I want her again. It’s going to have to wait, since there are more pressing matters right now, like getting to safety and keeping an eye out for unsavories. There are plenty of things out here that can kill in less than a heartbeat, without you seeing them coming.
Isla moves a little ahead of me. I note how she moves with the horse rather than against him, her body finding the rhythm of his gait.
She catches me looking. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” I turn my eyes forward.
But I look again a few minutes later. I can’t seem to stop myself.
Her blond hair has come loose from its braid. Her cheeks are flushed from the ride, her lips parted as she breathes. The gray light of the deadlands does nothing to diminish her. If anything, she burns brighter against the dullness of this forsaken landscape. She is warmth in a world that has forgotten what it feels like.
I think about what happened between us in the boulders. The taste of her. The sounds she made. The way she looked at me afterward, open and unguarded, without expectation or demand.
I’ve been with other females. None of them made me feel the way she does. I am sure that it is because I haven’t been with a female in many summers.
I force my attention back to the terrain ahead. We press on, the earth squelching beneath our horses’ hooves. There is nothing but the odd tuft of grass, followed by more mud and the occasional dead tree.
I’m about to suggest we rest the horses when a shadow falls over us.
Not the kind cast by a cloud. This is larger. Darker. Moving fast. Then dark befalls us. It’s unnatural.
Nox breaks stride. His head flies up, and he dances sideways. I pull the reins, sitting deep to keep him from bolting. He whinnies in fear, his eyes rolling.
Jack gives one small jump and settles, his ears swiveling upward.
I look up too.
My stomach drops.
The sky above us is full of dragons.
Isla gasps.
Easily two hundred dragons fly in a loose formation above us. They’re enormous, their wings spanning wider than the tallest trees that once grew in these lands. Some have scales of black, while others are green. There are a scant few who are a deep burnished gold. Their wings beat in great, sweeping motions that stir the air below into gusts strong enough to flatten the dead grass around us.
They fly low. Close enough that I can make out the ridges along their spines, the curve of their talons, the slit-pupiled eyes that scan the ground beneath them. Close enough that the wind from their passage buffets us like a gale. Nox screams and rears, his front legs striking the air. I grip with my legs and lean forward, fighting to bring him back down.
“Goddess help us!” Isla shouts. Her hair is wild, her eyes wide as she stares upward. Jack stirs and is restless but doesn’t try to bolt…not yet. “What are they doing here?” she turns panicked eyes on me.
They’re on their way to the Shadow Court.
Toward Snow.
“It’s the Vashren,” I say.
Nox is still fighting me. I use my legs, my seat, my voice, every scrap of horsemanship I possess to keep him from bolting. He tosses his head, foam flying from his bit, and spins a tight circle before I bring him to a shuddering halt.
“The what?” Isla asks, still looking upward at the great beasts.
“The shifterfae,” I tell her. “It’s them.” My voice is deep and choked.
Isla stares at me. “I thought that shifterfae were a myth.” She shakes her head, her expression caught between wonder and fear. “My mother told me tales about them when I was little. Stories at bedtime that scared me senseless. They supposedly live on the most southern border of the kingdom, far away from everyone and everything.” She looks back up at the sky, where the last of the dragon formation is passing overhead, their shadows dragging across the dead earth. “They can’t be real.”
“Well, they are, and they’re here.”
“My mother told me that they have never left their lands.”
“I wish that were true.” Something hot and old twists in my gut. An anger I’ve carried since I was a boy of ten, standing in the throne room with my parents’ blood still wet on the floor. “I am sure that they had my parents assassinated.”
