Soldiers, in the hills,Mak’s furious growl told me.Wearing our colours, Ithanysian colours.Exactly like the ground warriors Ameirah and I spotted in the mountains around Red Manniston. Was this the king’s doing, or more Kaldic trickery?
“Shit,” I snarled, staring at the smoking tower, half of it burned to ruins in a single minute. The foot soldiers were bad enough, but if there were more of those trebuchets hidden in the hills…
The sky flared with light at the same moment the lightning soul hissed at me to control myself. I saw the clouds split in slow motion, and my stomach twisted into a knot. I tried to stop it, reached out with all my magic—control and lightning both—butit was too late to stop the bolt that speared from the clouds and struck a two-storey building at the edge of the city.
“Varidian!” Zaarib yelled, and I was so certain that he knew, that he’d swing Dahab around to take on Mak, that he’d try to knock me from the sky so I couldn’t harm anyone else. But what he said was,“Wyvern!”
Wings took to the sky over Daurith, the house guard finally reacting to the warning Shula and Nabil flew to give them, but that wasn’t what Zaarib warned of. Other wings, midnight blue and black and deep wine red rose from the shadows of the hills outside the city, cutting through the storm clouds as one. Flying as if part of the same body the way the wyverns flew at the Red Star.
I threw my right hand out, clenching my fingers into a fist and spiking razor-sharp control magic into the minds of the five wyverns at the front of the formation, the ten behind them, the… God, how many were there?
“I can’t control them,” I shouted, trying to mask my panic.
Zaarib’s smile was a vicious slash in his brown face. “The old-fashioned way then.”
“Whitbar manoeuvre?” I yelled. Back then, rogue tigers had crossed the Wall of Hydaran close to the southern coast and only Zaarib and I had been there to stop them. With Aliah hauling wing and scale into the city, it was only the two of us now.
“I hate you, but fine,” Zaarib shouted, pulling off the thick leather gloves that protected his scarred hands.
Like the other wyverns we encountered, these had no riders, either, but there were fae on the ground I could control. And whoever pulled the threads to control the wyverns had to be here somewhere. If I could find them, I could end this before any more of Daurith was damaged. Before anyone else was hurt. I didn’t want to think about who might have been caught up in the first tower blast, or the lightning strike.
Zaarib and Dahab caught a current and soared, flying directly above us. I didn’t let any nerves form, even if my control magic had been essential to this when we did it in Whitbar. The storm would help, and cover any lightning strikes I made.
And if it didn’t… I had to hope my oldest friend didn’t disown me.
I waited until the wyverns were close enough that we could see the reflection of lightning in their full-black eyes, waited until Zaarib snapped out a hand and seized hold of the front five beasts with his magic, using telekinesis to fling them into the second line. My heart thundered a rapid drum against my ribs. In a messy rush, I speared magic into those ranks of soldiers marching through the hills, and relief made my stomach ripple when my magic sank into their weak minds. Suspiciously weak, not a single glimmer of will in any of them.
Command the wyverns to pull back,I ordered every soldier whose mind I ransacked. But there was no flicker of recognition, not a single gleam of thought at all. As if they were empty, just shells with no brain.
Zaarib grabbed four wyverns in the second line of the formation, throwing them into the others to scatter their tight formation.
“Mak,”I shouted over the whipping wind; he rumbled a reply, the air scorching hot a moment later as fire gathered in his throat, perfuming the air with hot blood and seething iron. “Wait until they can’t escape.”
I know what I’m doing,was his grumbled reply. His wings carried us closer, closer with leathery booms that made my blood pump faster, hairs standing on end. I felt helpless without my magic, useless.
You are never without magic,the lightning soul reminded me.Call upon the clouds. But try to avoid hitting the city you flew all this way to defend.
Great advice, thanks,I sniped, eyeing the shadows wyverns cast over the mindless soldiers on the ground, the dark clouds above as light rippled through their fluffy underbellies. I reached inward for the crackling core that had burned since the moment she saved me from the storm and hissed when ice burned cold flame from my fingertips up my arms into my chest. Pain, as was the price for great magic.
Aim it,she barked.Don’t waste the bolt. Drag it down from the sky into the legion.
Drag it down, sure. That seemed easy.
Control it with your mind the way you would control anything else.
That I could do.
“Mak, now!” I yelled, plunging my command into the lightning magic at the same time Mak’s jaws parted and he roared fire upon our enemies. Scales turned red as they burned, eyes burned to ash, and thescreamsof the wyverns as they burned was horrific. The sound of injured allies, not of our enemy.
They’re Kaldic,I told myself even if it tasted untrue. It was what I had to tell myself to get through it, to wrap a lightning bolt in ironclad control and drive it into the heart of the legion.
It could have been my legion. They looked no different on the outside, except for lacking riders, but I pushed that thought aside. Mak’s fire, the lightning, and Zaarib’s unfaltering magic scattered the wyverns into groups of twos and threes. Mak’s wings caught a swell as he surged after a single wyvern, sinking violent teeth into its throat and ripping it out within a minute. Beneath us, Dahab caught the beasts that flew to its defence.
That action made me pause, made my mind whir at frantic speed. The fact they flew to defend the injured wyvern suggested they were intelligent, unlike the mindless soldiers below. Or were they following the commands of their puppet master?
“Mak, the ruby,” I roared when a deep red wyvern darted towards his left flank, fire pouring from its parted jaws. I dropped my stomach to Mak’s back, the air scorching hot as it blasted over my back, heating my leathers, tugging strands of hair from the knot on my head.
Too fucking close. Another metre and I’d be burned to a husk.
