Page 62 of Feralheart

A crew of commons emerged from a side entrance, pulling wagons and carrying shovels. They entered the maze.

We waited.

The crowd went back to their wine. Their betting slips. A servant popped into view with a tray of sweets, and three nobles took pieces without pausing their conversation.

I could watch the next rider. Learn from their mistakes. Or I could watch Lykor. Figure out what he needed from me before I asked him to fly into fire again.

The crowd leaned forward, hungry for the next death.

I turned my back on the viewing enchantment and scratched along his jaw hinge.

Inside the maze, the retrieval crew’s shovels scraped stone. The sound carried, metal on rock, rhythmic.

Ten minutes became fifteen. The scraping stopped and wagon wheels creaked. The smell reached us before the crew emerged. Burned meat and charred leather. Not much of it. Not enough there for a person and a dragon. Wasn’t there more to collect? Or had they scraped off the surface and left the rest behind?

Bile surged up my throat. I swallowed it back, my teeth clenched enough to ache.

Lykor’s breath hitched on exhale, the same sound I’d heard in the canyon. I stroked his jaw hinge again and felt his heartbeat beneath my fingertips, too fast, too hard.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

His rheumy eye found mine.

The scale in my pocket flared again, hotter now. The wild dragon was trying to show me something, pushing impressions through the connection the way she had in the forest.

Stone walls. Runes glowing red. A pattern that wasn’t random but deliberate.

Ah, yes.

The runes fired in sequence, and if you knew the rhythm, you could see the gaps before they appeared. But knowing wasn’t enough. The dragons had to feel it. Had to sense the heat gathering before the fire came.

Lykor couldn’t. Not anymore. Whatever they’d done to him had torn that instinct from his body.

Pressure built behind my ribs. The wild dragon was trying to help me. But she was showing me something Lykor didn’t have.

Marda went next. I forced myself to watch. Not the rider, but her dragon. The way it hesitated before entering each turn. The way its good wing beat harder to compensate for the crooked one.

The beast sensed the timing. I could see it in how it leaned before the flames came. But when the dragon’s damaged wing failed to follow the cue at the fourth turn, knowledge wasn’t enough.

The impact echoed. Flames followed.

I looked away before the screaming stopped, pressing my hand over the scale in my pocket. The heat had settled into a rhythm now, a pulse that wasn’t my own. Faster than mine. Stronger.

The retrieval crew scraped their shovels again, and another rider was called.

The red-haired man made it through, though his dragon’s flank came away blistered. Then the gray-bearded man. His dragon’s wing caught fire on the last turn, but he kicked the beast into a dive that saved them both. Barely.

Two deaths. Three survivors.

The pattern was becoming clear. The dragons that made it through weren’t the ones that were best at following commands. They were the ones whose riders felt the hesitation and adjusted before the dragon faltered.

Marda had figured out the maze, but she hadn’t known how to cue her dragon.

My hands were shaking again. I shoved them in my pockets and the scale burned against my palm like a demand.

Fly.

The word wasn’t mine. It came through the scale, through the connection to the wild dragon.