The Bear House (Preview)

PROLOGUE

THE Shadow Dragons were screaming. Their cries rose out of the dark, echoing over the peak of Mount Draccus.

Men had come for their eggs.

Quintin Wyvern crouched in the shadows of a rocky outcrop, watching the retrieval party approach the nests. The young prince had promised his father he would stay in the castle by his ailing mother's bedside. An outbreak of firelung had taken hold of the Kingdom of Dracogart, and Mother was just one of many fighting to survive. But that night, when the dragons began wailing, Lady Wyvern had squeezed Quintin's hand.

"Go," she told him, her breath ragged from the sickness. "Go and witness their sacrifice."

And so Quintin left her. He had followed hidden paths so as not to be seen, the mountain's breath thick and fetid and burning his lungs.

From his vantage point behind an outcrop of obsidian, Quin tin saw the lights of the city of Dracogart below, saw the men in impressive armor walking up the main road, their horses sidestepping with nerves.

The mother dragons hissed at their approach, plumes of smoke billowing from their gaping mouths in warning. Only three eggs had been laid that year, each one a precious gift from the stars. They would take a further two years to hatch.

One of them would never get that chance.

There was a chirrup at his back, and Quintin startled. He turned and saw a Shadow Dragon, a juvenile female, crouched on the stones above him. She blinked at him, her yellow eyes anxious. 

Umbra.

Quintin pressed a finger to his lips and turned back to watch the soldiers.

The mother dragons paced, encircling their nests. The light of the men's torches danced and glinted off their dark, stony scales. Quintin knew they would not give up an egg without a fight. Shadow Dragons did not abide the laws of men.

And yet the law demanded an egg all the same. Word had reached Dracogart a week ago from the Major: the Kingdom of the Shadow Dragon must surrender one egg. And that egg would pay for the firelung cure that could only be found in the land of their enemies, the Ring Highen.

"We can't!" his mother had said, fuming, when she had still been well enough to stand. "There has to be another way!" Chancellor Furia, King Wyvern's most trusted advisor, had agreed— even though Furia and Queen Wyvern rarely agreed on anything. "Sire, it is too sinful even to think of."

The eggs of the Shadow Dragon were sacred. Blessings from the holy stars themselves. How could Dracogart allow anyone to take what had been given by the stars?

"The Major was chosen to be Major because he is favored by the stars," King Wyvern told them. "If the Major believes this is the way to save our people, then we must trust that he is right."

Save the people, yes. And more importantly now, thought Quintin, save Mother. Her condition was worsening by the hour. But still, he felt a nervousness in his gut. What if Father was wrong to allow this?

Umbra chirruped again, as if she could read his thoughts.

Quintin looked beyond Dracogart's rocky valley, over which the mountain's shadow fell—Father was out there, somewhere, hunting with his mount Draco, the largest dragon alive, the dragon-king of the Shadow Dragons. When the Major's men had left the castle for the mountain path to retrieve the egg, Father had left with Draco— the king of dragons would be angry to hear his wives so distressed, he'd said.

But Quintin knew the truth. Seeing the Major's men take an egg from the Shadow Dragons' nest was too painful for even his father to bear.

There were shouts from the men in armor, and when Quintin looked, one had approached the edge of the nest. The man held a spear, its tip fitted with a fat, dripping hearth weasel— as if a treat would be enough to trade a dragon for her child.

One of the mother dragons slunk toward him, a threatening hiss venting from her smoking maw. The fins at the edge of her jaw fluttered. She was eager to crunch bone.

"Courage, men!" shouted someone. "Hold!" cried another. And still more were roaring orders as the man in armor inched closer to the dragon.

Quintin held his breath. The young soldier stepped across the line on the ground where the rock had been scorched by dragon breath—the threshold of the nest.

"Too close," Quintin whispered.

The mother dragons reared up, all of them screaming in unison, black wings flapping. The foremost dragon lunged, her powerful jaws snapping with a thunderous clap just short of the young man's belly.

The dragons' screams built on one another, the noise folding onto itself, lifting with a ferocious desperation. They were screaming for Draco.

Draco, whose size and power would protect them all. Draco, their king.

Quintin's eyes burned with tears. Draco was with his father. Draco would not save them.

And then a roar exploded from somewhere below the mountain. It was so loud and resonant, it was as if the earth itself had opened up. Draco?

No. This roar was earthbound. Not of the sky.

Quintin heard Umbra screech and skitter away, scurrying back to her family, back into a nest farther up the mountain. She was only a little dragon, after all, even if she was Draco's daughter.

The mother dragons' mood shifted, their hissing and smoking replaced by a quiet, nervous chirping, tiny sparks spitting from the sides of their mouths. Quintin had never seen Shadow Dragons look like that—tails wrapped close to their sides, bellies pressed low to the ground, all huddled close together. They were frightened. Frightened of what was making its way up the mountain road.

A bear.

A bear unlike any Quintin had ever seen before.

The hulking beast stood heads above the horses, her girth so wide it took up the entire path. Her long, grizzled fur looked like fire, a bright amber color that gleamed in the torchlight. Her jaws looked powerful enough to crush iron, her paws big enough to shake the earth. There was no mistaking it—a Hemoth Bear.

She was Mizar. The mightiest creature in all of the Bear Highen. And beside her stood a man, just as hulking and grizzled as she. The Bear Major himself: Jasper Lourdes.

They approached the nest, the dragons clustered together in a quaking mass. Mizar the Hemoth chuffed and snorted, her massive footfalls causing the very earth to shake.

Quintin watched as the Major placed a hand on the Hemoth's flank and the bear stopped. The Major continued to approach and, without hesitation, stepped over the nest's threshold. The dragons did not make a sound. He picked his way over rocks and boulders until he was standing above an egg, its black shell speckled with pinpricks of warm light.

One of the mothers, the one who had snapped at the soldier, whined with alarm, and the Hemoth roared again, dislodging rock and stone from the mountainside and sending it tumbling down. Quintin threw his hands over his head to protect himself from the stony shower; dust powdered his shoulders.

When the rumble faded to nothing, the dragons were silent again. Major Jasper Lourdes bent down to the egg and took it gently in his hands.

Quintin longed to know how it felt. Warm, he imagined. Like the stones that lined the hearth fires in the castle.

Finally, delicately, the High King of the Bear Highen fit the egg into the crook of his arm, as if cradling a baby, and bowed to the frightened flock of dragons.

And just as suddenly as they'd arrived, the Major and the Hemoth left, disappearing down the mountain road with the Major's soldiers following behind.

Quintin was alone with the Shadow Dragons, trembling with his awe of the Hemoth Bear, and with fear and sadness for the egg the men had taken with them—the Shadow Dragon that would never be.