“An excellent question. One I came out here to get an answer to. I’d be able to get one more easily without you squawking at me.”
Heat rushed to Elara’s cheeks.Squawking?She’d been perfectly calm, considering the circumstances. No other Iryan would be so calm this close to a dragon. The last time she’d seen one up close, it had been trying to murder her sister.
But Signey didn’t seem interested in any retort she could cobble together. She’d already turned back to the dragon and was running her hand up and down her snout and speaking to her gently. “I know you’ve been restless all day. I’ve felt it. But you can’t just show up here like this. You have to go back before someone else sees you, or worse, before—”
“I cannot return there yet,” said a voice. That voice.“Not until I have my Wingleader.”
The dragon lifted her head to stare directly at Elara, and, though her mouth hadn’t moved, Elara knew without question that the voice echoing in her head—now, inside, and in the city center—had come from the dragon. And she knew without question that she shouldn’t have been able to understand her at all, no matter what language the beast was speaking.
What washappeningto her?
What washappening?
“She’s here,” the dragon said.“It’s her.”
“Her?” Signey asked as though Elara were a disease she’d just been diagnosed with. Her downturned red-painted lips looked like an open wound. “But she’s Iryan.”
“These borders you’ve erected between your countries don’t matter to the bond. It’s her. At long last.”
Something about the dragon’s eyes made the tugging sensation in Elara’s stomach erupt back into being. Before she knew it, she was stepping forward, any fear she felt at the sight of a creature so otherworldly and enormous dissolving on the wind. Though the dragon’s face didn’t support expressions the way Elara traditionally understood them, her eyes seemed to be sparkling with happiness. Her joy was contagious.
Elara reached a hand toward her snout, but her wrist was snatched out of the air.
“What are you doing?” Signey snapped. “You can’t just touch another person’s dragon.”
This ismydragon, Elara almost snapped back, but the thought paralyzed her. She couldn’t have a dragon. She didn’t evenwanta dragon. She had only wanted to answer this call, and, if it was leading her to a dragon, then she wanted to be set free. Signey’s fingers were tight but warm against her skin, distracting her enough to gather her thoughts.
What had she been about to do?
“Signey,” said the dragon.“You know what must be done.”
“There must be some mistake.” Now Signey sounded frustrated, her grip on Elara loosening. “This isn’t what… She’sIryan. We can’t have an Iryan Rider!”
“Rider? I’m not aRider. I don’t want this,” Elara said. Now shewassquawking, her voice several octaves higher than usual, her words shaking on their way out, in time with her racing heart. “I don’t—I don’t. What’s going on? I don’t want this, either! Whatever ‘this’ is, I don’twantit!”
Zephyra sighed, another column of smoke winding out of her nostrils into the open air. Fear lanced through Elara, not at the sight but at the name that had appeared in her mind as if it had always been there. Sheknewwith startling certainty that the dragon’s name was Zephyra, but how could she? What was happening to her?“Come.”
Elara went. Against every urge in her body, she went, her feet moving with none of the hesitancies or doubts that always screamed within her mind. This time, Signey didn’t stop her as she reached out to press her palm against Zephyra’s scaly hide.
Fire raced through her body, fierce and blistering. A scream cut through the silence of the night, and it wasn’t until Elara’s jaw began to ache that she realized it was coming from her. She had assumed that joining the Sky Battalion would mean that she would one day die by dragonfire, but she hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. Or like this.
This wasexcruciating.
“Breathe!” Signey shouted. “Reach out to her! Assert your control!”
Control over what?Elara wanted to ask, but her mouth was no longer her own.
Images flashed before her eyes, memories that didn’t belong to her. She saw endless fields of flames and lava, mountains belching smoke into an ashy sky. She saw a dark-haired older woman who looked remarkably like Signey, pressing a young Signey’shand against the scaled egg of a dragon. She saw herself hurtling through the clouds, the sky little more than a blanket for her to roll in and gravity a suggestion that she could ignore. She felt rage. She felt ecstasy. She felt despair. She felt a keen desire to prove herself.
She felt everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere.
She felt shattered and whole.
Her knees hit the ground, pain radiating through her legs and dragging her mind above the onslaught.Assert your control. Reach out to her.
Breathe.
She inhaled the scent of brimstone and ash.
