The first sunbeam hadn't yet touched the eastern peaks when the screaming started in Highglen.

  Finley was elbow-deep in the morning milking, his forehead pressed against Bess's warm flank, when the old cow lowed sharply and kicked her bucket over. White froth splashed across the straw. He cursed not at Bess, who'd never done such a thing, but at the waste. That was a quarter of his Da's weekly earnings, gone.

  He knelt to right the bucket, muttering, and that's when he heard it. Not just screams. A sound beneath them. A low, grinding roar that vibrated up through the dirt floor and shook the timbers of the barn. Bess lowed again, a frightened, plaintive sound, and pressed against her stall.

  Finley scrambled to the door, his breath fogging in the chill dawn air.

  The sky above Highglen was darkening, but not with clouds.

  Dragons.

  Four of them, their wings blotting out the paling stars. They were sleek and scaled in colors of tarnished bronze and rusted iron not the glittering jewels of stories his mum used to tell, but something older, crueler. Their flight was a predatory glide, silent except for that terrible, building hum in the air.

  This isn't real, Finley thought. This is a nightmare. I'll wake up in the straw in a moment.

  One dragon peeled off, banking hard. Its maw opened. Not fire. Not yet. A gout of shimmering, liquid heat poured from its throat and struck Old Man Gerren's thatched cottage at the village edge. The roof didn't burn; it melted, collapsing inward with a hiss and a stink of pitch and cooked stone. Gerren who'd given Finley a honey-cake every Market Day since he was small didn't even have time to scream.

  Finley's legs gave out. He sat hard in the dirt, mouth agape.

  A horn blew from the watchtower a single, desperate bleat that choked off mid-blast as a second dragon spewed its molten breath. The tower, wood and straw, became a pillar of fire. Watcher Thom, who'd taught Finley how to tie a fishing fly last spring, was inside it.

  This is real. This is happening. They're all dead.

  Panic exploded through Highglen's muddy lanes. People spilled from their homes, clutching children, sacks of grain, whatever was at hand. Finley saw Marta, the baker's daughter the girl he'd been working up the courage to speak to for three months drag her little brother by the hand, both of them screaming. He saw Old Widow Henson, who couldn't walk without her stick, slumped against her doorframe with no one to help her. He saw Tav, the tavern keeper who always saved him a seat by the fire on cold nights, running toward the south road with his wife and babe.

  They all ran south, toward the forest, the only possible cover.

  Finley should run. His legs wouldn't move.

  The bronze dragon circled back. It drew a deep, rattling breath, its chest glowing like a forge. It was lining up the fleeing column. Dozens of people Marta, her brother, Tav and his family, everyone Finley had known his whole life bunched together on the open road. Sitting ducks.

  They're going to die. They're all going to die, and I'm going to watch.

  A voice cut through the chaos, sharp as cracked ice. "Shield!"

  A woman stood in the center of the southern road. She wore simple gray robes, her dark hair bound back in a severe braid. Her hands were empty, raised palms-up toward the oncoming dragon. Finley hadn't seen her arrive. She looked like she'd simply… appeared. Like she'd been there all along, and he'd only just noticed.

  The air above her shimmered. It wasn't a wall of light, not some glowing barrier. It was a distortion, like heat haze over a desert, but it thickened, coalescing into a dome of warped, translucent force that slammed down around the southern half of the village. It passed through Finley with a static tingle, raising the hair on his arms.

  The dragon's breath hit it.

  Liquid fire splashed against the distortion and slid, smoking and sizzling, to the ground, carving fiery trenches in the earth outside the dome but not touching a blade of grass within. The dragon shrieked in fury, banking away. Inside the shield, the air was suddenly thick, pressurized, smelling of ozone and hot stone.

  The woman the mage didn't flinch. Her eyes were fixed on the sky, her jaw rigid. A thin trickle of blood leaked from her left nostril. "Move!" she roared, her voice amplified, echoing strangely inside the dome. "Get to the forest! The shield won't hold long!"

  Her words broke the stunned paralysis. The crowd surged forward, streaming past her, scrambling toward the tree line fifty yards beyond the dome's edge. Marta ran past, her little brother in her arms now. She caught Finley's eye for a split second terrified, desperate and then she was gone into the trees.

  She's alive. She made it.

  Finley found his feet and ran, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs.

  Two more dragons dove. One breathed fire again, testing the shield. The dome rippled, and the mage grunted, staggering back a step. The other dragon, cunning, landed just outside the barrier. It was massive, a creature of jagged obsidian scales and horns like broken spears. It cocked its head, a strangely intelligent malice in its slit-pupiled eyes. It drew back a taloned foreleg and struck the shield.

  The sound was a physical blow: a deep, resonating GONG that threw Finley and a dozen others to the ground. The shield flickered, and for a second, Finley saw the world outside waver like a reflection in a disturbed pond.

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  The mage screamed, a raw sound of strain. She dropped to one knee, her hands now clenched into fists, driving them into the dirt as if physically holding the dome down. "Jacob! Now!" she shrieked.

  A streak of cobalt light shot from the forest edge.

  It resolved into a man, his robes the blue of a deep lake, his feet not touching the ground. He flew, trailing azure energy, straight toward the landed obsidian dragon. Finley had a confused, fragmented thought: He was in the forest. He was already in the forest. He was waiting.

  The dragon saw him coming. It inhaled, its throat glowing a sinister red.

  The mage in blue Jacob didn't slow. He crossed his arms over his chest and then flung them wide.

  A glacier erupted from the ground in front of the dragon.

  It wasn't a summoned block of ice. It was a sheer cliff face of blue-white, jagged fury, exploding upward with the sound of a mountain breaking. It caught the dragon's breath, freezing the gout of fire in mid-air into a bizarre sculpture of instant obsidian and steam. The ice wall slammed into the dragon's chest, knocking the beast onto its back with a ground-shaking thud. The dragon roared, thrashing, its claws scraping great gashes in the ice.

  Jacob landed lightly atop the glacial ridge. His face was serene, calm. He raised a hand, fingers splayed.

  The morning air, already cold, turned arctic. Frost rimed the grass. Finley's breath caught in his lungs. Above the prone dragon, the moisture in the air condensed, crystallized, and formed a hundred jagged spears of ice, each as long as a man is tall. They hung there, glinting in the first true rays of the sun.

  Jacob closed his fist.

  The spears fell.

  They slammed into the dragon with the sound of a thousand mirrors shattering. Scales cracked. The beast's roar became a pained screech. Black blood, steaming in the cold, spattered the melting ice.

  High above, the other dragons screamed in rage. They abandoned their strafing runs on the shield dome. The bronze one tucked its wings and dove, a living missile aimed at Jacob.

  A third mage stepped from the shadows of the smithy. This one was older, his robes a nondescript brown, his beard long and white. He held a gnarled staff of blackwood. He didn't look up at the diving dragon. He simply stamped the butt of his staff on the cobblestones.

  The ground beneath the diving dragon's path rippled. Not an earthquake, but a localized convulsion of gravity. The air itself thickened into a visible syrup of distorted force. The dragon hit it. Its incredible velocity didn't vanish; it was transmuted. Instead of plunging, the beast was whipped into a violent, corkscrewing spin, tumbling end over end across the sky, disoriented and shrieking.

  The old mage looked up, his eyes like chips of flint. "Offensive line!" he barked.

  From behind cottages, from the cover of wagons, three more robed figures emerged. One, a young man with fiery red hair, began weaving his hands in a complex pattern. The air around his fingers ignited into ribbons of pure, white-hot flame. He whipped his arms forward. The ribbons lashed out like serpents, wrapping around the wings of the tumbling bronze dragon. The beast bellowed as its flight membranes scorched and smoked.

  Another, a woman with a shaved head and eyes of stormy gray, raised her arms to the clear sky. Clouds congealed out of nothing, dark and bruise-purple, swirling directly above the village. Lightning, not yellow but a fierce, actinic blue, spiderwebbed within them. She pointed a finger.

  A bolt lanced down, not at a dragon, but at the third mage a stout, bald man who stood ready, his hands cupped as if holding a ball. The lightning struck his palms and… stayed. It coiled around his arms, a living, crackling energy. He gritted his teeth, muscles straining, and then threw the gathered energy skyward. It wasn't a bolt anymore; it was a continuous, roaring stream of plasma, a brilliant blue beam that swept across the sky, forcing the two remaining airborne dragons to bank and scatter or be sheared in half.

  For the first time, the dragons faltered. They hadn't expected this. They'd come to slaughter peasants, and instead they'd found an army.

  The battle became a cacophony of elemental fury. The shield mage still knelt, the dome flickering but holding, protecting the last stragglers Finley among them as they dashed for the trees. The obsidian dragon was hauling itself upright, bleeding from a dozen ice-wounds, its rage a palpable heat. The bronze one was beating its smoldering wings, trying to regain altitude. The other two wheeled high above, wary now of the storm below.

  Jacob leapt from his melting glacier, his blue robes streaming. He landed between the obsidian dragon and the village. "You are not welcome here," he said, his voice carrying over the din.

  The dragon responded by lunging, its maw gaping, aiming to swallow him whole.

  Jacob didn't move. He brought his hands together in a sharp clap.

  A shockwave of concussive cold exploded outward from the point of impact. It flash-froze the mud solid for twenty feet in every direction. It caught the dragon's head in a shell of instant ice, sealing its jaws shut. The beast staggered, blinded and choking.

  Finley reached the tree line. He turned, his back against a rough pine, gasping for air. He watched the red-haired mage send another whip of fire to coil around the bronze dragon's tail. He saw the old mage with the staff stomp again, and a sinkhole of whirling force opened beneath one of the high-flying dragons, sucking it downward until it beat its wings in frantic terror to escape. He saw lightning dance and ice shatter and the very air burn.

  Highglen was half in ruins. The northern end where Old Man Gerren's cottage had been, where Watcher Thom's tower had stood, where Widow Henson had lived her whole life was a smoking charnel house. But the southern end, under the flickering dome, stood. And the people were escaping. Marta was safe. Tav and his family were safe. A few hundred souls, hidden in the trees, watching their home die.

  How many didn't make it? Finley thought. How many friends? How many neighbors? How many people I'll never get to say goodbye to?

  The bronze dragon, enraged and injured, gave a piercing, ultrasonic cry. It was a signal. The two dragons still capable of clean flight broke off their attacks. They swooped down, not to fight, but to aid their grounded kin. One grabbed the ice-encased head of the obsidian dragon in its talons, heaving it into the sky with a mighty beat of its wings. The other flanked the bronze one, and together they turned east, flying away with ragged, pained wingbeats.

  The battle was over. As quickly as it had begun, the dragons retreated.

  Silence fell, broken only by the crackle of burning thatch, the hiss of molten stone, and the sobs of the survivors huddled at the forest's edge.

  Jacob lowered his hands. The old mage leaned heavily on his staff. The shield mage let out a long, shuddering breath, and the dome of distorted air vanished with a final pop. She collapsed forward onto her hands and knees, vomiting weakly into the grass.

  Finley stared at the smoldering wreckage of his home. At the mages gathering in the village square, weary and stained with soot and ichor. At the gray-robed woman who'd saved them all, now being helped to her feet by Jacob.

  Who are they? he wondered. Where did they come from? And why were they here, waiting in the forest before the dragons even arrived?

  The sun, now fully risen, shone on a world that had fundamentally changed. The carefree days the Market Days with Old Man Gerren's honey-cakes, the fishing lessons with Watcher Thom, the long afternoons working up the courage to talk to Marta were ash. This was the new reality: dragonfire from the sky, and the thin gray line of wizards standing between it and everything he knew.

  One of the mages the young man with the fire-red hair caught Finley watching. Their eyes met for a moment. The mage looked exhausted, haunted even. But he offered Finley a small, grim nod. A promise, maybe. Or an apology.

  Then he turned away, joining the others as they began the grim work of counting the dead.

  Finley slid down the trunk of the pine, sat hard on the forest floor, and wept.