Lowri’s fingers tremble, but she takes the vial, determined to show Tanith the respect she deserves. This gift is fabled, rare. For a moment, she is overcome by the gesture, for a drake to trust a witch, a natural enemy in many parts of the continent, including here. Forherto be the one who is trusted.
‘Why?’
She smiles sadly. ‘Because I believe in a better world. And because now I entrust this castle to your protection. My battle is elsewhere. Within myself, andwithout, in the skies,’ Tanith says softly. Then she turns for the window, the sunlight catching on iridescent scales where her skin is exposed. She walks forward, stepping up to the cushioned seat and thrusts back one of the windows. A stream of air, laced with brine and granite, rushes in.
Knowing what she is about to do, Lowri takes a half step towards her. ‘How do you know you won’t turn on your friends, your family?’
Tanith sighs as more scales glisten along her cheekbones. ‘I must trust that my head is stronger than my panic. I must believe in my mind, in myself. Tell him …’ She swallows. ‘Tell Joby I wish we’d had more time. Tell him I’m sorry I failed to find a way, that if I remember him, if somehow my soul remembers my human existence, I will find him again. We will begin as we should have done before, with hope.’
Then she faces the wind and sky, the wyvern in the distance … and leaps.
Lowri gasps, rushing for the window, gripping the ledge as she leans out. She searches for Tanith, scanning the sky, fearing her broken on the rocks below.
But then she hears an almighty rumble. And a bronze drake, fierce and beautiful, soars up and away into the clouds. Tanith roars with the force of a tempest and Lowri covers her ears, the depth of the drake’s bellow rattling through her entire being. Tears smart in Lowri’s eyes as she realises the sacrifice Tanith has just made for Ennor. For them all. Her human life sacrificed totransform back into her drake form, to battle their enemies and save them all. As she watches, the wyvern streak straight for Tanith, changing course as they dash towards her bronze flanks. She whistles low over the waves, striking the masts of three ships with her tail, before darting upwards, leading the batlike wyvern towards the eye of the sun.
And in that moment Lowri’s heart thuds with renewed hope. For there, far away, are more shapes moving closer. Drakes, flying towards Tanith. Drakes with riders on their backs.
‘Brielle,’ she breathes, tears spilling on to her cheeks. She grins, her heart filling with hope in her chest. ‘Ithasto be you. You found a coven in the Spines to help us. You’ve – you’ve returned.’
Another crack rocks the castle, throwing her back on to the window seat, the vial of Tanith’s blood dropping to the floor and rolling towards Amma. She rights herself quickly, sensing the wards fraying dangerously. Holes forming, the threads of Tresillian magic, Elena’s old magic, straining. She reaches for the vial, uncorks it and readies herself to imbibe the most potent catalyst she has ever taken.
She allows it to splash down her throat before stoppering it, in the hope that she can hand it to Dreska, Inesh and Brielle as well. ‘A small swallow, yes,’ she whispers to herself. ‘Not too much, the effects will be—’ She chokes suddenly, dropping to her knees, palms slamming the floor.
Lowri feelseverything.
The wooden floorboards creaking beneath her fingertips, the trees they once were, the bite of the axe that shaped them. The movement of people two floors below, the strain of an ankle of one of them – an old injury that twists each footfall. Then the whispered prayer to an old god on a woman’s tongue, the waves far below as they froth against the rocks, the sun in the sky as it warms the granite walls, the clang of a bell, the flat cadence of it as a rope is pulled, hitting always in the same place, it clatters and clatters …
Lowri feels the blood pumping in her veins, rich and full and powerful. She can barely contain it. Doesn’twantto contain it. She wants to pull apart the world, weave it as she wills it, pull down the sky, flood the land, rake the earth with her desires,burn it all down…
‘Steady there, witch,’ Amma murmurs. ‘Remember who you are.’
Lowri looks down at her fists, finding the lines of her veins inky and bulging, viscous and brimming with glorious magic. She looks at her reflection in the windows, onyx eyes peering back at her, a vicious smile pulling apart her lips. ‘I must control it,’ she rasps, forcing her lips into a thinner line, suppressing the wicked fickleness freckling her mind with pure possibility.
She goes to Amma and stands over her, taking her hands in hers. Amma places her translucent, barely-there fingers in Lowri’s, and all Lowri senses is thegentle burn of magic, of Elena Tresillian’s last protection of Elijah, and Ennor, the physical embodiment of the wards. She closes her eyes and allows her senses to guide her, to find the wards round the castle that are Amma, that are witch. She must reweave the tears … and then push the wards out, to encircle the town below as well. Rebuild them bigger than before, even as the other coven out there in the armada pushes and pulls them apart as she works.
Another shudder rocks the castle and Lowri feels her true self uncoiling, her magic awakening, the power of a Tresillian witch flowing through her like a river of ink. She’s aware now of the coven on those ships, the enemy witches, trying to smash the wards. Amma is dying before her, the wards stitched to her slowly unravelling. Lowri feeds them, coaxing the magic, reshaping and reforming the wards, allowing Amma to relinquish control to her through their joined hands. Then, as the tears are mended, she binds the wards to herself, as they were once bound to Elena. And she begins to push them out, inch by inch, desperate to save as many people in the town below as she can.
As Lowri feeds the wards, she senses more beings beyond them. The monsters Mira faces below the waves, and the ones Brielle and Tanith engage in the sky. With grim determination, she hopes that it will be enough.
That, combined, they can save Ennor.
the drake banks left, soaringin formation with its bloom as Brielle clings to the reins. The isles emerge below them like green jewels, a storm of clouds whipping up around them.
‘This is Mira’s work. A storm is coming,’ she calls to the others as she strains her eyes through the spelled goggles, assessing the terrain below. The armada are all dark shapes and blots, the Ennor fleet engaging them far fewer in number. The ruling-council forces have not yet breached the wards and landed upon the isle’s shores. She releases a ragged breath. She is not too late.
It seemed to take an age for them to train, to learn to ride drakeback. Even now, Dreska and Inesh ride behind two trueborn riders from the Spines. In truth, Brielle found herself not wanting to leave. For her, Lowri is family and Ennor is home, but in the Spines she found another home, somewhere to which she would want to return, again and again. A piece of her heart is now held somewhere in the ice and thick furs and wooden walls of the coven house.
But the coven had deemed them ready, and together they answered the call from the Fortunate Isles. They flew in formation, ready to defend a people ruled by leaders who want to control, not protect – just as they’d been, the peoples of the Spines, before they rebelled, before new rulers were elected.
A sharp whistle from the witch on her right, Skanni, signals the bloom to loosen formation and Brielle looks around, feeling the unease in the drake she rides. Wyvern. A swarm of them, their batlike bodies hovering on the air currents flowing over the armada, poised to strike. An air current most likely created by a witch. She glances at the vessels below, sweeping her gaze over the ships, and discerns a faint shimmer, then a matching one in the sea. A rival coven, then, doing the ruling council’s bidding. Here to help wipe out an island and bring the Fortunate Isles to heel.
She grimaces, the thought of her own kind turning on humans like this leaves bile coating the back of her throat. There is one person she is sure will be part of this armada: Captain Spencer Leggan. If she sees him, if they’re on opposing sides today, it will not end well for him – at her hand, or at an islander’s. He is on the list of those long past redemption, along with the ruling council themselves, and Captain Renshaw.
The drake beneath suddenly releases a low-pitched call and the bloom to either side of Brielle takes it up. She frowns, first checking on Dreska and Inesh, on drakes with other witches behind her, then she sees acreature soaring up from Ennor. Another drake. With no rider.
Brielle gasps in awe as the drake answers the call, bronze scales glinting, her body almost feline, sleek in the way that the male drakes are not. She slinks up into the clouds, opening her wings wide and sunlight glances off them, casting a web of rainbows out over the land and sea.
‘What a beauty …’ Brielle breathes. Then realisation hits her. It’s Tanith. The librarian of Ennor, giving up her human form, all her human memories, to fight the wyvern. To save Ennor. A lump forms in Brielle’s throat as she pats her drake’s side. Such sacrifice, such majesty. She narrows her gaze on the wyvern moving in to harry Tanith, and crouches low over her drake’s back. She won’t allow these wyvern to kill another she cares about.
