The Dragon Slayer's Queen
She’d rolled, reached, grabbed Bella by the hair, and jerked her up and away.
And then the air changed, the taste of it going iron-rich—outside the shattered glass, the world had gone dark as ink.
A white blaze struck the stone floor. Through the black dust, a woman in a flowing black dress stood, her hands empty, her hair a curtain of red silk.
She smiled at Mariah, and it was the precise inverse of the Queen’s: cold, blunt, and utterly without hope. “Enough,” she said, and in a heartbeat, every candle in the great hall died.