She wrenched the teeth into harmony without mercy and let them burn together.
Roaring gold fire erupted about her and the prince, fire that answered to Fie alone. It wheeled and shrieked, a blazing storm tearing through the flashburn-white flames, clearing a ring for her and Jasimir to pass.
The wider their halo grew, the more it sucked in clean air, leaving scarce enough to choke down. And with every breath, the twin teeth fought like no others had, thrashing for discord and, more dangerously, for release.
If Fie let them, they would burn Sabor from mountain to coast.
“Trikovoi,” she gasped instead, and staggered into a run once more.
The towers of Trikovoi carved at the sky ahead, creeping closer with each step, rimmed in the golden fire she kept leashed. Almost there. The teeth howled and twisted in her hold.
She tripped, stumbled, shoved herself back up.
Almost there.
Everything dissolved to flame and scorching air, breath after agonizing breath, ground that shifted with every step. She didn’t run so much as half fall, again and again, snatching her balance back each time, lurching forward through white fire and smoking earth and trees smashing down around them.
Vultures wailed beyond her sight, furious. Arrow after arrow dashed against the wall of golden Phoenix fire, only to be torn apart when its own flashburn exploded in the fiercer heat. The flashburn fire pushed back, thunderous. She could feel it, acid-born and starving, snapping at their halo of gold—that white fire was a wolf, and those jaws were hell-bent to close on her—
The oath, keep the oath, keep going, she had to keep the oath, she had to look after her own, she was a chief, she was a chief, she was a chief—
Fie staggered as the ground steadied and hardened beneath her feet.
The flatway. They’d burned a path straight from one bend of the flatway to another. And the gates of Trikovoi waited only a hundred paces away.
Jasimir let out a laugh like a sob behind her. This time it was pure relief.
Then hooves rattled the wind at their backs once more.
Fie spun round. For a dreadful moment, she was back on the bridge of the Floating Fortress; above golden flames, she saw a rider crowned in a jagged helm.
She didn’t feel the arrow when it buried itself in her thigh.
She dropped. She couldn’t help it; one moment her right leg bore her weight, and the next it folded and dumped her on the road. This arrow bore no flashburn, only a shaft of steel, and so the fires hadn’t troubled it in the slightest.
Pain ripped up and down Fie’s thigh, the kind that she felt in her teeth, the kind that twisted in her gut and turned her bones to water. Her fingers scrabbled at the arrow’s stem before she could fight the instinct, sending searing agony through her leg.
The teeth screeched into discord. Fie let one go, kept the other alight, sweat rolling down her face as she forced her bloody hands to clench in the dirt instead. A wall of golden fire bowed across the road. The Vulture riders kept their distance.
She didn’t realize the prince had been calling her name until he knelt at her side. “We’re almost there, Fie, just a little more to go.”
He looped her arm over his neck again. She tried to stand—slipped—
One wrong step put all her weight on her right leg. She screamed, red flashing through her sight. Jasimir swore and lowered her to the ground again.
“I can’t believe this,” he said with a strained smile, too alike Tavin. “You’re supposed to drag me into Trikovoi, not the other way around.”
Fie winced, propping herself up on shaking arms. So close—they were so, so, so damned close—
She shook her pain-addled thoughts down as blood pooled beneath her leg. She could heal herself with a Hawk tooth—no, healing was risky work to do on its own, let alone while injured and rushed. She could call Gull winds to blow the arrows off course—but she’d need two teeth, maybe three, and she’d have to hold them—
More red fog chewed into her vision. Paces away, the Vultures’ horses pawed at the earth.
The starving wolf had come for her. And she had no way to run.
Her heart thudded in her ears. So close—she’d almost done it—Wretch said they’d tell her story for centuries—
The story of a chief.
