once the boat scrapes along the rocky coral bottom, Andor jumps in, knee-deep in the water as he effortlessly pulls the vessel ashore with me in it. He grabs my hand and helps me off the bow, and then we grab our packs and a few extra weapons. Both of us are carrying a bow and arrows now, since I proved to be such a good shot with the Harbringer’s miniature bolt-thrower. We also have our usual swords and the egg collection sack that has been insulated with goose feathers.

Lemi barks at us, his nose pointed inland.

“That way, I guess,” I say as we scramble up a rough embankment of scree and lava rock, Andor helping me up as my boots try to find purchase. Once on top of the ridge we have a clear view of the land, nothing but undulating earth and rock all the way to the mountains in the distance, their sides blown off from explosions long ago.

“No active volcanoes,” Andor says. “That’s a win.”

“Doesn’t look like the type of terrain that gives way to fire tornadoes either,” I point out. “Another win.”

Lemi barks again, going into play pose and wagging his tail. “And I think he’s found a scent. Lead the way, boy. But don’t go too far.”

My hound immediately disappears and reappears about half a mile away. “How is that not going too far?” I yell after him.

Andor and I break into a jog, knowing we need to be quick about this mission. If Lemi finds any sort of eggs at all, we’re bringing them back, fertilized or not.

We run over the rock, jumping over fissures, heading toward a group of dark gray boulders that jut out from the blackened landscape like a city. Lemi slips between them and we follow, the dirt here the same gray as the rock.

“I’m unfamiliar with this kind of rock,” I say. “Doesn’t seem volcanic.”

“Or perhaps it’s so old and so volcanic, it doesn’t resemble the rest of the island,” Andor points out as we run around another boulder. “Maybe this is the birthplace of the islands.”

Birthplace or not, there doesn’t seem to be much of a path here, and I hope Lemi is actually running up ahead and checking it out and not shifting us to a dead end. The more we run, the narrower it gets, and the more the boulders start to melt into each other until finally we burst out of the chasm and into a large, circular area, the ground a mix of coarse gray sand and pebbles, towering rock walls all around us except for a slit in the side, which might be a cave.

It reminds me of an arena, and Lemi is standing in the middle of it, huffing his lips with his nose pointed at a giant nest of deathdrage eggs, the biggest ones to exist.

“Oh,” I say, coming to a halt. “This isn’t what I expected.”

The eggs are three to four feet tall, all of them in shades of green and blue.

And if mama comes back, we’re in a lot of trouble.

“What do you think?” I say to Andor, pulling an arrow from the quiver on my shoulder, the tips laced with the tranquilizer though I have no idea how many we need to take down a deathdrage. “Push our luck and move on, hoping we come across a sycledrage nest? Orpush our luck and try to take one of these? This isn’t even the dragon your father wanted.”

“Does it matter?” Andor asks. “I think this will keep him happy for now. What if we raise it from birth? What if we could tame it?”

“I think you’re delusional if you think you can tame one of those,” I admit. “Same goes for any dragon. They aren’t horses, they aren’t dogs. They aren’t our friends. They are vicious, wild beasts that will probably kill you first chance they get. Ever seen someone with a snake as a pet? In the end they always get bitten. And these creatures happen to have a very large bite.”

He sucks at his teeth, seeming to think it over. “I’m doing it.”

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