“We will follow the plan.” Tairn dives, and my weight lifts against the straps of the saddle as we plunge toward my squad. The Second Squad dragons turn their heads toward the oncoming threat, all of us rising or falling into formation. “Prepare.”
There are three venin on this assassination mission, their blue tunics standing out in stark contrast to the gray, bleary-eyed wyvern they ride. We’ve got ten seconds. Maybe.
One. Ridoc waves his hands at my right, holding a dagger that’s been snapped in two. Shit, if his only remaining blade is broken—I blink when the pieces disappear. He wasn’t waving at me.
Two. Snapping my head to the left, I find the pieces already in Rhiannon’s hands as Feirge dives to where Sliseag hovers beneath.
Three. Feirge flies alongside Sliseag, and Rhiannon tosses the pieces.
Four. To Sawyer’s credit, he catches them.
Five. Sgaeyl rises to take Feirge’s place, and I lock eyes with Xaden only long enough to see that he’s unharmed. Blood both drips from Sgaeyl’s mouth and runs in rain-driven rivulets down the side of Xaden’s face, but I instinctively know it’s not his and focus on the imminent threat.
Six. Breathe. I have to breathe through the firestorm in my chest or I’ll burn out. It’s not that I don’t recognize the signs: the trembling, the heat, the fatigue. It’s just that they don’t matter. Everyone I love is on this field.
Seven. They’re almost on us, and I look down at the ward chamber, where Marbh stands watch with a Blue Clubtail I don’t recognize and a vague shape I hope is Andarna, and when a flash of sunlight reflects on the dagger in Sawyer’s hand, it disappears again, Feirge already on the move.
Eight. “Dajalair is frustrated by the unflyable conditions,” Tairn relays as Feirge rises alongside Aotrom.
Nine. “Tell them they’re more efficient guarding the courtyard and incoming wounded than struggling with waterlogged wings,” I note. “They’d be a liability up here right now, not an asset.”
The dagger changes hands, and Ridoc is once again armed.
I grin at how seamlessly we work as a team, then face the coming tidal wave.
Ten. “You’re beginning to think—” Tairn starts.
“Like Brennan?” I suggest as the wyvern enter our airspace.
“Like Tairn,” Sgaeyl answers, surging toward the enemy, her neck outstretched as shadows streak from under her, grasping a wyvern at the jugular and dragging it with them as Sgaeyl drops away from formation.
Tairn lunges toward another, throwing me back into the saddle as he takes the wyvern head-on. I jolt forward upon impact, blood spraying as Tairn’s jaw locks on the throat of the wyvern.
Its screech rattles my brain as their claws grapple between them, forcing us into a vertical position that’s nearly impossible to maintain, even with Tairn’s wings beating this hard.
A flash of blue is all the warning I need to palm an alloy-hilted dagger and drop the conduit against my forearm to reach for my buckle, preparing to release it. I’ve seen this play before. I know this role. And this time I’m not coming away with a stab wound.
“Can you level out?” My heart jolts as the dark wielder jumps from the wyvern’s neck to Tairn’s, ignoring the menacing roar that vibrates Tairn’s scales as he holds the wyvern in a death grip.
“Stay in your saddle!” he demands but rolls us horizontal.
The venin grabs a horn and holds on, his eerie, red-rimmed eyes never leaving mine during the maneuver or the seconds after when we fall into a rapid descent, the wyvern’s weight pulling us downward. No spiderwebbed veins—he’s just an asim, and I can handle him.
“You’re the one he wants,” the dark wielder announces, shoving his wet, stringy blond hair out of his eyes and striding down Tairn’s neck as I yank at the belt with my left hand, but the buckle doesn’t give.
He looks so…young. But so did Jack.
Tairn releases the wyvern, his shoulders bunching to push off the dying creature, but it snaps at his neck, and Tairn retaliates with a stronger bite, bleeding the life out of it as we fall and fall and fall.
“Your Sage?” I wrench on the leather, but the belt is stuck, and so am I.
Fuck.
I flip the dagger to its tip, catching the water-slick blade between my thumb and forefinger, and flick my wrist, firing the dagger toward him when he reaches the spikes between Tairn’s shoulders.
He catches the blade, and pure panic floods my bloodstream as I pull my spare.
“You’ll meet them all soon enough,” he promises, raising my own blade as he marches toward me.
A green blur comes at us from the right, and we both look as Rhiannon jumps from Feirge to Tairn, landing in front of my saddle in a crouch.
The easiest way to defeat a dragon is to kill its rider. Though the creature will most likely survive the blow, it will be stunned long enough to be felled.
—CHAPTER THREE: THE TACTICAL GUIDE TO DEFEATING DRAGONS BY COLONEL ELIJAH JOBEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
No. No. No. This is too familiar.
Losing Liam was… I can’t lose Rhi. I just can’t.
She surges forward as the wyvern screams, our rate of descent so fast that blood appears to fall upward. I yank on my belt again, but the leather is swollen with rain, wedged tight, and I watch, my heart launching into my throat, as she engages the dark wielder in a series of moves that would have had me on the mat.
He knocks her blade loose with a backhand to her wrist, and it flies from her hand as he kicks her. She skids backward along Tairn’s rain-slick scales, and I reach for her, wrapping my left arm around her waist to steady her and pressing my dagger into her palm with my right hand.
She looks over her shoulder and nods at me, gaining her feet when he’s almost on us. I force myself to look away as their blades clash and mountains rise, alerting me to how low our altitude is as I unstrap the crossbow at my thigh, then quickly open the quiver strapped at my left and slip the arrow into the flight groove. At this range, the wind and rain shouldn’t matter.
