“It’s your duty to drag them with us. It’s youronlyduty.” Kaylin didn’t like the sound of that. “Kaylin—youfind Alsanis.”
What Kaylin wanted to know was thehow. Given that Barrani—Lords of the High Court—were demonstrably involved, she understood thewhy. People in power wanted more power, and people in power often felt that the rules that applied to others could be safely circumvented, rules being meant for the powerless.
But she understood, from one glance at Terrano, that Bellusdeo’s command would require the whole of his concentration.
“And you,” the Dragon said, not to Kaylin, but to the translucent familiar, “make sure we don’t get lost.”
Squawk.
“Yes, I know. I’m searching for the Barrani I now suspect are infested. Kaylin is searching for Alsanis. When we find one, I think we’ll find both.”
* * *
In the end, it was not Kaylin who found Alsanis. Nor was it Terrano. He was literally sweating—which the Barrani of Kaylin’s acquaintance did not do—with the effort of keeping his companions both together and in range, when he suddenly shouted.
“Sedarias, no!”
Sedarias, if ghostly and insubstantial, was not compliant and docile. She was angry, had been angry, since Terrano pulled her out of what was only metaphorically a cave, and she hadn’t gotten any calmer. Bellusdeo had taken to the air; Terrano had started to tell her to stay on the ground when the familiar had snapped at him.
After that, he had offered no further argument. He didn’t even have the energy to curse, so his expression had to speak for him. It spoke volumes, on the other hand. The cohort in their ghostly bodies walked—at speed and on air—alongside the fully aerial Dragon, until the moment Sedarias peeled away from the group. Allaron and Eddorian exchanged a telling glance; they looked to Terrano, miming action, before they followed her.
“Why,” he demanded, through gritted teeth, “did I even come here at all? Why am Itryingto rescue them?”
“They’re your family,” Kaylin replied. “Bellusdeo—”
“On it.” The Dragon immediately corrected her course and headed in the direction Sedarias had taken, which was, in this case, to the left and down.
* * *
Before they’d even caught sight of what could only loosely be called ground, Kaylin’s arms and legs began to tingle as her natural—and painful—allergy to magic flared up. She’d never quite figured out why some magic—say, Helen’s magic—didn’t cause that reaction, and at the moment, it didn’t matter.
“We’ve got magic incoming,” she told the Dragon.
Terrano had fallen utterly silent. Kaylin glanced at him, and then reached out and grabbed his arm; to her eye, he was becoming alarmingly translucent. “I need to go to where they are.”
“We’ve got no way of fishing you out, if you do.”
“Send your familiar.”
“The one whovery recentlytried to kill you in a rage?”
“...Good point.”
Hope bit her ear, but she didn’t feel it; the tingling across the surface of her skin—the skin that bore the marks of the Chosen—became painful. This was both good and bad. Good, in that they probably wanted to go in the direction of the magic, and bad because: pain. Sedarias was only barely visible, as were the two who had followed her; the rest of the cohort stayed with Terrano, but they were all turned as one toward their distant leader.
Kaylin wondered if Mandoran had elected to accompany Annarion because it meant he could get away from Sedarias—but she was always in his thoughts anyway. Literally.
As expected, Kaylin’s arms began to hurt; the sleeves of her shirt and the legs of her pants now caused acute pain if she so much as twitched. Given that she was riding a Dragon who wasn’t exactly placid and still, there was a lot more than just twitching. But as she started to count in Leontine—one of the first vocal exercises she’d learned, to the great amusement of Marcus’s kits—the ground appeared.
* * *
If she’d had any doubts about the speed at which Bellusdeo had been flying, they were shattered, because they couldn’t have approached ground any faster if they’d been falling. But the gold Dragon was not a fledgling, and she veered what felt like inches from the surface, changing her angle to avoid collision. Kaylin’s stomach still felt like it was hundreds of feet above them as the Dragon roared. And breathed.
Fire fanned out across the landscape, changing its color in a brief burst of orange and yellow. In the midst of those flames, a Barrani voice shouted a warning. It was a little late. Or maybe not; the fire had not consumed him and he clearly wasn’t screaming.
Sedarias gave the Dragon the side-eye, but nodded grimly when their eyes met. Terrano slid off the Dragon’s back—or tried. Kaylin’s familiar flew at his face, and his instinctive backward movement resettled him.
“I don’t think he wants you to leave. Whatever you’re doing for the cohort is working—for them. But I think he’s trying to tell you that the rest of us may need to move.”
