Chapter 12 #2
Rune’s arms tightened around her waist, and his chin hooked over her shoulder. He shouted, and the wind snatched his voice away, so she barely heard him say, “What’s that?”
At first, she didn’t see anything, only the pale blue of the sky brushed with gold, and the rolling carpet of clouds below. But when Run extended an arm, and pointed, she spied a tiny dark speck in the distance.
“I don’t know. A bird?” she shouted back.
But her heart began to pound, because this was a high altitude, and only migrating flocks would be sharing the peaks with them this time of year.
Up here, there was no prey for a solitary hawk or falcon, no carrion for a vulture to spy and circle down toward.
Ahead, Percy banked sharply to the left, swooped around, and pulled up alongside them. He screeched, and Alfie screeched back, and Tessa’s mind filled with a sight that froze the air in her lungs.
It wasn’t a bird ahead, but a drake. A big one.
And as Alfie sent a cry of distress through the bond, the speck grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger, coming straight toward them, until she could see the working of its wings and wondered how she’d mistaken it for anything but what it was: a massive Selesee drake, violent purple in the new morning light.
Valgrind came winging back to them, shrieking, undulating like a ribbon through the air as he pumped his wings twice as fast to meet them and continue traveling forward.
Why in the gods’ names were they still traveling forward?!
Within shouting range, Náli called, “What is it? Why are they screaming?”
Tessa gaped at him a moment; she forgot sometimes that he wasn’t a Drake, and didn’t share the same kind of mental and soulful connection she, Oliver, and Amelia did with their drakes. Then she called back, “There’s a drake headed for us! A purple one!”
Like she had, Náli took a moment to gape. Then he cursed. He was so naturally pale that she didn’t expect him to blanch, but he did, and his eyes seemed bright blue by contrast.
He looked ahead, and Tessa did, too. The oncoming drake was growing larger and nearer by the second. She could see the lash of its tail, now, could tell that its wingspan dwarfed Percy’s.
Rune’s breath puffed warm against her ear. “What will we do? Can our drakes fight it?” He sounded like a man trying very hard to be brave and rational. “I have my bow.”
At another time, Tessa would have smiled, and touched his cheek, and explained that it was very sweet and heroic of him to offer up his archery skills, while inwardly shaking her head, because save a direct hit to the eye, the idea of shooting a bow toward a scaled drake of this size was laughable.
But this time, as disaster and certain death flapped its way toward them, Tessa couldn’t say anything.
She clung to the leather strap of Alfie’s breastplate, and opened up the bond between them as wide as it would go.
Accepted their connection so freely and wholeheartedly that her vision sharpened, and she realized she was seeing through Alfie’s eyes, rather than her own.
She could sense Alfie’s connection with Percy and with Valgrind.
Her head swelled with the inclusion of so many voices besides her own.
What do we do? she asked Alfie. How can we survive this?
Alfie told her with images, with a plan of attack born in Percy’s mind, and shared with his family via a high, bugling call that cracked out across the mountaintops.
“What are we doing?” Náli shouted, panicked. “Do you mean to fly straight into the bastard?”
“No!” she shouted back. “Hold on!”
She twisted her head and repeated, “Hold on!” to Rune.
Alfie ducked her head, and dove straight down into the clouds.
Rune yelled in alarm, and he squeezed Tessa so tight it was hard to draw her next breath. But when Tessa leaned low over Alfie’s neck, he leaned with her.
The clouds swept soft, and cold, and damp across her cheeks, a chill reversal of the steam in the hot springs beneath the palace of Aeres.
She could see nothing save Alfie’s neck, the clouds shredding against the tips of her horns.
But she could sense what Alfie sensed, and so she knew exactly where the Sel drake was overhead, and where Percy and Valgrind were.
She knew when the move would come, and what it would be, and had time to warn Rune.
“Get ready,” she said over her shoulder. “We’re going to go up fast. Don’t hold me, hold the saddle.”
A testament to his craft, the saddler had retrofitted Alfie’s saddle in a jiff. Rune was tethered to it, just as she was, and extra handgrips had been stitched behind her thighs for him.
She missed the weight and warmth of his arms immediately when they withdrew, but Alfie said to hold tight, and she didn’t want to come dislodged and take Rune with her.
Alfie sent her one last warning.
“Now!” Tessa called.
Alfie snapped her wings shut and propelled herself into a tight twist that almost threw Tessa clear from the saddle.
She gritted her teeth, and clung tight to the handgrips on the pommel.
Her toes slipped out of her stirrups, and she clamped her legs tight to Alfie’s sides as the drake righted herself, and spread her wings again, traveling straight up this time.
The clouds swept over them, cold and slick, and then all at once were gone. Alfie burst back into the sunlight, and when Tessa craned her neck back, she glimpsed the enemy drake’s exposed, golden belly, gleaming like treasure save a single dark band behind the forelegs that looked like a girth.
Did this drake have a…?
Alfie opened her jaws with a roar, and shot freezing blue jets at the other drake.
Her breath was so cold that the blowback burned Tessa’s face. Before she closed her eyes and ducked to the side, she saw a thick rime of frost coat the Sel drake’s belly, and legs. Heard, once her eyes were shut, a furious, pained bellow.
Alfie swerved, and Tessa risked a glance in time to see the purple drake writhing in midair, its head ducked as it tried to see what had been done to it, and where the perpetrator had gone.
Icicles clung to its claws, its legs, even the base of its tail.
Percy and Valgrind swept in from either side of it, and hit it with twin blasts of ice breath.
The drake roared and faltered in the air, its wings heavy and ineffective, sheathed as they were in ice.
Two things struck her about the icy tableau, before Alfie ducked again.
One: the drake was even more massive than she’d first thought, more than double Percy’s size. Valgrind looked like a child’s toy beside it.
Two: the drake had a rider.
He wore golden armor, just as the Sel foot soldiers did, and the horsetail plume on his helmet was dyed the same rich purple as his cloak, as the drake beneath him. He looked tiny perched above but his sword was long, and bright, and sharp, and Tessa didn’t want to be anywhere near it.
Alfie whipped them through another sharp turn that nearly slung them overboard, and then attacked the big drake from the rear. She jetted it with ice just as it struck toward Valgrind.
Valgrind wheeled back, an upside-down midair flip that sent Nali dangling from the handgrips on his saddle.
“Oh no!”
Alfie’s freezing breath sent skeins of ice up the drake’s back, nearly to its saddle, and when Valgrind righted, Náli landed back in the saddle. Thank the gods.
Rune let out a triumphant shout as Alfie swooped away and banked, preparing for another run. “It’s working! They’re freezing him!”
Tessa thought of the men encased in ice outside the walls of Aeres, frozen in place, swords, and spears, and bows upraised, mouths permanently open and eyes forever fixed wide in terror.
She felt a smile threaten. They could do this!
It didn’t matter how huge the other drake was: they had three on their side, and they were cleaver, and quick, and this could work!
Alfie smoothed through the end of the turn, and Tessa pushed upright so she could get a better glimpse of the purple drake.
Ice dripped from it, icicles long as its tail. It dropped lower in the clouds, almost brushing the clouds, wings hampered by the clinging mantle of ice that coated the delicate membrane between the bones. It sank lower, and lower, and lower…
The rider swung the sword around, a brilliant flash, and brought the flat of it down on the drake’s shoulder.
The drake let out a cry that made Percy, and Alfie, and Valgrind’s shrieks seem like whispers.
It stabbed down deep into her ears, and she would have covered them if she dared release the reins and handgrips.
She felt the cry in her stomach, all her insides shuddering against it.
Rune’s chest vibrated against her back, and she thought he must have shouted something, the sound swallowed up in the awful, piercing wail of the purple drake.
Then the beast flung out its head and its tail, and shook all over, like a dog climbing out of a pond.
The sound of glass breaking rang out across the mountaintops. Ice breaking. The clear glaze encasing the drake shattered, turned white, and then flew in all directions.
Tessa shouted in alarm, in dismay. She shut her eyes, and ducked her head, and felt a shard of ice graze her cheek, a bright line of fire just to the side of her helmet’s chin strap.
The drake bellowed again, and this time it was distinctly triumphant.
By contrast, Alfie’s bleating was nothing but distress.
Tessa lifted her head and saw the purple drake regaining altitude, wings pumping strong and sure, tail whipping.
Its horns were at least three feet long, thick around at the base as a man’s waist, its frill broad as two wagons lined up side by side when it flared open.
It could swallow a man whole, Tessa thought, looking at its jaws, its knives for teeth, and for a moment, cold fear gripped her so fiercely she thought she might faint.