“Could have, but alas, they moved.”

I spot Rhiannon and Sawyer with Ridoc braced between them, walking him toward Aotrom, and breathe a sigh of relief.

“What? You thought I’d let your friend die?” Brennan asks, folding his arms and tilting his head up at me from where he stands next to Bodhi and Dain to the right of Tairn’s foreleg.

“Never doubted you for a second.” I force a smile.

“Want to get your ass down here and let me mend that shoulder?” He wields the older brother disapproving stare like the professional he is.

“Not particularly.” I grimace and haul Dain’s belt back into position, refusing to take the chance that I won’t be able to mount again if a mending session knocks me out.

“So fucking stubborn,” Brennan mutters, shoving his hands through his hair. “How did you know you could kill them like that?”

“I didn’t.” I breathe through the wave of pain that threatens to pull me under as I let the weight of my shoulder fall into the makeshift sling. “Wyvern are created with dark wielder magic, and Felix said something to me about energy fields the other day. I took a chance that the lightning would be drawn to their magic, and Tairn agreed to try.”

Brennan’s jaw drops slightly and Dain bites back an uncharacteristic smile, reminding me of the years when he cared more about climbing trees than our curfew.

“Chance panned out,” Bodhi says, flat-out grinning.

“It did.” I nod. “Aren’t you going to tell me how brilliant that idea was?”

Tairn scoffs. “I chose you last year for that brilliance, and now you’d like to be congratulated like it’s something new? How odd.”

“You’re impossible to impress.”

“I’m a dragon, a Black Morningstartail. The descendent of—”

“Yeah, yeah.” I cut him off before he makes me recite his entire lineage.

“Cath said there were four of them in there.” Dain deftly changes the subject. “At least they were riderless. Could you imagine if dark wielders knew we were joining forces with fliers and moving them into Tyrrendor? Where a dragon just hatched? They’d see us as a ripe little draining target.”

Bodhi’s face falls.

Oh shit. “That’s why you were worried.”

“There’s no telling who is within a four-hour flight.” Tairn bites out those last words.

“They already know.” My stomach twists. “That’s why they’re using riderless wyverns to patrol.”

Brennan stills completely, and the color drains from his face.

“What?” Dain glances between us.

“Venin share a collective conscious with the wyvern they create,” Brennan says quietly. “That’s what Tecarus’s book says.”

“The book you haven’t let me read in the four days you’ve had it?” I touch my fingertips to my head as the dizziness returns.

“It’s only been three days, and you apparently already know,” Brennan counters. “And some things are beyond your clearance, cadet, especially information we haven’t finished analyzing.”

“I know because I read the book my father gave me,” I argue, and I almost regret the emphasis when he flinches. He didn’t just separate himself from Mom when he changed his name—he distanced himself from Dad. “And Bodhi knows because it’s how I killed an entire horde of them at Resson.”

“I didn’t know,” Dain interrupts. “So if one of them felt that energy pulse… If one of them knows what it means…”

“Whoever created them knows,” I finish for him, turning my gaze to Brennan. “And you can bet they’ll come for us now.”

It was only in the last fifty years that we realized they were no longer solely coming from the Barrens. They’d begun to take recruits, teaching those who never bonded a gryphon to channel what was not theirs to take, to upset the balance of magic by stealing it from the very source.

The problem with mankind is we too often find our souls to be a fair price for power.

—CAPTAIN LERA DORRELL’S GUIDE TO VANQUISHING THE VENIN PROPERTY OF CLIFFSBANE ACADEMY

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

“Coralee Ryle. Nicholai Panya,” a newly pinned Major Devera calls out over the frost-covered courtyard, reading from what’s become the new death roll. For the first time since entering the quadrant, the names called every morning for the last week haven’t been cadets, but active riders—and fliers—on the front lines, fighting to fortify the villages along the Stonewater River. Trying to divert the venin’s attention from our valley, where four new dragons have hatched.

Don’t say Mira. Don’t say Mira. Don’t say Mira. It’s become my personal prayer to whatever god will listen while standing in formation.

I feel so fucking useless. Unlike the last two weeks, there’s no luminary to fetch, no wards to fail at. There’s a real war down there, and we’re up here learning history and physics.

“We lost two yesterday?” Aaric tenses in the row ahead.

Rhiannon glances back over her shoulder at me, sorrow haunting her eyes for a heartbeat before she composes herself with a grace I can never seem to manage and straightens her shoulders at Sawyer’s side. Two riders in one day is unfathomable in active service. The entirety of the Aretian Quadrant will be dead in less than two months at this rate.

“I think that’s Isar’s brother,” Ridoc says from beside me. “Second Wing.”

We both glance left, past Third Wing. Isar Panya bows her head from the middle of her squad in Tail Section.

I blink back the burning in my eyes, and my fingers squeeze tight around the conduit in my left hand.

“He was a lieutenant,” Imogen says quietly.

“Two years ahead of us,” Quinn adds. “Great sense of humor.”

“This is cruel,” I whisper. “Telling us that our siblings, our friends are dead this way is fucking cruel.” It’s harsher than anything we’ve been put through at Basgiath.

“It’s no different than morning formation,” Visia says over her shoulder.

“Yes, it is,” Sloane argues. “Hearing someone from a different wing died, or hell, even our squad, isn’t the same as being told your brother’s gone.” Her voice cracks.

A lump swells painfully in my throat. Brennan is inside, no doubt arguing with the Assembly about where to find game for the tsunami of predators we’ve brought here over the last month or coordinating shipments from the now-functioning forge. He’s safe.

Every commissioned rider that isn’t here teaching has been sent in shifts to man the outposts along the Cliffs of Dralor, like Xaden, Garrick, Heaton, and Emery…or to hold the front, like Mira.

Devera clears her throat and exchanges the roll for the one Jesinia holds.

My shoulders dip, a breath of relief clouding the freezing air. Mira’s alive. Or at least she was last night when the rotational rider brought the news in. Morning formation doesn’t scare me when it comes to Xaden—I’d know instantly if he…