Page 244 of Feralheart

We both pretended the promises would hold.

Climbing onto Selira’s back took three tries. I kept sliding back down, my ruined palms screaming when they scraped across her scales.

“Eradin,” Fen growled. He spanned my waist and boosted me up, his good arm supporting most of my weight. His wounded shoulder had to be hurting him, but he didn’t make a sound.

I landed between her back spikes in a graceless heap, slumping forward.

Selira’s head curved back, her snout nudging my foot. Won’t let you fall.

My fingers found her spike and gripped well enough to keep me from toppling off. “Take us up, love.”

Yes.

With her in the lead, the dragons scrambled upward, moving the way they were meant to.

Aristus’s wings beat with power that made the air crack, each stroke so strong I felt the wind shift from thirty feet away. Reece’s dragon’s damaged wing hadn’t yet healed, but without the collar restricting his movement, he could compensate naturally, his gait smoothing into something that worked well on the slope.

Grimstone went faster than any dragon I’d seen, his body built for speed the collar had been smothering for years.

Four dragons. Four riders. Surging together.

We passed Blair’s and Cedric’s bodies, their dragons lying twisted and dead beside them.

Fen brought Aristus around and leaned above the bodies longer than grief explained. When he drew level with us again, his face had smoothed to the neutral man I’d first seen across a blood-strewn meadow.

“Blair’s palms are spell-scorched to the wrist,” he said. “That’s what casting past your limits does while these pillars are draining you. He was our sniper. The shots stopped when his heart did.”

Blair had thrown killing magic at a crown prince in front of witnesses, on grounds where every death was tallied. Men were only that unafraid when someone powerful promised them there wouldn’t be an after.

We continued moving.

Finally, we reached the canyon rim and crested it.

The world opened up in front of us, a plateau of crushed white stone that gleamed like bone dust because that’s what it was. Generations of bones had been ground so fine you couldn’t tell dragon from rider.

A pristine white building rose on the opposite side, a monument to something older than the fates. The structure blazed so bright it hurt to look at directly.

Beneath the light, the same hunger I’d sensed on the slope lurked, ancient and vast and so desperate it made my belly flip over.

This thing had been starving for centuries, and we’d fed dragons and riders straight into its mouth.

Bad place, Selira said, her unease bleeding into my bones. Should not be here.

“We had to come.”

Know. Still wrong. Her head swung toward the building that must house the Oracle, her pupils narrowing to slits. All teeth. No mercy.

“We’ll be careful.”

Careful means not walking into teeth.

Her wings spread wide.

Fen’s jaw locked. Lyndie paled. Reece stared at the building like a man who’d just realized the price of the wish he’d been chasing.

We’d survived the canyon.

Now we had to survive what waited for us ahead.