“Thirty-two.” Carr jots it down.
There’s no care for if I can aim. Not a single consideration for mastery or strength. Their only goal here is to wear me down, while mine is to hold on to whatever scraps of self-control I can muster so I don’t wake Andarna.
“Again,” Varrish orders.
Gods, my body feels like it’s cooking itself alive. I reach for the buttons on my flight jacket and yank them open, letting some of the infernal heat escape.
“Violet?” Andarna asks sleepily.
Guilt slams into me harder than a lightning strike. “I’m fine,” I promise her.
“Waking is dangerous to the growth process,” Tairn lectures. “Sleep.”
“What’s happening?” She’s alarmingly alert now.
“Nothing I can’t handle.” Not quite a lie. Right?
“I’ve never seen her produce more than twenty-six strikes in an hour, Major. She’s at risk of overheating and burning out if you continue to push like this,” Carr says to Varrish.
“She can take it just fine.” He looks at me like he knows. Like he was there at Resson, watching me hurl bolt after bolt at the wyvern. If he’s the picture of control, then maybe I should be glad I don’t seem to have any.
“All it takes is her slipping in her grounding, or exhausting her physically, and she will burn out,” Carr warns, his gaze shifting nervously. “Punishing her for insubordination is one thing, but killing her is quite another.”
“Again.” Varrish lifts his brows at me. “Unless your golden one would like to fly up and say hello, since she failed to appear as ordered. If she joins us, we’ll only task you with three more.”
“This is about me?”
My shoulders drop and my stomach hits the ground.
“This is an example of what happens when dragons choose poorly,” Tairn counters. “Solas should never have given this barbarian more power.”
“I don’t want to submit her for tests or anything barbaric,” Varrish cajoles, as though he’d heard Tairn’s words. “I just want her to understand that she is not above the structure of command.”
“I fucking hate him,” I tell Tairn.
“I can feel this draining you! I’ll come—” Andarna starts.
“You’ll do no such thing, or you risk every feathertail in the Vale,” I remind her. “Do you want someone who takes joy in the pain of others like Varrish bonding a hatchling?”
Andarna growls in pure frustration.
Tairn angles his wing, directing the cooling wind over my scalding skin.
“Well?” Varrish asks, tugging his cloak around him as steam rises from my body.
Tairn snarls.
“Humans do not command dragons, and that includes you.” I lift my impossibly heavy arms and reach for power again.
Around strike forty, my knees buckle and I crumple to the hard rock. The ground rushes up at me, and I throw out my hands, sending pain shooting through my left shoulder as the joint partially subluxates from the impact. My mouth waters from the instant nausea, but I cradle my left arm and force myself to my knees just to take the weight off the joint.
Extending his neck, Tairn roars so loudly at Varrish and Carr that the notebook blows out of Carr’s hands and tumbles down the mountain, vanishing from sight.
“Silver One is done!” he shouts.
“They can’t hear you,” I remind him, breathing through the pain.
“Their dragons can.”
“If she dies, you will summon the wrath of not only General Sorrengail but General Melgren. Her signet is the weapon generals dream of in this war.” Carr glances between Varrish and me. “And if that’s not enough to encourage a degree of caution, Vice Commandant, then remember her death will cost you two of the most powerful dragons on the Continent and Lieutenant Riorson’s irreplaceable ability to wield shadows.”
“Ah yes, that pesky mating bond.” Varrish clicks his tongue and cocks his head to the side, studying me like I’m nothing but an experiment for him to play with. “One more. Just to prove that you can listen to orders if your dragon will not.”
“Silver One—”
“I can do it.” I stumble to my feet and pray my shoulder will hold if I tuck my elbow in tight to my body. For Andarna, for the other hatchlings protected in the Vale, I can do it.
My muscles shake and cramp, and my shoulder screams as though there’s a dagger in the joint, but I raise my palms and reach for Tairn’s power anyway. I make the connection and let the energy flood through me one more time.
I wield, and lightning crashes.
But my arms cramp as the strike hits the nearest peak, the muscles twisting and bunching in an unnatural way, causing me to physically hold the power I usually release right away.
Fuck! I can’t let it go!
“Silver One!” Tairn shouts.
Power lashes through me, extending the strike, which cleaves a section from the northernmost ridgeline ahead of me. The rock crashes down the mountain’s slope, and still the lightning flows like an incandescent blade, cutting away the terrain.
I can’t move. Can’t drop my hands. Can’t even twitch my fingers.
This is going to kill me.
Tairn. Sgaeyl. Xaden. It’s going to kill us all. Fear and pain roll into one, seizing my mind with the one emotion I can’t afford—panic.
“Cut it off mentally!” Tairn bellows as the strike goes on and on, and in the distance I hear Andarna cry.
My very bones catch fire, and a scream rips from my throat as I shove mentally at the doors to my Archives.
The strike ends, and I stagger backward, falling against Tairn’s foreleg and crumpling between his talons. Every breath is a struggle.
Carr swallows. Hard. “We’re done for the day.”
I couldn’t stand if I wanted to.
Varrish examines the destruction I caused and turns toward me. “Fascinating. You’ll both be indispensable once you come to heel.” He turns then, his cloak billowing in the wind as he walks to Solas. “This is the only warning you’ll get, Cadet Sorrengail.”
The threat hits like a punch to the stomach, but I can’t think around the blistering heat.
Carr hikes over, then puts the back of his hand against my forehead and hisses. “You’re burning up.” He glances at Tairn. “Tell your dragon to carry you directly to the courtyard. You won’t make it from the flight field. Get food and a cold bath.” There’s something suspiciously close to sympathy in his eyes as he looks me over. “And while I agree that we do not command dragons, perhaps you could talk Andarna into making an appearance. You are a rare, powerful signet, Cadet Sorrengail. It would be a travesty to use your training sessions in this manner again.”
I’m not a signet. I’m a person. But I’m too damned hot, too tired to make the words form. Not that it matters—he doesn’t see me that way. Carr never has. To him, we are the sum of our powers and nothing more. My chest heaves, but even the cool air of the mountaintop can’t touch the burn sizzling in my veins.
Tairn wraps his claw around me, securing a talon under each arm to lock my limp body into position, then launches, leaving Carr beneath us on the peak.
We’re airborne in an instant. Or maybe it’s an hour. Time has no meaning. It’s all just pain, beckoning me to let go, to release my soul from the prison of my body.
“You will not let go,” he orders as we fly toward Basgiath, moving faster than I’ve ever felt him go before. The air rushing by feels so damned good, but it’s not enough to reach the furnace in my lungs or the molten marrow of my bones.
Mountains and valleys pass under me in a blur before I recognize the walls of the quadrant, but Tairn blows by the courtyard and then plummets to the valley below.
The river. Water. Cold. Clear. Water.
“I’ve already called for support.”
My stomach lurches as he pulls up to a hover at the last second, my body swaying from the change in momentum.
“Hold your breath.” It’s his only warning before water covers me from head to toe, gushing with bone-crushing force, icy from the last of the summer runoff. The contrast threatens to crack every part of me, to peel me away layer by searing layer.