Sweat gathered on Elara’s skin. Her body felt as if it were on fire.
Finish her, niece, Aunt Vittoria crooned inside her head.
Not yet, Elara replied. If she attacked now, Cherry would just throw up a shield of her own. Her ex had quick instincts, but she was bad at multitasking; she could block an attack, but she’d leave herself open to a counterattack. In that time, Elara could take her down, a fight won in three moves. But she knew she could do it in two. She could do better, and wasn’t that the goal? To be thebest?
She wouldn’t get into the Iryan Military Forces—into the aerial branch called the Sky Battalion—if she wasn’t.
Beneath her feet, the ground shook as if an earthquake were hitting Deadegg, but Elara remembered this feeling too well to look away. Cherry had no such focus; she never did. As she’d done every time before, she allowed herself to get distracted by what was happening on the street.
Andthatwas when Elara attacked.
She swung the ball of energy like a cricket bat. Cherry was blasted off her feet. Elara drew on Aunt Vittoria’s magic one last time to soften the ground, saving Cherry from a painful landing. Then she purged the astral from her body and gasped like a drowning man rising above the waves.
Victory in only two moves. She was improving.
“Every time,” Cherry complained as Elara joined everyone in gathering around her. “That one wasn’t even my fault!”
“Nice job, El,” Wayne Pryor said as Aisha helped Cherry sit up. “Did you catch the commotion, though? The queen has arrived.”
Elara had ridden in enough of Queen Aveline’s fancy coaches to know what it sounded like when the horses cantered over the intermittently paved Deadegg streets. It had been impressive the first couple of times, but now she just associated the rumbling sound with at least a full day of her sister, Faron, being in a bad mood.
“Do you guys have to leave?” Aisha asked. Her eyes flicked over Elara’s shoulder to where Reeve Warwick was sitting in the shade of a guinep tree, buried between the pages of his latest book. As if he could sense the sudden attention, he glanced up, but whatever he saw in their expressions apparently wasn’t more interesting than what he was reading.
This field, with its overgrown grass, wilted wooden fence, and fallen barbed wire, had once been part of a farm. But many of thefarms in Deadegg had gone under, leaving fields like this as their graveyards. As sad as they looked, these lots were better off than the blackened patches of land that had been ravaged by dragonfire, charred soil that could never again yield new life, livelihoods that had been destroyed in an instant. At least here she could still dream that, in a few more years, this field would transform into something new.
Besides, Elara liked to spar here because it was only about a ten-minute walk from her house, so she could get home quickly when she needed to. Today, she didn’t need to. She may have fought every battle alongside her sister, a soldier in theory though never in rank, but Elara was not the Childe Empyrean. The queen was never in Deadegg for her.
“No,” she answered, and left it at that. “Cherry, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.Humiliated, but fine.”
Cherry was on her feet now, her plump lower lip curled into an exaggerated pout. A year ago, Elara would have taken this as an invitation to sway forward and nibble at that lip, to wrap an arm around that narrow waist and pull their bodies together, to press a kiss to the little freckle on Cherry’s throat until she forgot to be upset by her defeat. She didn’t miss Cherry, but she missed that playful closeness. It had been a nice distraction from the doubts forever screaming in her head.
“Let’s take a break,” Elara suggested. “Who wants to go get us some juice?”
One quick hand game of sun moon stars later, Wayne was jumping the fence and jogging down the sidewalk to find a cart. Elara headed over to Reeve, who paused to hold his place in the book with a blade of grass before he set it aside. Her smile widened when he pulled a bottle of water from his bag.
“I love you themost,” she told him after she’d downed half of it.
“We both know that’s not true,” he drawled, “but I’ll take it.”
Reeve was the picture of relaxation here, his back resting against the curved bark and his legs crossed at the ankles. It was a side of him that Elara hadn’t always had access to. She had met him when he’d stumbled into the Iryan war camp at thirteen years old, and even that almost hadn’t happened; the soldiers had been ready to kill him for somehow evading the scoutsandthe perimeter guard. He’d been shaking then, rolled papers stolen from his father’s war room gathered to his chest as he’d gasped in broken patois, “I need—I need to talk to the queen!”
But he was Langlish, and the son of Commander Gavriel Warwick, the leader of the Langlish Empire. Reeve was now allowed, by royal decree, to live in San Irie, but it was only so he wouldn’t be murdered for treason by his own people. As far as friends went, he had her, and by extension he had her neighbors Aisha, Cherry, and Wayne. As far as family went, he’d been taken in by the otherwise childless Hanlons, and they seemed to treat him well enough.
Everyoneelsein and out of the town line took one look at Reeve’s silver dragon’s-eye pendant or heard him speak patois with his persistent Langlish accent, and they held him personally responsible for everything the Langlish Empire had done to their island. Elara was glad to see him this loose, this open, this calm, but it made her sad, too.
Reeve had betrayed everything he’d known to be an enemy of two countries.
She dropped down next to him in the shade, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. “It’shot!”
“Is it?” Reeve asked with faux surprise. “On an island in the middle of the Ember Sea?”
Elara jabbed him with her elbow as the rest of the group made their way over. Instead of juice boxes, they were each holding a different flavor of freeze pop; Elara was handed a pineapple one and Reeve received the last cream soda. Because she was a good friend, she didn’t complain.
“Can you believe that by this time next week at least one of us might be in the Sky Battalion?” Wayne asked, sitting in front of them. He shoved his dark curls away from his forehead, but they immediately tumbled back over his damp skin. Cherry’s head rested on his shoulder, her eyes half-lidded, her skirts lifted to bare her shins to the mild breeze. “Or, even better, we could be chosen to pilot Valor.”
“Ican’t believe they commissioned a new drake at all,” said Aisha, using her freeze pop to cool the back of her neck. “It’s been years. Not since—which one was it?”
