If you can understand me,I said,then rip them from the sky.I let out a guttural scream as power seemed to flow in me and through me as the wind responded. It pulled energy from me so hard and fast that I gasped for breath, but I would have given everything to save Shazeera.
All the wind that flowed around me like an inescapablewhirlpool burst toward the eagle and its rider. The pole with its noose was wrenched from the rider’s hand, and the eagle was blown back so fiercely that its wings bent at severe angles.
With a tremendous shriek, it somersaulted through the air before finally crashing to the ground in a heap behind us. The ground shook when the eagle landed, and a wave of dust and debris rose in its wake. For an instant I thought I saw the rider wrenched from the saddle, his weapon spinning away, before the dust swallowed them both.
As Shazeera carried us far away from the scene of destruction, I watched the grounded eagle and rider for any sign of movement.
But there was none.
3
Talon
They said your life flashed before your eyes before you died. And maybe I just wasn’t close enough to being dead yet, but all my mind chose to show me was the moment the girl with the staggeringly arresting features had called death upon us from the sky. Through my connection with Neo, I could see her in perfect clarity. The image of her was still burned into my retinas, dark-framed eyes blazing with fierce determination, full lips parted, chest heaving. She was as beautiful and terrible as the sudden storm she had conjured. Neo could handle powerful wind gusts that tossed smaller birds around like leaves, but he had been like a chick in storm-churned waters. Completely helpless.
Neo. Before we’d crashed, there’d been a tangle of wings and talons and feathers, and my heart turned to lead in my chest at the thought that he might have snapped his neck. It was a miracle I hadn’t. But somehow, I could move my fingers and my toes, then my arms and my legs, though at least two of my ribs were fractured. As I pushed aside the cloudiness in my mind and came more fully to consciousness, I could see why I was still in onepiece. Neo had broken my fall. Even now, I rested on one of his golden-brown wings, as though he’d grabbed hold of me as we crashed. He may have, but everything happened so fast that it was hard to recall clearly.
One second, we’d been closing in on the girl, and the next, we were blown out of the sky like we’d been sucked into a cyclone. I didn’t know how, but I knew the wind had come from the girl. I’d been flying since I was a baby, and I’d encountered every type of wind. Updrafts, currents, gusts, even wind powerful enough to force Neo to descend to avoid it. But never had I experienced wind that sudden when we were so close to the ground.
I thought again of the girl, her eyes boring into mine, turning from the terror of someone who knew she wasn’t skilled enough to save herself to steely determination. Had it all been a trick? Had she just been drawing me closer to use that strange power on me? The whole thing flashed rapidly through my mind: the girl’s eyes, one slender arm outstretched—not toward me, but toward the sky itself—the resulting wind, a force so powerful it ripped through all my senses, tearing at my eyes, howling in my ears, stealing the breath from my lungs.
Powerful enough to knock a giant eagle right out of the sky.
Neo,I called in my mind, but there was only darkness at the other end of our bond, even more than when he was asleep. His chest rose and fell, so at least he was still breathing. Images of how hard he had crashed to the ground—the earth itself shaking—flashed through my mind. What if he had been injured so badly he never woke up?
After many minutes of this, I finally felt a stirring in his mind, the darkness slowly growing lighter, like the first hints of sunlight at dawn. As he swam closer to consciousness, a red haze joined the light, and I frowned as I recognized it as the haze of pain.
Neo?
I’m awake.He slowly opened his eyes.But I wish I weren’t.
Can you move your wings?
He lifted the left gingerly with no problem besides stiffness, but the right caused him to shriek so suddenly that I grabbed hold of his wing—gently—and pushed it back down.
It’s broken,he said when the pain had faded enough that he could think again.
My mind raced toward a solution to the problem at hand. Corbin and Phoenix, the eagle and rider pair we had flown a formation with, had hopefully been able to defeat the Children of Earth warriors they had encountered. I glanced up at the position of the sun in the sky, and my mouth went dry. We must have been knocked out for hours now. If Corbin and Phoenix had won their battle, they would have come for us already.
A broken wing meant we would have to walk until we were noticed by another eagle and rider scouting, and that could take days—best-case scenario. Worst was that we’d have to wait for Neo’s wing to heal, which could take two to three weeks. And we were at least one hundred miles deep into enemy territory. Luckily, hollow bones meant fast healing. More than anything, though, I needed to get word to the emperor about this girl.
Her power could change everything.
The emperor will send someone to look for us,Neo said when he caught hold of the thoughts flying through my mind.
I’m just glad you’re alive.I laid my hand on his uninjured wing.We should make for the foothills for food and shelter. The last thing I want to do is sleep here on the plains, exposed.
I agree on all counts.
Having a goal gave me something to focus on other than the fact that I had failed my mission for the first time in my life.While Eagle Rider scouts engaged the queen’s guards, I had been sent to capture the Queen of All Queens. We had flown to the exact coordinates the sorcerer had provided, but it wasn’t the queen we found there.
Who was she? Not the queen, for she was too young. But she had a black headdress that only the royals wore. The First Daughter, then? Had the Children of Earth somehow kept this power hidden? And if so, what was their strategy behind it?
I turned over the possibilities in my mind as the tall prairie grass reached up to my thighs, hindering each step. Even Neo, who towered over me, struggled through the thick blades. In the distance, perhaps only a few miles, stood the tree line. This was no doubt where that girl and her horse had been headed. Beyond it rose the Angora Mountains, their silvery outlines just visible against the horizon.
Neo tried to hide it from me, but we were connected more than brothers who’d shared a womb; I felt the waves of pain crashing over him with every step. An eagle wasn’t particularly fast while walking, but because of his injury, our progress was achingly slow. If any of the Children found us here, or worse, if the girl with the power over the wind returned with reinforcements, we’d be killed as easily as pigs for slaughter.
I don’t appreciate being compared to a pig,Neo said huffily.I still have talons and a sharp beak, and you have all your weapons. That’s hardly helpless.
