They're stretched up toward the sky on either side of me. A combination of feathers, dark arching bone, and thin luminous membrane stretched between—similar to Sesca's in all but color. Where hers are a tapestry of blues and greens, mine are ash-grey with hints of deep violet along their edges, faintly glowing where the morning light catches them. They'remassive. Crumpled and flailing, but catching enough wind to change my trajectory.
And they could save me.
Iknowthey could save me, yet my first instinct is to fold them in tighter and just keep falling, because I don't know how to do this. This is all too big, too powerful, too much for me to embrace, and I'm more unbalanced than I've ever been.
For a fraction of a moment, I believe that.
One last time, I believe that.
Then I think again of embers on the wind, stretched thin and flickering but still there, andI am still here, even if I am bloody and broken and falling down, down, down.
I stretch one wing out as wide as I can.
Then the other.
My control isn't precise. My entire body feels dangerously close to shattering when I slam to a violent, jarringstop in mid-air, and I can't remain calm enough to figure out how to hover; I drop several feet, and I panic, and the panic only makes me drop faster, until I'm tumbling toward another freefall?—
Then Sesca is suddenlythere, bright and warm and powerful, and we're falling together, her body weaving around mine.
Her wings are perfectly steady. Precisely tucking, twisting, turning. I don't watch the way she moves them; Ifeelit through the bond, and I lean into it without thinking, the way I've been learning to lean into all of it.
Our plummeting soon becomes a more controlled descent. Little by little I adjust my own wings, slowing down and finally bringing myself to a trembling but steady, hard-won hover.
Sesca dives lower and spins in tight spirals below me, creating an updraft of warm energy that lifts me even higher, giving me more time to find my balance. Once I manage to stop shaking, she ascends and circles several times, examining me, before drawing up directly in front of my hovering body.
I reach out and put my hand against the side of her jaw. She leans into my touch for an instant before spiraling away once more, her body seemingly full of too much power to keep still for long—the power of this fully realized bond that’s suddenly overflowing from both of us.
The enormity of the moment finally settles when I find the courage to look down. To see the entire world stretched out below us, the battle still raging across the valley floor, the two kings and their armies and the empire beyond waiting to see what happens next.
Waiting forme, it feels like.
It's hard to know where to start. Hard to think of anything to say, except: “What now?”
The wind stills as Sesca turns back to me, her golden eyes bright and blazing in the sunrise.
Now we fly.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Sesca soars underneath me as we head back toward the battle, occasionally using a combination of her wings and magic to create warm updrafts for my own fledgling wings to catch and rise upon. Whenever this doesn't work—whenever I start to drop too low, too fast—she rises, readily offering herself as an emergency landing spot.
It never becomes a particularly graceful flight on my part, but I manage to maintain our course well enough.
Within minutes, we're gliding close to the hilltop I was taken from. I immediately try to find Reave, my stomach in knots as I scan over fallen bodies and sparring soldiers, searching for him among the chaos.
But it's the dragons who catch my attention and keep it.
They're hovering above the battlefield like gods in repose, watching it all unfold without intervening.
“They seem strangely calm,” I say, more to myself than to Sesca.
They felt our bond expanding, she explains.Even a hint ofdivine blood makes them sensitive to it. They're waiting on you, now.
Her voice trails off, but an unspoken understanding settles in the silence; they may be waiting for the moment, but their stillness isn't indefinite. It's one thing for them to recognize the shift in my power and potential. It's another for them to realign themselves around it.
Everything hinges upon what I do next.
I study them more closely, and I realize there are only six of them. I find the seventh quickly; it's dead, its body broken and splayed over the rocky ground far below, reddish-black blood pooling around it. The same color blood is splattered across Sesca's shoulder and the edge of one wing, I notice.
