Tairn growls, raising his lip over his fangs.
“Stay with him for me. Don’t you dare let him die!” Turning on my heel, I break into a run without saying goodbye to Xaden. Farewells aren’t needed when I’ll see him shortly. Because there’s no chance I’m going to fail.
“The fliers want to fight,” I say to Melgren. “Let them!”
I pretend I haven’t been in a battle for the last two hours, haven’t wielded to exhaustion, haven’t pushed my body to the breaking point and run.
“Cut the storm so the gryphons can fly!” I shout at my mother as I pass by, sprinting under the archway. Fuck her permission or her understanding. If the wardstone can hold power, I’ll imbue it on my own.
My arms pump and I force my legs to move, despite the jarring pain in my knees. I run through the courtyard, dodging infantry squads, and I run up the central steps. I run through the open door and down the hall with a pounding heart and burning lungs. I run like I’ve been training for it since Resson.
I run because I couldn’t save Liam, couldn’t save Soleil, but I can save the rest of them. I can save him. And if I give myself even a moment to linger on the possibilities of what he might be facing, I’ll turn around and run straight back to Xaden.
Taking the spiral steps at breakneck speed has me dizzy when I reach the bottom of the southwest tower, and I don’t waste my gasped breaths on our first-years standing guard at the doorway as I sprint through, into the tunnel that smells like Varrish and pain.
“Move!” I shout at Lynx and Baylor. Because I remember their names. Avalynn. Sloane. Aaric. Kai, the flier. I know all the first-years’ names.
They dive to opposite sides, and I force my body sideways, shuffling through the narrowest part of the tunnel.
My chest tightens, and I think of Xaden.
Xaden, and the scent of thunderstorms, and books. That’s all I let in as I force my way through the passage. And as soon as it opens up, so do I, pushing myself harder than I ever have, racing down the rest of the tunnel and into the ward chamber lit by morning sunlight.
Only then do I skid to a halt and brace my hands on my knees, breathing deeply to keep from puking. “Does. It. Work?” I ask, looking up at the stone that is miraculously in one piece and standing where it should be.
“Damn, Sorrengail, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you run that fast!” Aaric lifts his brows.
“Here.” Brennan stumbles out from next to Aaric, his reddish-brown waves damp with sweat, and the first-year catches him, slinging his arm over his shoulder to keep my brother standing. “It took everything I had to mend it.”
“Will it hold power?” I ask, forcing myself to stand through the nausea.
“Try,” Brennan suggests. “If it doesn’t, this was all for nothing.”
Every second counts as I step up to the stone. It looks exactly how it did when we arrived last night, with the exception of the powerful hum of energy and the flames.
“Looks just like ours did before we imbued and fired it,” Brennan observes.
“Right, except this stone was actually on fire when we got here,” I tell him, lifting my hand to the black iron.
“Iron doesn’t catch fire,” Brennan argues.
“Tell that to the wardstone,” I counter. Without a conduit, this is harder than I imagined, but I have to know. Opening up the Archives door again, I welcome Tairn’s power in a focused trickle, just like Felix taught me, but instead of powering the conduit, I rest my fingertips on the wardstone and let it flow.
“How long did it take for three to imbue the wardstone at home?” Brennan asks.
“Weeks,” I answer, my fingers tingling painfully, like they’ve just had circulation restored after a lengthy period of numbness, and I watch with more than a little satisfaction when energy streams past the tips. I pull my hand back an inch, just enough to see the white-blue strands connect my fingertips to the stone, and then I increase the power.
Heat prickles my skin, and I push myself to the edge to imbue, which isn’t as far as I’d like it to be after hours of wielding. Sweat pops on my forehead,and my skin flushes red.
“We don’t have weeks,” Brennan says softly, as though talking to himself.
“I know.”
Roars sound in the distance, and I look up through the chamber’s opening to the sky so far above us. My throat closes at the sight of gray clashing with green. With orange. My squad is up there fighting without me. Xaden is battling at the gates. We’re out of time.
I cut my power, then rest my palm on the stone. There’s a tiny vibration, like the ripple of water after a pebble has been skipped into a vast lake. We don’t have enough pebbles. “It can hold power, but we don’t have enough riders who can imbue down here.”
“I’ll have Marbh put the word out,” Brennan says, and we both look skyward when a flash of red is quickly followed by one of gray.
“We need every rider who can make it.” But who the hell is going to stop fighting and risk the battle on a hunch? My heart careens. It looks exactly like what my mother warned us not to let happen—a full-on melee. A dark shape moves at the top edge of the chamber, and I lower my shields for the first time since speaking to Jesinia.
“Get down here,” I say to Andarna, walking around to the back of the stone so no one coming to help imbue will see her.
“I’m not fond of pits—”
“Now.” There’s no room for argument in my tone.
I put my hand on the stone and call my power to rise while she descends, blacking out the sun momentarily on her way down, where no one else can see. Power flows out of me in a steady drip, buzzing the ends of my fingertips as I feed it into the stone.
She lands, sticking to the shadows the morning light doesn’t yet touch.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her golden eyes blink in the darkness. “Tell you what?”
“I know.” I shake my head at her. “I should have known earlier. The second I saw you after Resson, I knew something was different about the sheen of your scales, but I figured I’d never been around an adolescent, so what would I know?”
“Different.” She cocks her head to the side and steps out of the darkness, her scales shifting from midnight black to a shimmering deep purple. “That’s exactly how I’ve always felt.”
“It’s why you feel like you don’t fit in with the other adolescents,” I note, my hand shaking as I hold the power steady, giving the stone what I can until others arrive to help. “It’s why you were allowed to bond. Gods, you told me yourself, but I thought you were just being…”
“An adolescent?” she challenges, flaring her nostrils.
Nodding, I try to ignore the sounds of battle high above so I can concentrate on saving us, even as anger barrels down the bond from Tairn, and fury… I can’t think about what Xaden’s doing. “I should have listened when you said you were the head of your own den. That’s why no one could fight your Right of Benefaction last year. Why the Empyrean allowed a juvenile to bond.”
“Say it. Don’t just guess,” she demands.
Even a slow breath won’t calm my racing heart. “Your scales aren’t really black.”
“No.” Even now, her scales are changing, taking on the grayish hue of the stone around us. “But he is, and I so badly want to be just like him.”
“Tairn.” It’s not hard to guess.
“He doesn’t know. Only the elders do.” She lowers her head, resting it on the ground in front of me. “They revere him. He is strong, and loyal, and fierce.”