21. Falling
Falling
The air explodes in a burst of light. I don’t make it three steps before I’m caught.
Tage the dragon snatches me up and closes me in his claws.
I’m no more significant than a fluff of dandelion, my bones no more substantial than the veins beneath the thin skin of a leaf.
So very crushable in the massive arms of a beast. It would take nothing for him to end me.
It might even happen by accident, with no effort from him at all .
. . just the slightest pressure, the slightest flexing of his considerable brawn, and I would be no more.
A quick, panicked glance around reveals shapes of green, bronze, and pearl: the other dragons, also fully transformed.
I glimpse them before Tage lifts off with a single woosh of his wings. And then we’re moving and everything is a screeching blur.
I’m flying.
Well, I’m not flying. A dragon is flying and carrying me with him.
I’m his captive because he decided I should live.
Tage decreed it. Not the others. An important distinction.
The others are more than willing to see me dead.
As long as they’re around, I’m not safe.
You’re not safe with Tage either. An important reminder.
I live or die at his whim. Once his curiosity for me is satisfied, he could revoke his protection.
I sit in the cradle of his claws, tucked close to the curve of his muscular chest, holding fast, as insubstantial as a thistle in grass.
Scaled dragon flesh surrounds me, rippling with his movements.
I cling to the hard curve of his talons, fear sour in my mouth.
I glance down and then yank my gaze up with a sharp inhale, looking away from the swiftly stirring clouds, the vast, wild unknown speeding by below, steering my thoughts from the very real possibility that I might fall and plunge to my death.
Would I die on impact? The moment I hit land? Or might I die on the way down, a victim of my own terror and the roaring, breath-stealing wind?
The air howls around me like an angry animal, clawing at my skin and hair with sharp teeth. Tears stream in steady ribbons down my face, and it’s hard to say whether they’re from the force of wind or my despair.
We’re moving north. Deafening wind fills my ears. Through my blurred vision, I glimpse the jagged outline of the immense mountains ahead amid the breaks of fog. I can’t see the ground below anymore. The clouds float all around us like smoke.
All of it is too much.
I’m a captive of these devils. And yet I have long been a prisoner. I’ve merely traded one cage for another.
The atmosphere is thin, impossible to catch and drag into my lungs. I grow faint, hungry for air.
Wind rushes past me in a screaming roar, and I think I’m screaming, too. I feel the strain in my throat.
There is only sky and the smell of water-soaked wind and vapor. Fog. And something else undefinable. A lush, earthy musk I’d never experienced before. Dragon.
The fear of falling swallows me. Plummeting. Dropping. Tumbling through the air.
I tighten my grip, hold fast to the smooth curve of claws, clinging for life.
I still want to live.
After this day’s losses and suffering, after losing everyone, after everything . . . the will to survive still pumps through me, indomitable, speeding along in the hot flow of my blood.
I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to join Da and Maretta and all the others. Not yet.
Dragon skin undulates around me.
Time is lost. I don’t know if it’s been minutes or hours or days. Maybe a lifetime passed. Maybe I’m an old woman now who has been clinging forever in this dragon’s grasp. I feel old and battered. My trembling arms tire and weaken.
Despite everything in me that cries out to fight, to survive, I can’t hold on anymore. My shaking fingers slip from the dark, steel claws. I let go.
And then I’m falling to the ground.
Down.
Down.
Down.
My arms pinwheel violently at my sides as the wind rushes me.
The sight of Tage fades, the gleaming-dark underside of his belly growing more and more distant. He goes from a charcoal-dark giant to a blot, then a speck, then a pinpoint, then nothing. Nothingness eaten up by clouds and fog and terror, I don’t see him anymore. I don’t see any of them.
They’re gone.
I twist, turning until I’m facing down. The far-off ground swells closer and closer, coming for me as I am coming for it.
I scream against my death, against my grief, against the sadness of this life, against the lonely years, against the cruelty of magic, against the stinging, earsplitting roar of wind, the force of which attacks my skin, threatening to rend it from my body.
Spots flash before my eyes. Darkness pushes at the edges of my vision, closing in.
My screams fade and wilt, turning hoarse until no sound escapes from me at all as I fall.
My limbs go limp, no longer doing anything except flopping in the air.
My head goes fuzzy. Then heavy. My neck boneless.
Then the world . . .
Dark.