She hoped, hell, evenshewas almost ready to pray, that nothing had gone wrong. And if something had happened to her steed along the way, she’d turn Jaxon and Markam inside out.
Soon.
They would come soon.
“She lies,” the woman on the far side of the wagon scoffed. “The Devil wouldn’t be caught alive, and forced into a prison wagon.”
“The Devil?” another asked.
The woman nodded. “Heard tell of it just before they picked me up in Rothollow. The Devil stole the king’s sword!” A few nods of approval followed. The woman coughed and glanced at Sonara with hollow eyes. “But this girl is just a stray sea urchin from the south. Nothing more.”
Sonara barked out a laugh at the insult. If she wasn’t chained, she would show the woman exactly what asea urchin’ssting felt like. But she was weaponless. She may as well have been naked without her sword.
The Devil of the Deadlands,Sonara thought.Doomed to die.
If her troupe really had forgotten her, she’d haunt them from the afterlife.
She wasn’t truly afraid. And yet, she couldn’t help the image that slid into her mind at the thought of a final death. A quest unfinished.
A face that materialized, long removed from her life, butneverforgotten.
The face looked like hers, but it was older. Male, and handsome, with a square jaw and perfect Soreian blue eyes and hair to match.
If she died in the north, she’d lose all chance of finding her brother again. Though sometimes, she wondered if Soahm was already dead.
“What if she’s not lying?” the other prisoner asked. Sonara blinked, and Soahm’s face faded from existence, replaced by the man before her that continued smiling in the shadows. “You say you are the Devil?”
Sonara nodded. “I very well could be.”
“Alright then, Blue. Prove it.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but words failed her.
For outside the wagon, something had changed.
Sonara cocked her head to listen. Beyond the wind, beyond the breathing of her companions… the powerful beat of widespread wings cutting through the sky. A sharp screech echoed from afar.
The steeds hauling the caravan whinnied, and everything shifted. Indeed, beyond the barred window, the escorts turned in their saddles, then began to shout as they saw something in the sky.
The word echoed across the caravan, from one escort’s mouth to another’s, until it reached the front driver.
“Wyvern!”
The whip sounded. The wagons began to speed up. Sonara’s head smacked against the person next to her, so hard she sucked in a painful breath. And as she did, her curse snapped loose.
Come back,she begged, but she already knew it would refuse.
Out the wagon window it went, spiraling into the desert as it preyed on everything in sight. She sensed the steeds hauling the whole caravan, their fearsticky and dark as tar on the tongueas the screech in the sky grew louder.
She sensed the corpses in the other wagons, bloated and decaying in the heat.
She sensed the salty tears on someone’s face. The sweat on tightly pressed together bodies, on ruined wrists beneath thick diamond manacles.
Her head throbbed like someone had taken a hammer to it. Her throat burned like she’d contracted a sudden illness.
Still, the steeds tore across the sand, desperately trying to outrun the source of the wingbeats. Dust rose from the wheels, clouding the barred windows, the view of the escorts and their mounts.
“What’s out there?” a prisoner asked. “Why are we speeding up?”
