Oops,Mak replied with a wince down our link. I kept close to his back as he angled himself around to face the ruby, blasting it with fire so hot it made my skin tingle.Are you hurt?
“By sheer fluke, no.”
Dahab surged up and carved the sharp talon at the tip of his golden wing across the belly of the ruby, making it falter mid-air. At the same time, Zaarib threw out a hand, a battering ram that shoved back the other wyverns. We were outnumbered by twenty to two even now, but if I took out the fae controlling them, would they simply fall from the sky?
I spiked their minds with the sharp slice of control magic that made me a villain to so many and again found those threads of someone else’s power.
Follow them,the lightning soul instructed, as if I hadn’t thought of that.
I didn’t argue, didn’t have the time. This battle was fast and messy and deadly if I slipped even once. I sent my power zipping down the threads of command, surprised when they led deep into the mountains we’d come from, rather than the foot soldiers below. And further. And further.
Too far for me to reach, disappearing deep into central Ithanys.
To command wyverns from that distance… they were far more powerful than I was. A chill made me shudder.
Worry about that later,the lightning soul.Keep following them. We need to know where they’re hiding.
Wyfell was the obvious answer, but the threads went through sand and long grass and over hills… to Morysen. Where I’d sent my wife.
A shrill wyvern cry came behind us, and I exhaled a hard breath. Nabil and Buchra had returned, along with members of Daurith’s guard. I made sure to avoid their path as lightning burned an icy path through me and a dark cloud split, thunder rocking the ground moments before it struck three wyverns, splitting into deadly branches.
“It’s too precise,” Zaarib yelled as Dahab raced past us to intercept a black-eyed wyvern. “That’s no ordinary storm.”
“The lightning soul,” Nabil shouted when he reached us; I flinched in my seat atop Mak. “It’s helping us. Why?”
“Who cares?” Zaarib flattened himself to Dahab’s back when a dark navy wyvern flew above him, its barbed tail missing him by a hair. “Just avoid—”
Fire erupted from the mouth of the navy wyvern, the same crimson fire that had been loaded into the trebuchet, but something about it was wrong in a way that made me shrink back. Its core was pure, void black. Unnatural fire.
“Nabil!” I roared, throwing my weight on Mak to angle us across the sky, and he responded to my panic with fearsome wingbeats and a cry of warning.
Two of Daurith’s guard sped to reach him, closer than Zaarib and me. As we soared across the sky, I had just enough time to exhale a hard gust of air when the stalwart, aging grey wyvern knocked Buchra out of the path of fire, just enough time for a second of relief—and then that unnatural crimson fire hit the old grey wyvern and its fierce-scowled female rider.
It should have warped and mangled skin, should have melted muscle, leaving scars the wyvern would have to carry for its long life.
The black core hit scale and wing and horns and—the Daurith rider was incinerated where she sat. Her wyvern’s flesh melted, sloughed off, and turned to ash, leaving only bones and death.
It happened in seconds. Happened too fast for me to process it. Too fast for the small sapphire that had pushed Nabil and Buchra back to avoid the spray of crimson and void. Unnatural flame caught the wyvern’s wing and razed it to a skeletal husk in a single blink. Shrieking its fear and rage, the wyvern spun through the air, claws and talons grasping at clouds, at lightning, as Zaarib raced to catch her, but too late as she crashed to the ground along with her rider.
I ripped my stare away from that ruined creature, its broken rider, and fear as sharp and cold as the day I lost Fahad speared my chest, making it impossible to breathe.
“Nabil!” I screamed with the last of my air as the black-eyed wyvern opened its jaws again, flame more lethal than anything I’d ever witnessed gathering in its throat. And I knew, even as Mak flew as fast as the storm, his wingbeats like rapid thunder, we wouldn’t reach him in time.
CHAPTER 3
VARIDIAN
The storm ripped at my hair, tearing strands from the knot as Mak rode a gust of seething wind, neither of us taking our eyes off the navy wyvern and its glowing throat.
Nabil threw himself left on Buchra’s back, but she needed no extra convincing to twist in the air, executing a hasty, panicked spiral that would have carried her out of the blue’s path if it hadn’t followed her, hadn’t screamed its fury and fire into the sky.
I reacted on instinct, flexing my hands, practicallydraggingpower from the crackling core of ice where the lightning soul lived. Pain wrote itself across my skin, and my hands curled into fists as I bore down on it, breath hissing in through my gritted teeth. It was worth the flare of agony when the sky flashed pure, blinding white.
Mak’s wings battled faster, flowing with the wind’s current, closer, closer…
Lightning scythed through the scant, terrifyingly narrow space between the navy wyvern and Buchra, buying her a few seconds. I rushed through a prayer, tripping over words I knew as well as my own heart. If the bolt had been two feet to the left…
There’s no time for ifs and maybes,the lightning soul warned.I sense movement from the coast beyond the hills. Be ready.
