29. Eradin
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ERADIN
The horn’s blast stomped through my chest. I was about to become a cautionary tale commons mothers whispered to their children.
Forty-five elite dragons launched from the ground in perfect formation, their riders moving like they’d rehearsed this in their sleep. My team shuffled and jerked, Kerrel’s mount already trying to scramble backward.
Go, Selira shouted through the bond. Now. We fly NOW.
I clamped my thighs tighter around her sides, my hands clutching the spike jutting up in front of me. “Wait.”
Why wait? We are faster. We are better.
She truly was speaking in my mind.
“Are you alright, Kerrel?” We were a team. I wasn’t taking off without him, and he didn’t appear to be in control of his dragon.
“I’m fine,” he shouted.
The last of the elite teams disappeared through the doors.
Fenian went last, Aristus moving with a liquid grace that made the other dragons look clumsy, even the good ones. He glanced my way. Then he was gone.
“Now,” I said.
Selira burst from the ground.
The world compressed into speed and wind and the burn in my thighs as I fought to stay mounted.
No saddle meant every movement translated directly into my body, every bank and dive trying to peel me off her spine like old paint.
My fingers cramped around the neck spike, my knuckles going from scarlet to white.
We plunged into the tunnel, the rest of my team beside me.
Torches lined the walls in iron sconces, their flames guttering as we passed. The air pressure changed, making my ears pop. The tunnel descended at an angle that shouldn’t exist, too steep to be natural, carved in raked grooves by something I’d rather not encounter if it still lived here.
Behind us, the doors boomed shut. The sound echoed, vibrating through rock that had stood for longer than the kingdom had names for things.
Trapping us inside.
Darkness consumed us, and it was all I could do to see my hand in front of my face.
“Can you see?” I cried out to Selira.
She sent me reassurance through the bond.
I counted breaths to keep from screaming. One. Two. Three.
As she flew, Selira’s talons scraped across stone. The tunnel walls were closing in or we were expanding. My throat tightened along with them. The darkness had weight, pressing down on my chest until breathing became a choice I had to deliberately make.
Four. Five.
Selira’s certainty pulsed through the bond. She’d flown in darkness before. Wild dragons didn’t need torchlight to hunt.
Six.
The ceiling expanded, disappearing upward to an impossible height. I could feel it more than see it, the way sound ricocheted off a smooth surface and kept going and going until it faded into something older than sounds should be.
Silver light bloomed ahead.
We burst onto a shore made up of black sand littered with chunks of white. Ahead, a lake stretched impossibly wide, its surface as silver as a mirror, reflecting nothing.
Selira landed on the shore, her claws gouging deep into the sand. The others crowded around us, their dragons blasting flames and clawing at each other in agitation.
Feels wrong, Selira said.
Lord Callix didn’t slow. He and his dragon abandoned their team, racing from the shore, skimming above the water.
His dragon’s wing-tip kissed the surface, and something below moved, peeling away and snapping upward.
It oozed up the dragon’s black scales in a silver frost. Except frost didn’t crackle and creak.
The dragon’s wings locked mid-beat. Its mouth opened, but instead of flames or a roar, nothing came out. Everything that made the creature alive had stopped.
Lord Callix angled sideways to fling himself off the dragon, but the lake was faster. The mass crept up his leg, his torso, reaching his face as his mouth opened to release a scream that never came.
They fell, hitting the surface, sinking without a splash, sucked down.
The lake smoothed over and stilled.
Silence descended on the shore as we gaped at the area where Lord Callix and his dragon had lost their lives.
My breakfast crawled up my throat, but I swallowed down the bile.
I couldn’t look away from where they’d disappeared. Couldn’t stop waiting for them to surface, even though I knew dead things didn’t swim.
Selira watched the other dragons. All broken. Teeth on inside instead of outside. Her nostrils flared. No fire. Cold, not heat.
Forty-four elite riders now. Four commons.
While the rest of the elites clustered on the right side of the shore, my team urged their dragons closer to Selira, our eagerness to survive overriding any urge to cross. Instinct knew death when it tasted it.
“We stay together,” Reece said. “Watch each other’s backs.” His voice came out steady even though his hands twitched enough to make his reins click together.
“Good idea,” Lyndie said from my right side. “We’re a team.” She urged her dragon closer to the elites, her smile ghoulishly bright. When her head cocked, I realized she was listening to their discussion. Spying.
Kerrel kept jerking on his dragon’s reins, to the point the beast backed into the wall we’d emerged from. His face had gone green-gray, and I imagined mine looked the same.
The elite teams didn’t wait long. It was a race, after all, and they hoped to win prizes at the end of this first leg. They pushed forward in groups, perhaps hoping to overwhelm the lake with numbers and speed.
A ruby dragon and rider took the lead for her team, flying high.
Mist swirled off the lake, rushing up to meet them. The silver liquid that had killed Callix had aerosolized. It hung above the surface in droplets fine enough to breathe. The dragon’s nostrils flared, pulling it in deep the way dragons did before flaming.
I could almost see the liquid hardening inside the poor creature.
Stone took the dragon from the inside. The rider’s scream died before it started. She yanked on the reins, and magic flared in the runes etched along the harness’s surface.
“Fly,” she bellowed, trying to force her dragon to keep going.
The dragon’s wings locked, and the pair plummeted, spiraling down toward the eerily smooth surface.
They hit with a heavy smack and were gobbled down. A ripple smoothed outward from where they’d made impact, lapping along the shore, before the surface went flat again.
I’d bitten my tongue, but the pain felt distant, unimportant when compared to what was coming. We had to cross that silver death.
Teams scattered, fleeing across the lake. Some made it. Most didn’t. The shore started to empty except for us.
Selira’s frustration crashed through the bond. We are faster!
“We’re also alive,” I said under my breath.
Lyndie sidled her dragon closer to Selira, her gaze tracking the mist patterns. “They have no idea how to get past this,” she whispered, shooting me a level look. “I hoped one of the elite had read about a similar test in the past. I think we should wait. See how this plays out before…”
Before we tried to race across like the others and died.
“Agreed.” I scanned the cavern, looking for exits that didn’t exist other than one far in the distance, on the opposite shore. Water lapped right up to the steep cave walls, and far above, faelights floated, outlining jagged rock, revealing no way out in that direction.
The air tasted like metal and blood and something older, the way a grave might if graves could exhale.
Selira’s muscles remained rigid beneath me, and through the bond I felt her recognition.
Her species remembered this thing living beneath the surface.
Remembered what it did to dragons who flew too close.
I leaned across her neck.
“Tell me,” I whispered. “How can we cross?”
Badbadbad.
“But how?”
She didn’t reply.
Shapes writhed inside the mist, teeth or tendrils or something worse. They didn’t have eyes that I could see, but they moved as if they knew exactly where we waited. Tasting the air. Daring us to try to cross.
Panic rippled through the remaining riders. Three more teams tried to rush the crossing together. The mist took some, stone spreading faster than screams. The lake smoothed over like it had never been disturbed.
The shore was thinning fast.
My hands cramped on Selira’s shoulder spike.
Movement overhead made my head snap up. Aristus’s midnight scales caught the dim light.
No. Not the lake. Not him.
But Fenian was already guiding his dragon forward, approaching the silver surface with its mist of death. Air scraped down my throat. I didn’t dare shout a warning. If he looked back, he wouldn’t look forward.
I couldn’t do anything but watch.
But he did something I’d never seen an elite do.
Fenian let go of the reins, and they went slack on Aristus’s neck. He shifted his weight forward and let the dragon decide where and how to fly.
My pulse drummed in my ears. Heat that had nothing to do with the bond or my palms flooded through me, settling low in my belly where it had no business being.
He’d learned that from our conversations. A crown prince had listened when a commons woman spoke, and he’d let go of everything he’d been taught.
For me. Because of me.
The knowledge made me dizzy.
He glanced back. Time stretched and compressed all at once. I knew what he’d done. He knew I’d seen it.
And in his look I found everything we couldn’t say in front of the crowd, Don’t die.
A knot formed in my chest.
Lady Severine yanked Heartsbrim’s reins hard enough the ruby dragon’s head snapped back. Her voice carried across the water. “Fenian, what the fuck? Your dragon’s unbound! Grab the reins!”
Aristus wove through the mist without triggering it. His wings caught air differently without his rider directing every movement. Whatever had been catching was finally free to work as it should.
The silver-gray parted around him.
Drawn to fear, Selira said. Magic.
With the reins loose, it found nothing but a dragon moving with his rider.
They made it halfway across before pulling up, circling, showing a way across existed for those willing to find it.