The smiths are free. The mountain isn't. And every ally she has is about to land on her doorstep.
Selina came back to Wydra to find her people's hands unshackled and their forges cold. The smiths were freed in the coordinated strike — she felt it through the bond, Citrine's golden fire melting the spelled silver from every wrist without touching the skin beneath. Within minutes her people were forging again, for themselves, the way Wydrian smiths have always forged: with the patience of those who understand that iron remembers where it came from, and that a good smith's only job is to help it become what it was always going to be next.But the ore veins are still under Citadel guard. The mountain passes are held. And without the mountain, every forge in the valley runs cold within weeks.
Selina has no intention of taking the mountain by force. She has Citrine's precision, fifteen years of training, and a smith's understanding of something the Citadel overseers will never grasp: inferior technique produces inferior iron. What leaves the mountain can look identical to finished product and fail on the fourth voyage. She does not need to fight Madrid's fleet. She needs to help it remember what it was before it was his.
But Wydra is about to become something more than one province's liberation. The war has followed the army to the coast, the fleet is sailing, and every ally the resistance has built across eight years and ten provinces is converging on the forge mountain. They are coming by dragon and by ship and on foot and through passages beneath the earth, and they are bringing everything they have left, because what comes next requires all of it.
The last reunion. The hardest reckoning. The crossing that cannot be undone.
Marco -- Selina's counterpart, the Wydrian male heartbearer who has been on the wrong side of a fifteen-year-old decision -- is sitting in an ore cave with his dragon pressed against the mountain she was hatched in, and he is not leaving. The only question is which way he is facing when the time comes.
Two twins who chose opposite paths at the moment the choice was taken from them are about to run out of mountain to put between themselves and each other.
A bond that has been building across four books, across captivity and grief and loss and the long patience of a dragon who refused to stop believing in the person on the other end of it, is about to complete.
And on the eve of the crossing, on a forge ledge above the valley with a piece of raw iron between them, a fire elemental and a golden dragon will finally speak the same language -- and understand what fire has always been for.
Heart of Wydra is the eleventh book in The Dragon Saga -- the epic fantasy series where every bond is a choice, every choice has a price, and the smiths are the ones who finish it.
Genre: Fantasy