Cold, wet horror slammed into her like a slap in the face, and she realized this wasn’t a dream at all.

The tortured corpse a few feet away was unidentifiable, no shreds of clothing or even skin remaining to give any clue. Head thrown back, limbs mangled, every line of its pose telling her it had suffered a sudden, unimaginably painful death.

She tried to sit up but failed, and instead flopped onto her side, turning away from the charred body and focusing through the heavy, lung-clogging smoke on the fires still burning. Behind them, she saw mountains rising against the black sky. Their outline was familiar.

They were the mountains of the Northern Province of Peneggan. Her mountains.

The battered shell of a stone building stood silhouetted against the flames. A roofless barn with a shattered cottage built on the side. Jarven’s house.

This was home.

Bile rose in her. There was nothing in her stomach to be brought up but she retched anyway, and when a dark shadow loomed through the fog she drew back, her weak body unable to rouse itself to fight.

“Kett? Oh hell, sweetheart, of all the times to wake up.”

It sounded like Bael, and he carefully draped something large and heavy on the ground beside her. A person, wrapped in tattered fabric.

“Drink, Kett,” said Bael’s voice, and something was pressed to her lips. A flask of water. It was stale and warm, but to Kett it was the coolest, most delicious thing she’d ever tasted.

A few sips, and then it was taken from her.

“What happened?” she croaked, trying to focus on Bael’s face through smoky eyes. He had a fold of fabric wrapped around the lower half of his face, muffling his voice a little.

“I don’t know. Fire. The dragons got loose, I guess. I-” He broke off, pressing a hand to his face. “I stopped for a bit, sweetheart, tried to heal you. If I’d just kept going, if I hadn’t delayed, we’d have gotten here and…”

And we’d have been killed too. He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to.

Bael cleared his throat. “There are bodies. The villagers, I think. Not all of them. And some of them weren’t killed by fire. They were attacked-”

“Jarven,” Kett rasped, appalled.

“He’s alive, but he’s hurt pretty badly.” He indicated the body wrapped in cloth. She could see it move slightly as it breathed. Jarven was alive, even if he might not be for long.

Her gaze skittered past Jarven, trying to make out the shapes visible in the smoky gloom. A row of what she’d at first assumed to be chopped logs was revealed to be a row of bodies, laid out neatly side by side. Some were badly disfigured, but others she recognized. Villagers. Friends.

Lying a little way from them were a few more corpses. Unfamiliar ones. Men in armor.

A cold sliminess crawled through her as she made out hunting gear and a scarred face. Albhar’s man. Smoke clouded her vision, tears stinging until she was lying in that rocky gully again and the dogs were snapping as Bael’s voice rang out from the scryer. “Highest cell, tallest tower. Let it freeze. Let it starve. Keep it alive just enough for it to be awake to feel the pain.”

Agony burned through her and she couldn’t breathe. The nightmare hammered at her brain. The man with the scarred face opened his mouth and breathed fire at her. Her dragons escaped and burned Bael to a crisp. Twisting, flickering shapes, pictograms, blood, torchlight on rocky walls and the gleam of lust in her lover’s eye. Kett writhed away from the delirious images but they wouldn’t let her go.

“…to your stepmother, I think. Kett? Can you hear me? Var will take you,” Bael said, and the smoke shifted as a green dragon hovered above her, wings beating away some of the heat and heavy, oppressive smog.

She shook her head. She wanted to stay, to help-this was her home and the villagers had been hurt because of her dragons and-

“You have to go,” Bael insisted. He kissed her lips very gently then said, “I’m staying here.”

With that, Var picked her up gently in one claw and Jarven in the other. His wings began to beat, and the dragon rose into the air, leaving Bael behind, surrounded by smoke and fire and death. Kett screamed and screamed, even after unconsciousness had claimed her again.

When she opened her eyes she was in a bed, drenched in sweat and with one of her sisters shaking her by the arm, calling her name urgently.

“Kett? Can you hear me?” It was Eithne, and she left Kett for a moment to rush to the door and shout, “Mama! She’s having some sort of fit!”

Kett lay there, breathing hard, staring up at the pale canopy of her bed. Her own bed in Nuala’s house. The room smelled the same as it always had, the damp linen was soft against her skin. The lamp burned low, casting a dull glow over familiar furniture.

The scent of smoke had vanished.

Nuala rushed in dressed in nightclothes, Tyrnan behind her. She felt at Kett’s forehead, shone a light into her eyes and repeated her name over and over until Kett snapped, “Of course I can bloody hear you. I’m not deaf.”

Eithne put her hand to her mouth.

“I was having a-a dream,” Kett said, her voice rusty. “That’s all.”

Nuala didn’t look convinced but after she’d checked Kett’s wounds, stuck a thermometer in her mouth and checked her eyes again, she was forced to conclude there was nothing terribly amiss.

“How long have I been here?” Kett asked. The clock over the fireplace showed it wasn’t far off morning.

“A few hours. Drink this,” Nuala said, holding out a glass into which she’d just tipped some powder. “Eithne, have you been giving her drinks every half hour?”

Eithne indicated a small hourglass by the bed. “Small sips of water, just as you said.”

“Maybe a little more from now on. You’ll be even more dehydrated now,” Nuala said to Kett, then turned to her husband. “Lift her up so I can change the sheets.”

“For gods’ sakes, Nuala, I’m fine,” Kett said, but her father picked her up anyway, as if she weighed absolutely nothing. Kett considered what she’d had to eat and drink in the last five days and figured that was probably about right.

“I can stand,” she said.

“No, you can’t,” said Tyrnan. “I haven’t seen you this bad since you came back to life.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t look so hot then either,” Kett snapped. She attempted to fold her arms, which didn’t go very well. Her right shoulder was heavily bandaged. “Look, at the risk of asking a very trite question, how the hell did I get here?”

Her father smiled, although it was too tense to be convincing. “A dragon dropped you off in the garden,” he said. “Quite literally. You and Jarven. Who, incidentally, is in even worse shape than you are.”

Kett opened her mouth then closed it again. The smoke. The fire. Gods, had that actually been real? “Jarven? But-I was in Asiatica. With…Bael.”

Come to think of it, where the hell was Bael?

“Well, now you’re here. With Jarven. And both of you look like you’ve been set on fire.”

Fire.

Fear gripped her. “Is he-will he be okay?”

“Eventually,” Nuala said. “But I wouldn’t advise any dragon training for either of you for a while.”

Bed made-who knew her princess stepmother could do something so menial?-Kett was allowed to lie down again. “And Bael?” she asked.

Her parents and sister looked at each other. Cold dread spread through Kett’s body.

“We haven’t seen him, sweetheart,” Nuala said.

I’m staying here.

“Kett, what happened?” Tyrnan asked, and she closed her eyes, images of fire and smoke and strange pictograms dancing across her vision.

She’d been nearly dead from starvation, dehydration, infection, blood loss…

And yet she was still alive, and as healthy as if she’d had weeks of medical care.