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  Dragon’s Flame

  The Hearts of Dragons Book Two

  Lee Hayton

  Copyright © 2018 Lee Hayton

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  With Special Thanks to Real Indie Author Services

  Cover Design by kathay1973

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Also by Lee Hayton

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Shandra jumped over the muddy creek that ran the length of her neighbor’s main field. At least, that was what she tried to do. Her foot sank deeper into the mud than expected and the next moment, she lay flat on her back, staring up at the sky.

  “You okay, sis?”

  Halv’s voice held a hint of laughter, although it was shadowed with concern. It took Shandra a second to answer, getting back the breath the fall had knocked clean out of her.

  “I’ll be—”

  Mal suddenly towered above her, scooping her up out of the ditch as though she were as light as a feather. He sat her down and examined her. An investigation that began with questions and prodding, then moved to subtle strokes along her back, under the fabric of her shirt.

  “Not here,” she whispered, her cheeks coloring. The caresses on her skin reminded her too much of the antics they’d enjoyed together the night before. Shandra might be new to owning a harem but she was discovering the joys, night by night.

  Meanwhile Sulli, who’d been fiddling with the machinery in the barn, walked out and issued a startled cry. He raced to Shandra’s side and dropped to his knees. “You’re hurt? Where?”

  “I’m fine. The fall knocked my pride loose, but that’s about all.” Shandra scrambled to her feet, wishing for the grace of her departed mother as every man in the field stared at her.

  Sulli put an arm around her back, insisting on leading her inside the farmhouse. She pressed a hand against his chest for balance, but also to enjoy the warmth of his embrace.

  Although Mal was currently the only clan brother privy to her bedroom, Shandra had thought long and hard—mainly hard—about introducing Sulli as her next partner. Her reticence to ask him was born half from the inability to know how to broach the subject and half from the deliciousness of forcing herself to wait.

  He sat her down at the kitchen table and lifted her shirt to examine the damage to her back. They were lending a hand on the neighbor’s farm—a necessity since Wella had scooped up another group of able-bodied men from the region. Soon, they’d be down to the injured, the underage, and the elderly.

  “You’ll bruise,” Sulli said, pulling a canister of ointment from his pocket and massaging it into her aching muscles. “But if you let me apply this at night and morning, it should save you from the worst of the pain.”

  With his dexterous fingers releasing a flood of endorphins into her system, Shandra decided she’d be happy to agree to this delicious ritual every hour of every day. “I’m fine,” she insisted again when he pulled her shirt back down. “Nobody needs to flap about me, worrying.”

  “We do.” Sulli’s tone was warm but emphatic. “With the workers in the area stripped down to almost nothing, if we lose an able-bodied woman, it affects all the farms we assist.”

  “Oh.” Shandra nodded, annoyed she hadn’t considered the bigger picture. “Of course.”

  She walked up and down in front of Sulli to prove she had displaced nothing of importance in her fall. “If you feel any pain in your back, let me know straight away,” he ordered. “I don’t want you pretending everything is okay, then collapsing later.”

  Shandra blushed at the implication. The flu had struck her down soon after the fight in Wella’s arena. After ignoring the symptoms in favor of working herself to the bone on the farm, she’d ended up in bed, feverish, certain every breath would be her last.

  When she walked outside, Halv stood at the exit, his weight on one foot and a frown creasing his large face. “Do you want me to take over your chores? If you want to return home, I can do your work here.”

  The offer sent a pang of gratitude to twist at Shandra’s heart. “I’ll be okay. Go rejoin Ricci, I’m sure he’s missing your help.”

  Halv ran off, his short legs pumping hard to reach the running speed that his older brother took for granted. Even with the harem now sworn to her farm, Shandra still worried about her youngest sibling’s future.

  “Doing anything to take a rest now, are we?” Baile called out as Shandra returned to her position in the field.

  They were turning the earth, ready to dig the mulch into it that would ensure a good harvest the following year. If they couldn’t get the seven blocks surrounding the house done by the end of the week, then their neighbor would have to work twice as hard come spring to plant out his crops.

  The situation was not confined to just this neighbor. It seemed every week lately, another member of their community threw their hands up, ready to give in under the weight of the demands of their farm. With the last crop of the year still growing at home, Shandra had been happy to lend out the services of her harem. When the requests grew more frequent, she’d joined them, along with her brothers Ricci and Halv.

  At times, it seemed to Shandra that the latest round of drafting people into Wella’s army had come as a retaliation for her harem warrior losing the fight. The overlord had recognized Mal as the winner, losing Shandra for her army. The roundup of fit men and women in the district had come so soon after, it didn’t appear coincidental.

  Or, it could simply be that Wella had seized her chance to advance the army’s position fighting against the dwarves. With the rich mines of the Davelmiotas within her grasp, making a push now could spell a quick victory.

  Shandra wasn’t so naïve as to think that would mean those serving would then be released to return home and work the land. She had no doubt that as one victory claimed new territory it would just result in another war declared in an attempt to gain still more.

  With a wave to Baile—faking an injury to take a rest would be lovely, but not supportable—she got back to work. Her job for the day was to collect the rocks and stones that might cause damage to the machinery. A task already labor-heavy on her back and one which the blossoming crop of bruises weren’t happy about.

  “Here you go, lovely lady,” Chance said, presenting Shandra with a sprig of late-season herbs, cleverly tied together with their own stalks. He stooped next to her, collecting a few large rocks to help her task along while she placed the delicious smelling bundle in her hair. “How do these stones manage to creep back every year?”

  It was something that Shandra had long wondered as well. Her elder brother Zen had tried to explain it to her before the war effort swallowed him whole.

  “Apparently, the rocks are lighter than the soil,” she said, tossing one in her hand as though it were a pumice. “They rise up through the hard-packed ground the same way bubbles rise to the surface of water.”

  “Oh, my.” Chance’s face, usually creased with fury at something—animate or not—was now smooth and relaxed as his mind appeared to work the idea through. “So pretty and so clever.”

  Shandra blushed, a habit she wished she could rid herself of now that men surrounded her on all sides
on a daily basis. “My brother told me—”

  Io gave a scream behind her, then burst into laughter. “Spider. Don’t worry, it won’t be taking anything home to feed its family.” He raised a knife, usually kept in a holster across his hip, with a fat wriggling body speared on its blade.

  “They catch insects, you know,” Halv said, walking over to inspect the creature with abject curiosity. “If it weren’t for these little soldiers, flies would overrun our home during the summer.” He tipped his head to one side, lips pursed. “I mean, even worse than they already do.”

  “Could you put it somewhere else?” Shandra shuddered, though whether at the spider’s multitude of legs—why so many? Surely it could get by with half that?—or at its obviously painful death, she didn’t know.

  “Put it where the sun doesn’t shine,” Io sang, starting up a little ditty, half whistling, half singing, that he’d apparently made up on the spot.

  “Hey, guys?” Mal stood up and waved his arms to show he was talking to all of them. “You know there’s a lot of work to be done here, right? How about we concentrate on that for a while?”

  “We’ve concentrated on that for most of the day.” Io sat back on his heels and stretched his arms above his head. “How about, we concentrate on a song battle for the rest of the afternoon? I’ll start.”

  “Please, no.” Baile held up his hands to ward off the suggestion, while Chance took the more logical tack of covering his ears.

  Halv and Shandra burst into laughter, catching each other’s eyes until they became so bad, they both collapsed onto the ground.

  “Haven’t you done enough falling over for one day?” Ricci asked with a note of disgust in his voice.

  Shandra ignored him for the moment. While Halv had blossomed under the caring and teaching eyes of the clan brothers, Ricci now played more up around the house, sullen and morose. Perhaps the mood swings were just due to his age—Shandra vaguely recalled Zen stomping around the house for a full year about the same time—but she also worried that her brother might have an actual beef with the men.

  To talk to him and find out was on her list of chores, somewhere near the bottom, around all the other tasks that involved emotions.

  “If we take a short break now to refresh ourselves, we might manage more work this afternoon.” Sulli made his suggestion in the same thoughtful manner as always, as though he’d tallied up the pros and cons of every option and knew this was the only sure way.

  “Yes. A break. Anyone seen my instrument?”

  If anyone else had offered such an easy double entendre, Baile would have leaped all over it. Since quiet Io was the one to speak it, the possible jokes remained unsaid.

  Ricci walked away from the group and Shandra hurried after him. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to our house. I can do more good there.”

  “We promised Lan we’d help at his farm all day. You can’t just walk off to do something else because you feel like it.”

  At that, Ricci pooched his lower lip out so far it was in danger of falling off. “You don’t tell me what to do. If you’d just gone into the army as Wella wanted, I’d be the leader of our farm by now.”

  Although Shandra didn’t allow her face to register the emotion, relief flooded through her body like a warm wave. So, that was the problem. When they’d celebrated Ricci’s seventeenth birthday a week before, she’d never thought of what he might have been expecting.

  “You’ll have a farm of your own, soon enough.” Shandra put her hands on her hips and stared at the ground, trying to think of some way to combat his antagonism. She couldn’t give him the farm to run, could she?

  “How about you pick out a piece of land, back home? You can map out a farmhouse of your own and take over the responsibility for looking after all the area attached to it.” The family farm was so large, it could easily be split up into smaller portions.

  Shandra felt a burst of excitement at the idea. If Ricci was a landowner, it might even help protect him from Wella’s poaching. “It can be your responsibility and belong solely to you, and your family.”

  Ricci glanced cautiously up at her, his eyes half-hidden by his tangled fringe. “Would you really do that?”

  “Of course. The farm belongs to you and Halv as much as it does to me. If you section off a part as solely yours, that’ll be a great weight off my shoulders.”

  “Can I hire my own men to work the land with me?”

  Sadness cut through Shandra like a knife. The clan brothers had done so much to improve all their fortunes, not just her own. It was hard to accept that the people she loved, didn’t all love one another.

  “Once you make some money to pay them, you can hire anybody you like.” If there were any able-bodied people left in the district by that stage. “Be warned though. If you hire them and can’t pay, I’m not bailing out your debts.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not about—”

  The world exploded. Sound and light. Blinding. Deafening.

  Shandra’s ears filled with sound until they couldn’t take anymore and popped. A high whine replaced the deafening noise of a split-second before.

  She looked into the distance where a plume of smoke rose in a gigantic cloud. After a moment, she realized someone was banging on her arm and looked down to see herself clutching onto Ricci’s shirt, bunching it up. She let go and stepped back, adrenaline rushing through her system but without any intimation of which way she should run.

  Her muscles bunched tight in readiness to flee, then she saw Sulli waving his arms. Grabbing Ricci by the hand, Shandra dragged him with her as she sprinted over. Her ears popped again, and noise crushed into them, a roar in which she couldn’t decipher individual sounds.

  “It’s the war,” Ricci yelled, Shandra able to determine the words more by the shape of his lips than the noise.

  The smoke continued to hang in the air as they reached Sulli, not dissipating, not blowing away. Blue smoke. Shandra had never seen its like before.

  “Stay away from the creatures,” Sulli yelled.

  Shandra thought her hearing had betrayed her and called back, “What?”

  “The creatures. We have to get away from them.”

  “What creatures?” With renewed fear, Shandra stared at the plume of smoke again but couldn’t see what Sulli was talking about.

  He grasped at her arm, shaking her to gain her attention. “You can’t see them but they’re there. They’re coming for us. We need to get away.”

  “Why would you be able to see them and not us?” Ricci scowled at Sulli and Shandra felt like slapping him. The boy needed to learn how to pick his moments.

  “Tell everyone we pass. They need to get inside their houses and stay there. Bar the doors and windows. Believe me, they don’t want to be outside when those beasts get here.”

  Sulli ran off, waving his arms to some men who were walking along the road at the back of the farm, headed toward the noise and the smoke.

  “Where’s Halv?” Shandra turned in a circle, unable to see him. Her fear ratcheted higher with each passing second.

  Ricci pulled at her hand, pointing it toward the neighbor’s house. “There he is. Mal’s got him.”

  The two of them ran over, joining Io, Chance, and Baile as they converged on the property. “Sulli said there were creatures coming out of the smoke.”

  “You can’t see them with your human eyes,” Mal agreed. “We need to get back home and barricade it against anything that might arrive. Can you run?”

  Sulli passed by, twenty yards away, still yelling instructions at the two men. “Don’t let anything inside, even if it sounds like a child screaming.”

  Shandra’s eyes bugged out with terror. What the hell?

  She demonstrated her ability to run without another thought, dragging Ricci and Halv along by the hand. The horror of being chased by something she couldn’t see expanded in her chest, but she fought it down.

  Time enough to worry when they were safely
back inside.

  Chapter Two

  As soon as Sulli strode through the door, he flung himself into a chair. The first pounding rush of adrenaline had been used up, leaving his body shaking and wanting more.

  “What did you see?” Shandra demanded, her teeth chattering against each other.

  Sulli wanted to look at her, this woman who had come into their lives and changed everything for the better. He wanted to, but the fear growing inside wouldn’t let him.

  It had been a long time since Sulli had been afraid.

  The emotion muddled his thoughts. Where he’d usually see a clear path showing the best way forward, now trails scattered in all directions. The past crowded forward, filling up the space in his mind until there was no room left for decisions or considerations.

  No room for the logical thought processes that were his best strength.

  He ignored Shandra, instead staring down at his hands. They’d clenched together, the nails biting into the palms the same way they’d done so many years before. Back when his world was shaped by a mage full of evil.

  Sulli hadn’t known it then—he’d been so young when he joined up with Cade Storm that he lacked judgment—but the truth had revealed itself. In time.

  Mal checked the door had closed shut following Sulli’s entrance, then pulled a chair across and tucked it under the handle as another barrier. He was the last to reach home, desperately trying to save the entire community by running at them and shouting what to do in their faces.

  Had any of them listened? Sulli didn’t know. His mind had been too filled with panic to pay attention.

  He risked a glance up at the room of faces but had to look away again. Shandra was trying to pull her brothers into a close embrace, but they fought her off, wanting to show their bravery.