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“More flame!” she gasped.
They vomited fire again. Running water turned to steam in the heat—
Krrrrrack!
A stone gave way.
The ice shifted, the whole mass moved perhaps a clawsbreadth.
Wistala held her breath, every nerve alert.
“Run, Wistala, it’s giving.”
She felt wingtips lash across her back as she hurried for the rocks. The ground slid beneath her feet.
Thunder in her ears, a roaring so loud that one felt it rather than heard it, engulfed her. She lunged, leaped, managed to cling to a fall of rocks at the base of the wall of rock.
Ice and snow roared down behind her, dragging her feet with them. She felt the ground pull at her—a strange sensation, not being able to trust the ground. Instinctively she opened her wings and tried to take off, but her broken wing just pulled against the lines and braces that held it to her body.
The flow dragged at her, its icy dust trying to choke her, but still she clung. Then she realized she was lost as well—tumbling, tumbling—and she curled her wings about her.
Then her breath was gone. Somehow she sensed which way was up and, heaving with every muscle, fought her way toward the surface. But the snow was so very heavy and she was cold and tired and broken, and oh so very sleepy . . .
She woke to a bright orange eye, found a great feathered roc staring down at her, its reins piercing its beak like a leathery mustache.
It had its claw on her throat, ready to rip out her neck hearts.
She was lying in the pass, but something was all wrong. She was at the wrong height, halfway up the sheer cliff on the south side. Then she realized that she rested on a mound of snow the size of one of the twin hills on Rainfall’s old estate.
Spirits and snowdrifts, they’d done it! She knew the weather at these heights—it would be full summer before the pass would be warm enough to melt all this down into the Ba-drink.
“It’s alive,” the rider called, in Parl, to a group of Ironriders behind. They wore baskets upon their shoes to allow themselves to walk on the snow.
“You. Hold still,” he ordered in Parl.
She wouldn’t be a prisoner again. She’d rather breathe her last in the clean mountain air than be flung into some new dungeon.
Wistala realized that only a thin layer of snow covered her body. She flexed her body, struck out with all the power in her cold-stiff tail, and a wave of snow flew out toward the bird.
As birds always do when startled, it flapped its wings and jumped back.
That was all Wistala needed. Her body stiffened and she spat flame—a thin stream, more a series of torfs than an actual stream of fire given that she’d been on short rations lately—striking bird and rider.
Both screamed and they flew off, the rider beating at the liquid fire across his saddle.
The Ironriders waddled comically, dropping the lines and chains they’d brought to drag her out of the snow.
Wistala felt too tired and cold to give chase. But shadows crossed the sun, shadows of dragons—
“Wistala, we are coming!” cried the Firemaids.
Drakka came shooting down the snowy slope, heads up, sii and saa tight against their sides, steering with their tails.
Roc-riders, drawn by the motion, dived and whirled, their riders firing arrows.
The drakka shot past her, flying like scaly arrows across the snow.
The Ironriders didn’t have a chance. They couldn’t run with the baskets on their feet, and they couldn’t move through the snow with the baskets off. One after another fell, knocked down by the drakka.>On the third day after Ayafeeia left, the roc-riders attacked.
