“I didn’t.” The saddest smile I’ve ever seen tugs at Xaden’s mouth. “First, because your shields are up, and secondly because I didn’t have to. It’s all over your face.”
My heart struggles to beat regularly, torn between slowing and sluggishly admitting defeat, and racing—no, rising to fight—in defense of the simple yet agonizing truth that I love him anyway.
But how many more blows can that love take? How many more daggers are there in that metaphorical armoire? Gods, I don’t know what to think. Nausea washes over me. Has he ever used it on me?
“Say something,” he begs, fear streaking through his eyes.
The roaring grows louder, the sound like a thousand soft drops of rain on a roof.
“My love isn’t fickle.” I shake my head slowly, keeping my gaze locked on his. “So you’d better live, because I’m ready to ask you all the fucking questions.”
“Silver One, mount!” Tairn bellows, demolishing the barrier of my shields like they’re thinner than parchment. “Wyvern!”
Xaden and I both spare a single glance to the edge of the cliffs. My stomach drops as I realize that the approaching gray cloud isn’t a storm and that roaring in my ears is actually wingbeats. One heartbeat, that’s all I wait, and then I’m turning, moving, sprinting across the frozen ground and racing up the ramp Tairn makes of his foreleg to his shoulder.
“How many?” I lower my flight goggles and blast the question down the mental pathway that connects the four of us as I climb into my saddle.
“Hundreds,” Sgaeyl answers.
“That’s unfortunate.” I force air through my lungs in measured breaths to keep calm, but my hand still trembles as I buckle the belt across my lap. The second I’m secure, Tairn swings his body parallel to the cliffs and launches, throwing my weight back into my seat as he climbs rapidly with heavy, forceful wingbeats.
When we have enough altitude for air superiority, Tairn banks left, flying in a tight circle until we face the flying horde. Then he pushes his wings back against the wind, abruptly halting our momentum and sending my body forward into the pommel as he hovers a hundred feet above the frozen field, leaving twice his body length between us and the cliff’s edge. “A little warning next time?” I use our private bond.
“Did you fall?” he challenges along the same, his wings rising and falling only often enough to keep us relatively in place.
I decide to keep my retort to myself as Xaden and Sgaeyl arrive on our right, keeping a noticeable distance from the edge of Tairn’s wing. “I’m sorry she didn’t tell you.”
“We will settle matters of emotion after matters of life.”
Noted.
My stomach twists when I can make out individual shapes in the horde, then outright sours as evening sky appears between their wingbeats.
“Thirty seconds,” Tairn estimates.
I release the pommel and turn my palms up, opening the Archives door to Tairn’s power and letting it fill every cell in my body until the hum of energy I pick up on at the edge of the wards is replaced by the hum of energy that I’ve become.
“They’re slowing,” Xaden remarks as the horde spreads into a grouping I’m terrified to acknowledge looks like a formation.
Bile rises in my throat as I count one, two, three, four—“I count at least a dozen venin.”
“Seventeen,” Tairn corrects in a growl.
Seventeen dark wielders and a horde that rivals the riot at Aretia against…us. “We’re dead if the wards aren’t up, if I messed up the translation.”
“You didn’t,” Xaden replies, sounding infinitely more confident than I feel. Heat flushes my skin as my power seeks an outlet, but I keep it contained, ready to be wielded as three wyvern break away from the grouping and fly closer. They hover a tail’s length beyond the edge of the cliffs, their scales dull and gray, holes peppered through their wings as though they hadn’t quite finished forming.
“They can feel the wards,” I manage to say before my stomach abandons my body, plummeting like a rock. The rider on the center wyvern…
“Then they can die in them, too,” Sgaeyl replies.
I can only make out vague facial features from this distance, but I know in my very bones it’s him. The Sage from Resson, the one who’s taken up residence in my nightmares.
His head turns noticeably from me…to Xaden.
“He was in Resson,” I tell him.
“I know.” White-hot rage shimmers along the bond.
The Sage lifts his staff, then swings it like a club, pointing toward us.
“I love you,” Xaden says as the wyvern closest to me banks away from the wards, falling into a turning dive, only to gain speed and climb again, leveling out behind the lead two before flying straight for us. “Even if you believe nothing else I ever say, please believe that.”
“Do not speak to her as if death is a possibility,” Tairn snaps, slamming his own shields around us both, an impenetrable wall of black stone, blocking out Xaden and Sgaeyl.
I breathe deeply, using every ounce of concentration to keep my power contained and my emotions under control as the wyvern accumulates speed and flies past the lead two, heading for the wards.
Time slows to heartbeats, my breath freezing in my heated chest.
Then the wyvern crosses the invisible barrier, and my heart stops beating altogether as its wings flap once. Twice.
“Prepare to dive.” Tairn swivels his head, his jaw opening as the wyvern closes the distance to less than a body length, and I brace for the maneuver. “Never mind.”
The wyvern’s wings and head sag, and its body follows suit—as though someone plucked out its life force—and then it falls, propelled only by its previous momentum, passing forty feet beneath us and crashing into the field below, leaving a deep furrow before stopping.
“We should check—”
“Its heartbeat ceased,” Tairn tells me, his attention already redirected to the other two wyvern along the border and the horde behind them. “The wards work.”
The wards work. Relief restarts my heart.
The Sage swings his staff again and lets out a furious shout, sending the wyvern on the right, who meets the same fate a few seconds later, impacting a short distance from the first one.
Tairn doesn’t look when Sgaeyl dives for the carcasses, but he does lower his shields.
“They’re dead,” Xaden confirms a moment later, and I glance down to see Felix arriving on his Red Swordtail.
We’re safe. I throw out my hands and release the searing energy within me, letting it snap free as I wield. Lightning cracks open the sky, striking a few feet from the remaining wyvern, and I curse under my breath.
Close, but I didn’t hit him.
It’s enough for the Sage to call off the attack, and though I can’t see his eyes from here, I feel the hatred of his stare locking onto me as he looks back before joining the rest of the horde.
“That’s it?” I ask Tairn as he holds position, watching the wyvern become a cloud of gray once again. How…anticlimactic. “Now what?”
“Now we stay long enough to be sure, and then we go home.”
We wait another three hours before flying back, long enough for Suri to arrive and tell us of three similar incidents along the cliffs. We weren’t the lucky recipients of a lone horde. It was a coordinated, simultaneous attack.
But we survived.
The joyous atmosphere is contagious when we walk into Riorson House a few hours later, accompanied by Felix, and I’m promptly pulled into Rhiannon’s hug.
“You got the wards up!” Her flight leathers are still cold from the night air, meaning she’s just returned, too.
“We got the wards up,” I counter before I’m yanked out of her arms and smooshed against Ridoc’s chest, then Sawyer’s, as riders and fliers celebrate around us, the noise filling the cavernous space of Riorson House’s foyer and somehow making the area feel smaller in the best way, less like a fortress and more like a home.