The Final Trial by Kelley Armstrong

Author:Kelley Armstrong [Armstrong, Kelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PRH Canada Young Readers
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

It has been an endless day. It doesn’t help that I barely slept, plagued by dreams of grootslangs and kalabandars. My spirits have improved, though. I understand that Madlyn’s death hit me harder than I thought, bringing memories of Jannah, and that’s what made me feel so discouraged yesterday.

It’s slow going as we move through the jungle, but we’re making progress. We have two more encounters, neither monster-related. One is a wild boar herd that doesn’t want to share a watering hole, and the other is a jaguar that stalks us until an arrow sends it fleeing.

We make camp, and our night is uneventful. Everyone’s quiet, but it’s not a bad kind of quiet. We just don’t seem to have much to say, so we save all our energy for what will be another exhausting day of trekking through the jungle. I’m on last shift, and I’m roasting meat on the fire for breakfast when the back of my neck prickles. I tense and rise, looking around. Malric and Jacko are doing the same, as if they also sense something. I don’t see anything in the jungle. It’s dawn, and there’s a preternatural quiet, as if the nocturnal animals have all gone to bed and the diurnal ones haven’t yet risen.

I look up to see a shape moving lazily, like a cloud floating past the sun, and that’s what I think it is until I remember that the sun is still hidden behind the mountains to the east. That distant black shape swirls through the clouds, as if flying above them. I squint up.

“The dragon,” Dain whispers, and I glance over to see he’s awake in his sleeping blankets, both he and Dez looking up, too.

He’s right. It is indeed the dragon. Hunting, it seems, moving in slow circles far above us. Then she seems to spot her target to the south, and she unleashes a scream that barely reaches our ears at this distance. She dives, only to pull up short. Then she swoops again and flaps back up, her movements jerky now, agitated.

“Something’s bothering her,” he says.

“People.” The hairs on my neck prickle. “Roivan soldiers. They’re moving on the mountains, like King Estienne warned.”

He shakes his head. “She’s just warning someone off. Could be a trading caravan.”

“You’re right.”

He exhales, as if relieved that I agree. Relieved that we aren’t too late, that the attack hasn’t begun without us.

“Rhydd and Liliath will slow them down,” he says. “They’ll talk sense into the prime minster and the minister of defense. They have the king on their side. That must count for something.”

“If she is attacking traders, that’s a problem,” Alianor says from her sleeping blankets.

“I don’t think she’s attacking anyone,” I say. “It’s a warning display.”

“Yeah, that’s not going to matter. I’d like to see you tell a terrified caravan not to worry about a swooping dragon.”

She has a point. Not a lot of travelers come that way—one of the royal monster hunter’s jobs is to escort semiannual caravans of traders, something that’s been put on hold while I train.

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