45. Fen
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
FEN
The list of suspects was long, and I didn’t have time to figure this out before the next race killed me.
The blade sat on the table where I’d left it, the stylized J on the hilt catching the morning light. My father’s initial. My mother had cleared his desk within days of his death, but someone had kept this knife, a person close enough to have access to things she’d locked away.
They’d tried to kill me with my father’s blade.
When I emerged from the tent, I found servants hurrying through camp, dismantling the elite setup. No one looked at me directly. The elite stood off to the side, near their dragons.
Every single one of them watched me stride across the clearing.
Aristus waited, already saddled.
The wound pulled when I moved, a reminder that someone had entered my tent while I slept and tried to kill me. Whoever it was, they knew the layout. They’d had access. They were someone others—even my dragon—wouldn’t suspect.
That narrowed the list of suspects, but not enough.
Aristus’s saddle sat differently. Eradin had adjusted it to avoid the pressure points where Aristus’s scales had rubbed for years. The girth strap hung looser, giving his ribs room to expand. The breastplate had been positioned to avoid scar tissue.
She’d seen what I hadn’t.
A knot formed in my throat.
I stroked Aristus’s neck and slid my fingers up to the ridge above his eye where the harness had worn the scales smooth. He leaned into my touch, and through our bond I felt his contentment. He turned his head, pressing his jaw against my injured shoulder with a gentleness he’d never used before.
I stood very still while my body locked around the feeling.
“Your Highness.” Vella’s voice cut through the early morning air. She stopped beside me, and she didn’t speak for a long moment. “Are you certain you should fly today? Your wound…”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Of course.” She nodded once, but her smile did not reach her eyes. “We should mount then. The herald will arrive soon.”
She walked back toward where Lord Brimmore stood with his dragon. They exchanged glances, and the lord’s eyes slid across me before flicking away.
Eradin was helping Reece adjust his dragon’s harness. She’d braided her hair back from her face, and all I could think about was how it had looked down when she’d burst into my tent. Feral. Terrified.
For me.
I’d spent thirty years surrounded by people who calculated every approach. She hadn’t calculated anything. She’d just come.
That knowledge sat in my guts like swallowed fire.
My shoulder throbbed harder, but the pain had nothing to do with my wound.
A shimmer of magic announced the herald’s arrival. She materialized in the center of camp, her robes catching light that shouldn’t exist in the gray faelight dawn. Every conversation stopped.
“Today’s trial tests team cohesion,” she said, her voice amplified to reach every corner of camp. “You will navigate floating platforms and shifting pathways. The structures respond to your team’s emotional state. Discord breeds failure. Trust breeds passage.”
She paused, letting that sink in.
“Teams must stay together. That is all.”
She vanished.
Teams clustered together, their voices rising in discussion. I stood beside Aristus, my team nowhere near me.
“Mount up,” I growled, and everyone scattered, rushing toward their dragons.
Aristus was picking up on the tension radiating from every elite rider in camp. He didn’t understand why the humans were now moving like prey.
Huge doors groaned open in the canyon walls surrounding the meadow. Five of them, evenly spaced, revealing darkness beyond.
Teams launched, dragons’ wings beating the air. Leather creaked and riders shouted last-minute instructions.
Mounting one-handed tugged at every stitch. My vision whited out halfway up Aristus’s side. I held onto the saddle horn, breathing through the pain until I could see again.
Eradin sat on Selira nearby, her hands on the dragon’s neck spike. She watched with concern in her eyes.
Lyndie and Reece flanked her, their formation tight.
“Be careful,” Eradin hissed. “I mean it.”
“Will do.”
She nodded, then Selira took off and Eradin guided the dragon toward one of the open doors, her team following.
I cued Aristus into flight and toward the nearest opening. My team flew behind me, Vella on my right, Brimmore, Blair, and Alys bringing up the rear.
We flew through the door together, into darkness that lasted long enough I lost all sense of direction, Aristus’s wingbeats the only fixed point in nothing.
Light exploded.
We emerged into a space that shouldn’t exist, with mirrored platforms floating in a vast pale void, bright surfaces reflecting everything and nothing, pathways shimmering between them in configurations that shifted even as I tried to map them.
No visible floor or ceiling, just endless space in every direction.
Aristus’s wings beat three times before he lurched and fell into a sickening, weightless drop. I locked my good hand on his neck spike. His wings caught again, and we jolted upward, both of us breathing harder.
He pulled left, putting distance between us and whatever we’d just passed through.
I’d felt what had happened through the bond. We’d flown into a place where the rules of the air had been revoked. His unease came through clearly. There were places here where his wings wouldn’t work. They were invisible, and we’d fall.
I quickly explained to the others.
“Stay close,” I barked after.
The platforms ahead split into three paths.
Left led to a wide, well-lit bridge between two clusters, the surfaces smooth and inviting.
The center area dropped away into a pale haze.
The right side curved upward at an awkward, narrow angle toward platforms that looked half-formed, their edges rough.
Left was obviously the right path to take.
Aristus pulled right, his confidence coming through the bond in the same way he’d warned me on entry.
This way only, he pretty much said.
“Your Highness.” Blair’s voice echoed from behind. “The left path is clear. We should go that way.”
“We go right,” I said.
Vella was already moving left, her dragon responding to her cues. Alys hesitated at the split, looking between us.
“Right,” I said again. “Alys, right.”
She swung right.
Vella didn’t.
“Remember, I co-lead this team.” She shot the others quick glances. “You don’t need to follow his rule all the time.”
Heartsbrim hit a dead area between one wingbeat and the next, his wings finding nothing.
Vella’s screams punctuated the dragon and rider’s drop.
The platforms below dissolved into a void, showing nothing beneath them.
Heartsbrim’s wings caught and hauled them back up in an uneven spiral, Vella’s hands locked on the reins so hard the leather creaked.
The left path gleamed once more.
Vella’s face lost all color.
We all swung right.
My shoulder throbbed, my grip on Aristus’s spike the only thing keeping me in the saddle. Listening to him had saved our lives, but if I told them that, they wouldn’t see it like I did. They’d see weakness.
We flew deeper into the challenge.
The platforms grew denser, the pathways more complex. Mirrored surfaces reflected our dragons, our faces, and our worst selves back at us in fractured pieces.
We entered a space where the air felt too heavy to breathe and shouted words arrived delayed. My own voice echoed back oddly.
“Stay together,” I called.
“Fall apart,” came back.
Aristus’s unease spiked. He struggled to navigate in a place where nothing made sense.
“Left!” Vella’s voice rang out, full of confidence. “The path left is clear. I can see it.”
I looked left but saw nothing but empty space.
But Vella’s voice held absolute conviction. She’d trained as a strategist, and she’d studied trial records, preparing for scenarios exactly like this. I was certain this was why she’d been assigned to my team in the first place.
She sounded so sure.
Aristus pulled right, harder this time.
Pain made thinking difficult. The edges of my vision blurred, but I had to choose. Listen to a member of my team or trust a dragon who could barely fly without his wings locking.
Vella was already banking left. Brimmore and Blair followed. Alys hesitated, looking between Vella and me.
“Right,” I said. “Aristus says right.”
“Your dragon says right?” Vella frowned. “Your Highness, I can see—”
“Right.”
I leaned into Aristus’s turn. He responded, his wings catching the air currents, pleased that I’d finally stopped fighting him.
Curses rang out behind me, and the other dragons adjusted course.
“He’s not leading,” Lord Brimmore said, loud enough to carry. “He believes he’s following his dragon’s directions.”
Alys snickered, lagging in the rear.
The path vanished after the three of us had turned. Alys’s dragon clipped the edge of a dead area, one wing suddenly weightless while the other still beat. They spun, corkscrewing toward the void below, her shrieks cutting through the distorted air.
“Pull up,” Brimmore shouted, leaning over to watch.
I sent Aristus into a dive, his wings tucking. The stitches in my shoulder tore. I felt each one give, a sequence of snaps followed by hot blood trickling down my arm and chest. The bandage Eradin had wrapped so carefully soaked through.
I locked my thighs and leaned into his neck.
We weren’t going to reach Alys in time.
But her dragon found air again, the wings catching, hauling them up in a lurching climb. Her dragon’s left wing hung crooked, the membrane torn where it had brushed the void.
The dragon fought for altitude, each wingbeat weaker than the last. Blood dripped from the torn membrane, scattering below.
I pulled Aristus alongside them, close enough to catch the terror on Alys’s face. Her dragon was dying beneath her, and she knew it.
“Jump to Aristus,” I said.
Her eyes went wide. “I can’t—”
“You can and you will. On three. One.”
She eased sideways in her saddle.
“Two.”
Her dragon pitched, the wounded wing folding at an awkward angle. They dropped before catching again.