The cold dropped into my stomach. I yanked my thoughts back behind my shields and prayed I hadn't betrayed that which I had been sworn to keep a secret.
It wasn't that I was afraid Onyx or Ravel would use the information to undermine Catonia or the Federation, but Alar had asked us to keep his brother's condition a secret, and I didn't want to be the weak link who spilled it.
"Sorry,"I said.
"I don't care about your prince and his court. What I care about is you paying attention. You are hundreds of meters in the air. It's not smart allowing yourself to be preoccupied during flights."
"You are absolutely right. I'm with you. Paying attention."
I wasn't, though. Not really. I tried, but my mind wouldn't let go and slid right back to Alar and the letter. Morgateth had flown ten thousand of these turns, and he didn't need me to guide him. He was humoring me when I did, but he didn't need it. He'd promised me that he would never let me fall, and I could allow myself to be distracted and trust him to navigate for me.
He banked into a hard turn, a tight one, the world tilting up on its edge, and as I leaned with him the way I always did, loose and confident, I wondered whether he was testing me to see if I was paying attention.
It was amazing what Morgateth had done for me. Whatever had been left of my fear of heights had disappeared completely once I'd bonded with him. It was a pleasure being carried by someone so strong, so experienced, and so capable. I trusted him with my life.
It was a measure of how far I'd come. High above the peaks, in the middle of a hard turn, I was thinking about how much my life had changed since bonding with Morgateth.
The saddle shifted under me.
Not my body.
The saddle.
It slid under me, sideways and down, a hand's width in an instant, and the wrongness of it hit me a heartbeat before the fear did, because my body knew before my mind that I was in trouble.
"Morgateth!" I screamed, and then the turn and the slide threw me, and the harness that should have held gave, and there was nothing under me at all.
I went off his back into open air.
The sky and the mountain swapped places. I saw Morgateth's dark underside wheel away above me, saw the white teeth of the peaks spin past, and the wind tore the scream out of my mouth.
I was falling.
The same way Alar had fallen in my dreams. It was happening to me, and the ground was so far down and coming so fast.
I reached for Morgateth, not with my hands, but with my mind, yanking on the bond as if it was a physical lifeline.
I felt him there, he was coming after me, but he would never make it in time.
He knew it.
I knew it.
"Tell Alar I love him and that I'm sorry."
There was no answer in my mind, only a sensation of dread, a wash of blind white terror that wasn't mine.
And then the world went black underneath me, but it wasn't the ground coming up to claim me. It was a vast obsidian shape rising into my fall.
Onyx was beneath me, matching my plummet and rising to meet it, and then a band of iron closed around my arm and my chest, and hauled, and the impact of being caught knocked the air clean out of me.
Ravel had me.
He'd come half out of his own saddle to do it, one arm locked around me and one hand fisted in Onyx's harness, and he dragged me up and across and down against him. I grabbed him with both hands and held on like he was the last solid thing in the universe, because he was.
Onyx leveled out.
The mountains stopped spinning.
