Brennan #3
“Deal.” I grin. Yeah. This guy is mine. Waiting for him to agree would be foolish—he’d probably retreat just for the fun of watching me fall—so I take off at a run, my feet flying across the branch. I race down the limb, my gaze on the leafy end for the first sign it’s going to dip under my weight.
The second the branch wavers, I leap.
Time slows to heartbeats for the brief seconds I’m airborne and the orange beats his wings, preparing to push back.
These are either the first moments of the rest of my life or the last of my existence.
My arms swing through the air as if I can claw my way across the distance, and my feet kick as momentum hurtles me toward the dragon.
This is definitely not the way Kaori taught us to mount.
I slam into the space between his nostrils, air gushing from my lungs on impact, and I grasp the first handholds I can find, which happen to be the edge of one scale and the ridge of one nostril.
“Little birdie can fly,” he taunts, and sure enough, we’re sailing through the air, his head already moving away from the branch.
My fingers dig into the crevices between scales, and every muscle in my upper body strains as I haul myself upward, unwilling to stick my feet anywhere near those teeth.
The ground rushes by, or maybe it’s the canopy.
Either way, I’m not losing focus long enough to look as I crawl up this dragon’s face in the most unorthodox technique known—and unknown—to mankind.
The angle shifts, and suddenly we’re plummeting, making it even harder to haul myself up between his eyes. “Seriously?” I shout, keeping my attention on the scale beyond the one I have a hold on. “Because this wasn’t hard enough already?”
“If you want easy, you should have joined the infantry,” he quips.
Got it. The only thing I can expect when it comes to this dragon is he’ll do whatever I’m not prepared for.
“You’re learning.” He pulls up out of the dive as branches skim the side of his face and I reach the top of his head.
The abrupt change in direction sends me careening between his horns to slide down his neck.
It’s all I can do to throw my weight side to side, narrowly missing the sharp neck spikes that form no visible pattern down the length to his shoulders.
By Dunne, he must be in a near-vertical climb, because the treetops of the valley lie beyond the deadly tips of his razor-sharp daggertail, and if I don’t stop this momentum, I’ll slide straight off to my death.
There’s no surviving a fall from this altitude, just corpse recovery.
Adrenaline floods my system as I slam my hands down, accepting whatever damage his scales might do in the name of gaining a second of traction.
Pain ripples up my arms, but I catch the edge of a ridge of scales just before his shoulders and dig the heels of my boots into the next set long enough to roll to my stomach.
Wind hits me head-on as the dragon continues to climb toward the midday sun, and I ease my body down one scale at a time, making sure to wedge my toes between scales as I climb toward his seat.
Gravity doesn’t give a shit that I’m Lilith and Asher Sorrengail’s son.
It’s only on my own merit that I’ll make this happen.
My feet slide across his pommel scales, then slip over the smooth dip of his seat.
There’s no foothold here, no way to ease myself into position.
Leaping from the tree was one thing, but I’ll need Zihnal’s own luck to pull this off.
My heart pounds so hard I feel it in my ears, my vision pulsing in time with the beats as I reach for the next ridge of scales, holding on to him with only my hands.
The second I grasp his pommel scales, I let out a shout of victory. “I win!” I yell into the wind as it rips the moisture from my eyes.
“There is no longer an I,” he corrects me as he levels out and my ass settles into the seat. “There is only us.”
I bend my knees, then lock the toes of my boots between his scales just like Kaori taught us, securing my seat.
Then the damned dragon dives into a spiral.
“Marbh,” he tells me. “Not damned dragon. Though I will answer to Glorious One, Brilliant One, or Zihnal’s Chosen should you prefer.”
“I’ll stick with Marbh!” I shout. The ground spins like a pinwheel, and I shove back against the pommel to maintain my seat, defying both centrifugal motion and gravity to prove myself worthy.
“Your worth is no longer in question,” Marbh lectures. “Now it’s only the strength of your stomach we need to test.”
Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.
He climbs, then dives until my face is green and I regret every single choice I made at breakfast, but I hold my seat.
I earn my black leathers. When I look up, the flight field is in the distance, the floor of the box canyon speckled with every color of dragon that has gathered to watch and those who have already landed with their cadets.
I can only hope that my squadmates—that Ennis—can be counted among those riders.
“There is only us,” Marbh tells me again as we fly for home. “Marbh and Brennan.”
I’m no longer just a Sorrengail.
I am Marbh’s rider.