Swamped by an overwhelming exhaustion, she thought the steady working of Alfie’s wings might have lulled her to sleep, if the sky hadn’t exploded beneath them.
Everything happened all at once.
A sound like cloth ripping.
A sudden pressure in her ears, a sharp prickling of her skin.
Alfie flooded the bond with panic.
A triumphant drake cry split the sky, and it didn’t belong to a cold-drake.
Alfie juddered, swerved, and them tumbled through the sky, wings flapping wildly. She rolled over upside down, just missing a bright, hot gout of flame, and Tessa fell out of the saddle.
She saw swirling clouds, and flashing blue wedges of sky; saw Alfie’s white, leathern wings fighting for purchase in midair. Alfie cried out in dismay. And Tessa fell.
She screamed.
Rune screamed, because he fell, too.
Their tethers caught them around the waist.Snatchedat them. Tessa felt like her body halted, but her insides did not, and that they slammed up against her bones, a painful, allover shock.She bit her tongue and tasted blood; her vision bloomed with white flowers, and she thought she might faint.
She collided with Rune, their shoulders slamming into one another. What little breath that remained in her lungs was forced out by the impact.
“Oof!” Rune grunted, and pawed at her shoulder, tried to find purchase on her cloak and succeeded only in half-strangling her.
Then her tether snapped.
She heard it. A littlecrackof the leather breaking.
She fell again, and this time, there would be no stopping.
“TESSA!” Rune bellowed.
She looked up as she fell, and she saw Alfie roll upright and begin to furiously beat her wings; saw Rune clinging to the side of the saddle, his eyes huge, his mouth open. She would never forget the horror and pain on his face in that moment for as long as she lived—which wouldn’t be long.
Alfie flooded the bond with panic. Percy’s anguish joined hers, and Valgrind’s, too. She saw them gathering themselves, ready to dive, ready to come after her.
She didn’t think they’d be fast enough.
The clouds looked like thick, fluffy quilts, but they were made of nothing so substantial, and they didn’t slow her descent, only blinded her.
Tessa closed her eyes, and prayed that it would end quickly. That she would strike a mountaintop, rather than fall, and fall, and fall all the way down to the ground.
She heard a familiar sound, the great crackle and snap of wings striking through air, before she landed. It was a hard landing; it jostled her; she gasped, and her eyes snapped open.
But she wasn’t dead.
Wasn’t smeared like a flicked bug on the side of a mountain.
No, it was much worse than that. When she turned her head, she saw a pale, hard face inside a golden helmet. An armored arm tightened around her waist, pinning her in place across the saddle of the Sel dragon rider.
The beast under them was massive, and purple, and it swung its great head around at its master’s tug on the reins, and dove down deeper through the cloud layer.
She’d been captured, she realized. By a Sel.
That was when she fainted.
13
