Chapter 2 #2
“Wishful thinking,” Zaarib yelled back, his chest flat to Dahab’s golden scales, his eyes fixed on the trebuchet as the arm pulled back, the sling sailing through the air, fire poised to hit the sacred city.
A bolt of lightning drove from a dark cloud and speared the wood. It blackened, charring in an instant, and relief spiked my chest when the arm crumbled from the trebuchet.
Too late, the lightning soul said with a heavy weight in her voice.
What? No. I hit the trebuchet, I stopped it.
“The north tower!” Aliah yelled, breaking out of formation and shooting towards the city, Habiba a burgundy streak in the rain. I should have reprimanded her for it, but when I saw why she’d acted, I exchanged a swift glance with Zaarib, and we followed.
I’d burned the trebuchet, but the arm had already done its job, and deep crimson fire rained down on the sacred city.
The north tower’s crenelated rooftop had crumbled, turned to ash and rubble in an instant.
My gut cramped at the sight, at the tower’s innards exposed.
People fled down rubble-strewn staircases, screams of alarm and panic replacing the city sounds of mere minutes ago.
Dahab swung his head around, silver gleaming on his gilded scales from the lightning as he communicated something with urgency to Mak.
Soldiers, in the hills, Mak’s furious growl told me. Wearing our colours, Ithanysian colours. Exactly like the ground warriors Ameirah and I spotted in the mountains around Red Manniston. Was this the king’s doing, or more Kaldic trickery?
“Shit,” I snarled, staring at the smoking tower, half of it burned to ruins in a single minute. The foot soldiers were bad enough, but if there were more of those trebuchets hidden in the hills…
The sky flared with light at the same moment the lightning soul hissed at me to control myself.
I saw the clouds split in slow motion, and my stomach twisted into a knot.
I tried to stop it, reached out with all my magic—control and lightning both—but it was too late to stop the bolt that speared from the clouds and struck a two-storey building at the edge of the city.
“Varidian!” Zaarib yelled, and I was so certain that he knew, that he’d swing Dahab around to take on Mak, that he’d try to knock me from the sky so I couldn’t harm anyone else. But what he said was, “Wyvern!”
Wings took to the sky over Daurith, the house guard finally reacting to the warning Shula and Nabil flew to give them, but that wasn’t what Zaarib warned of.
Other wings, midnight blue and black and deep wine red rose from the shadows of the hills outside the city, cutting through the storm clouds as one.
Flying as if part of the same body the way the wyverns flew at the Red Star.
I threw my right hand out, clenching my fingers into a fist and spiking razor-sharp control magic into the minds of the five wyverns at the front of the formation, the ten behind them, the… God, how many were there?
“I can’t control them,” I shouted, trying to mask my panic.
Zaarib’s smile was a vicious slash in his brown face. “The old-fashioned way then.”
“Whitbar manoeuvre?” I yelled. Back then, rogue tigers had crossed the Wall of Hydaran close to the southern coast and only Zaarib and I had been there to stop them. With Aliah hauling wing and scale into the city, it was only the two of us now.
“I hate you, but fine,” Zaarib shouted, pulling off the thick leather gloves that protected his scarred hands.
Like the other wyverns we encountered, these had no riders, either, but there were fae on the ground I could control.
And whoever pulled the threads to control the wyverns had to be here somewhere.
If I could find them, I could end this before any more of Daurith was damaged.
Before anyone else was hurt. I didn’t want to think about who might have been caught up in the first tower blast, or the lightning strike.
Zaarib and Dahab caught a current and soared, flying directly above us. I didn’t let any nerves form, even if my control magic had been essential to this when we did it in Whitbar. The storm would help, and cover any lightning strikes I made.
And if it didn’t… I had to hope my oldest friend didn’t disown me.
I waited until the wyverns were close enough that we could see the reflection of lightning in their full-black eyes, waited until Zaarib snapped out a hand and seized hold of the front five beasts with his magic, using telekinesis to fling them into the second line.
My heart thundered a rapid drum against my ribs.
In a messy rush, I speared magic into those ranks of soldiers marching through the hills, and relief made my stomach ripple when my magic sank into their weak minds.
Suspiciously weak, not a single glimmer of will in any of them.
Command the wyverns to pull back, I ordered every soldier whose mind I ransacked. But there was no flicker of recognition, not a single gleam of thought at all. As if they were empty, just shells with no brain.
Zaarib grabbed four wyverns in the second line of the formation, throwing them into the others to scatter their tight formation.
“Mak,” I shouted over the whipping wind; he rumbled a reply, the air scorching hot a moment later as fire gathered in his throat, perfuming the air with hot blood and seething iron. “Wait until they can’t escape.”
I know what I’m doing, was his grumbled reply. His wings carried us closer, closer with leathery booms that made my blood pump faster, hairs standing on end. I felt helpless without my magic, useless.
You are never without magic, the lightning soul reminded me. Call upon the clouds. But try to avoid hitting the city you flew all this way to defend.
Great advice, thanks, I sniped, eyeing the shadows wyverns cast over the mindless soldiers on the ground, the dark clouds above as light rippled through their fluffy underbellies.
I reached inward for the crackling core that had burned since the moment she saved me from the storm and hissed when ice burned cold flame from my fingertips up my arms into my chest. Pain, as was the price for great magic.
Aim it, she barked. Don’t waste the bolt. Drag it down from the sky into the legion.
Drag it down, sure. That seemed easy.
Control it with your mind the way you would control anything else.
That I could do.
“Mak, now!” I yelled, plunging my command into the lightning magic at the same time Mak’s jaws parted and he roared fire upon our enemies. Scales turned red as they burned, eyes burned to ash, and the screams of the wyverns as they burned was horrific. The sound of injured allies, not of our enemy.
They’re Kaldic, I told myself even if it tasted untrue. It was what I had to tell myself to get through it, to wrap a lightning bolt in ironclad control and drive it into the heart of the legion.
It could have been my legion. They looked no different on the outside, except for lacking riders, but I pushed that thought aside.
Mak’s fire, the lightning, and Zaarib’s unfaltering magic scattered the wyverns into groups of twos and threes.
Mak’s wings caught a swell as he surged after a single wyvern, sinking violent teeth into its throat and ripping it out within a minute.
Beneath us, Dahab caught the beasts that flew to its defence.
That action made me pause, made my mind whir at frantic speed. The fact they flew to defend the injured wyvern suggested they were intelligent, unlike the mindless soldiers below. Or were they following the commands of their puppet master?
“Mak, the ruby,” I roared when a deep red wyvern darted towards his left flank, fire pouring from its parted jaws. I dropped my stomach to Mak’s back, the air scorching hot as it blasted over my back, heating my leathers, tugging strands of hair from the knot on my head.
Too fucking close. Another metre and I’d be burned to a husk.
Oops, Mak replied with a wince down our link. I kept close to his back as he angled himself around to face the ruby, blasting it with fire so hot it made my skin tingle. Are you hurt?
“By sheer fluke, no.”
Dahab surged up and carved the sharp talon at the tip of his golden wing across the belly of the ruby, making it falter mid-air.
At the same time, Zaarib threw out a hand, a battering ram that shoved back the other wyverns.
We were outnumbered by twenty to two even now, but if I took out the fae controlling them, would they simply fall from the sky?
I spiked their minds with the sharp slice of control magic that made me a villain to so many and again found those threads of someone else’s power.
Follow them, the lightning soul instructed, as if I hadn’t thought of that.
I didn’t argue, didn’t have the time. This battle was fast and messy and deadly if I slipped even once. I sent my power zipping down the threads of command, surprised when they led deep into the mountains we’d come from, rather than the foot soldiers below. And further. And further.
Too far for me to reach, disappearing deep into central Ithanys.
To command wyverns from that distance… they were far more powerful than I was. A chill made me shudder.
Worry about that later, the lightning soul. Keep following them. We need to know where they’re hiding.
Wyfell was the obvious answer, but the threads went through sand and long grass and over hills… to Morysen. Where I’d sent my wife.
A shrill wyvern cry came behind us, and I exhaled a hard breath.
Nabil and Buchra had returned, along with members of Daurith’s guard.
I made sure to avoid their path as lightning burned an icy path through me and a dark cloud split, thunder rocking the ground moments before it struck three wyverns, splitting into deadly branches.
“It’s too precise,” Zaarib yelled as Dahab raced past us to intercept a black-eyed wyvern. “That’s no ordinary storm.”
“The lightning soul,” Nabil shouted when he reached us; I flinched in my seat atop Mak. “It’s helping us. Why?”
“Who cares?” Zaarib flattened himself to Dahab’s back when a dark navy wyvern flew above him, its barbed tail missing him by a hair. “Just avoid—”
Fire erupted from the mouth of the navy wyvern, the same crimson fire that had been loaded into the trebuchet, but something about it was wrong in a way that made me shrink back. Its core was pure, void black. Unnatural fire.
“Nabil!” I roared, throwing my weight on Mak to angle us across the sky, and he responded to my panic with fearsome wingbeats and a cry of warning.
Two of Daurith’s guard sped to reach him, closer than Zaarib and me.
As we soared across the sky, I had just enough time to exhale a hard gust of air when the stalwart, aging grey wyvern knocked Buchra out of the path of fire, just enough time for a second of relief—and then that unnatural crimson fire hit the old grey wyvern and its fierce-scowled female rider.
It should have warped and mangled skin, should have melted muscle, leaving scars the wyvern would have to carry for its long life.
The black core hit scale and wing and horns and—the Daurith rider was incinerated where she sat. Her wyvern’s flesh melted, sloughed off, and turned to ash, leaving only bones and death.
It happened in seconds. Happened too fast for me to process it.
Too fast for the small sapphire that had pushed Nabil and Buchra back to avoid the spray of crimson and void.
Unnatural flame caught the wyvern’s wing and razed it to a skeletal husk in a single blink.
Shrieking its fear and rage, the wyvern spun through the air, claws and talons grasping at clouds, at lightning, as Zaarib raced to catch her, but too late as she crashed to the ground along with her rider.
I ripped my stare away from that ruined creature, its broken rider, and fear as sharp and cold as the day I lost Fahad speared my chest, making it impossible to breathe.
“Nabil!” I screamed with the last of my air as the black-eyed wyvern opened its jaws again, flame more lethal than anything I’d ever witnessed gathering in its throat. And I knew, even as Mak flew as fast as the storm, his wingbeats like rapid thunder, we wouldn’t reach him in time.