Chapter 5
“Stay back,” Fel barked as he leaped into the doorway to meet the wyvern.
Syla’s earlier belief that the scaled creature wouldn’t fit through proved wrong. It simply tucked its wings against its body. But the pedestal Fel had pushed into the doorway impeded it.
When he swung his mace toward its snout, the wyvern accepted the powerful blow as though a mosquito had stung it and nothing more. Long fangs leering, it snapped its jaws at Fel.
Syla gasped, certain the wyvern would wrap its deadly maw around his shoulder—or his neck. But Fel was more agile than his age suggested. He leaped lightly back, and the jaws snapped at empty air inches from his face.
Again, he swung his mace, smashing the metal head between the creature’s yellow eyes. That was enough to make the wyvern jerk back, but it didn’t retreat. Muscles bunching, it lunged for the doorway again. The pedestal skidded back and toppled to the tile floor with a thunderous thunk.
Feeling foolish for having grabbed tchotchkes instead of a weapon, Syla looked around for something she could use to help Fel. Or… in case he went down… she needed to defend herself.
“Not that I kept weapons in my room,” she muttered, spotting nothing useful in the wreckage.
Mace met fangs with a loud clink. Again, the wyvern backed away, but, again, it didn’t retreat. It screeched, the piercing sound supernaturally loud, and another winged predator landed beside it. Damn it.
“I’m a healer, not a warrior,” Syla snarled in frustration.
She lifted her pack, thinking she might throw it. If Fel had complained about the heft of the book, maybe a wyvern would too—if she could smack it in an eye.
“Back up.” Fel kept his mace raised to defend their retreat. “We’re going to have to go another way.”
Though she doubted there was another way clear, Syla nodded and crept backward. If that mace scarcely bothered the wyverns, her book would do even less.
As the two creatures advanced through the doorway, a massive splitting of stone came from behind Syla and Fel.
Debris rained down, and Syla halted, gaping as a huge chunk of the ceiling over the hall was torn free, revealing the night sky above—and another great scaled beast.
At first, she believed it a third wyvern, but it was too large. A huge green dragon flexed its neck and flung the section of roof aside.
Fel swore, pushing Syla against the wall as he tried to keep his mace up toward the wyverns and the new threat.
The dragon roared, the sound thunderous in the night. The wyverns paused, peering at the larger creature, and didn’t charge into the hallway. That was no reprieve, however, when the dragon’s huge horned head swept down through the hole it had made.
Fel sprang past Syla to meet it with his mace.
“Watch out for fire!” she yelled, terrified that her only ally would be incinerated.
When Fel swung his mace toward the dragon’s scaled snout, the weapon struck, thudding against the armor-like scales, but it did even less than it had against the wyvern.
Almost casually, the dragon head-butted Fel, sending the forty-year veteran tumbling away.
As he rolled cursing down the hallway, he clipped Syla.
Knocked off balance, she couldn’t spring away when the dragon’s maw stretched toward her, more chunks of the ceiling clattering down as it encroached. Terrified, she swung her pack at their enemy. Impervious, the dragon clasped its jaws around her.
Syla screamed, expecting excruciating pain. The fanged maw did wrap around her with alarming pressure, but the beast didn’t tear her to pieces or fling her away as it had done the roof.
No, it pulled her out of the hallway—out of the keep entirely—and lifted her into the air. She screamed again and clamped her hand to her face to make sure her spectacles didn’t fall off.
As if that would matter if the dragon intended to eat her.
After flying into the air twenty or thirty feet above the keep, the dragon twisted its neck and tossed her. More terror rushed into her, and she flailed with her free hand, imagining flying all the way over the courtyard wall and off the bluff to land in the rocky sea far below.
Instead, she came down on the dragon’s back with a startling thump. Someone grabbed her to keep her from bouncing off. Powerful arms manipulated her, maneuvering her into a position astride the dragon, as if she were mounted on a horse. A horse with a very broad back.
A rider, came the observation from the tiny part of her mind that remained capable of rational thinking. This dragon had a rider.
That did nothing to comfort her. When a strong arm wrapped around her to keep her in place, she knew she was imprisoned, not saved.
“Greetings, Princess Syla,” a ridiculously calm baritone voice said. The rider.
She squirmed in his grip, though the last thing she wanted was to fall off and break her neck.
Through the distorted corners of her spectacles, she could make out the castle courtyard far below.
No, falling would not be good. But she couldn’t let the rider take her away and abandon Fel.
Those wyverns would get him—if they hadn’t already.
“I got it right, didn’t I?” the rider asked. “Princess Syla? I’m here to take you somewhere safe, Your Highness.”
“Like where?” she demanded. “A torture chamber?”
“No, my mission is to keep you from that fate.”
The dragon had been circling above the courtyard, but it banked, wings flapping to take off in another direction.
“Fel!” Syla craned her neck to look down, her hand still pressed to her spectacles.
For the first time in her life, she was flying, riding a dragon, but there was nothing delightful about it. And wyverns lurked all over the courtyard below, blood dripping from their talons and fangs. They’d paused to eye the dragon warily, but its arrival hadn’t scared them away.
“Is that the soldier?” the rider asked.
“My bodyguard. He’s in danger.” Syla thrust her hand toward the ruined castle below.
She couldn’t see Fel, who was presumably still in that hallway, but she could see the two wyverns that had been attacking them.
One disappeared into the building. “Help him!” she urged, though she doubted her captor would.
If anything, he had to be pleased that she was alone and utterly defenseless. Her bag had fallen, so she didn’t even have her book to throw at him.
“Very well,” the rider surprised her by saying.
The dragon glanced back. It had been angling out toward the sea, but the rider must have communicated with it—she’d read about the telepathic link that dragons and riders shared—for the creature banked again, and it flew back toward the courtyard.
The wyverns must have believed the dragon intended to leave them to their business because they weren’t looking up at its approach.
Not until the great green creature soared low, wings stretched out in a glide that took it over the ruined courtyard wall to skim the ground.
It snapped up a wyvern that had been about to enter the keep.
Fangs crunched audibly through scale and bone, and the smaller beast screeched.
The wyvern twisted and tried to claw at its captor, but the dragon had it around the back of the neck, and the smaller beast couldn’t reach it with talons or fangs.
More crunches sounded, more bone breaking. The vertebrae in the wyvern’s neck?
As if its prey weighed nothing, the dragon flung it over the wall and toward the edge of the bluff, as Syla had earlier imagined it would throw her. Limp, with its neck broken, the creature tumbled out of view, already dead.
The remaining wyverns, having realized the threat, took to the air.
Their chaotic flight reminded Syla of when she’d seen someone’s wolfhound barking and running down the beach, seagulls scattering.
The dragon roared instead of barking and sprang for another wyvern, one that had lingered, trying to take its meal with it.
Syla, still horrified that the scavengers were eating the remains of her people, looked toward the castle instead of at the body that dropped.
She tried to spot Fel near the doorway, but the shadows were deep in that hallway.
The lantern he’d carried had gone out. Even the courtyard was dim, with no moon visible through the clouds and few fires remaining burning, so she couldn’t make out much.
Nor could she see the face of her rider when she glanced back at him.
The dragon finished the second wyvern it had caught, breaking its neck, the same as the other, and flung it aside. Briefly, their mount landed, but only, Syla sensed, so that it could bunch its muscles to spring into the air again.
“Fel!” Syla yelled, afraid they’d been too late to help him—and that her captor would take her away before she could learn his fate. “We can’t go yet.”
She glanced back. What could she say to persuade someone who was undoubtedly her enemy?
“He is not the one I was sent to protect,” the rider said.
“I’m not going without him. He’s been my bodyguard for—” She stopped herself from uttering the truth, that Fel had only been assigned to her two weeks earlier. “I’ve known him for years.” That was true. She’d seen Fel often when visiting the castle.
“The wyverns are gone. He’ll survive if we leave him here.”
“He’s got my pack and my book,” she said, trying another tactic, but what would a history tome matter to a dragon rider? Those people didn’t even read.
“Those items sound precious to you.”
“Extremely precious. The pack has a first-aid kit inside.” Technically, it had a random collection of decorative medical items she’d grabbed from around her room, but she had thought to include bandages and suture thread.
“Oh, and there’s a pretty dragon artifact inside.
I’ll give it to you if you pick up my sergeant.
” Maybe it was a silly thing to mention, but she didn’t have much that a rider might value. What else could she bribe him with?
“What color is it?” he surprised her by asking.
“Red.”