Chapter 56
Chapter fifty-six
Valeraine ran to Lelantos, still where she had left him. Her mask blocked some of her peripheral vision, but she didn’t mind that now. She only had one objective: to get to her dragon.
Kesley was in the saddle, ready to race. He was wearing her flying leathers. He was already tethered to the saddle with a thin rope line. Her friend — her almost-fiance — the man who had tricked her — was in her spot.
With the ease of long practice (and grateful to not be wearing skirts at the moment), she scrambled up the harnesses and lines to reach the saddle behind Kesley.
He turned in his saddle to look at her, and was cocky, as always. “Val, don’t worry about it. I’ll handle this one for you.”
“Get out of my saddle.”
His expression lost a single scale of confidence, but he didn’t back down. “You better dismount. The derby will start any second, and I don’t want to delay our takeoff to help you down.”
Our takeoff. His. And Lelantos’. As if it was a forgone conclusion.
“Get out of my saddle, you cretin,” she snarled, her fury building from her toes to her hair, reverberating from her to Lelantos, his nest-tetchiness fueling her and back again.
The neighboring riders and roadies on the ground all turned, happy to have a spectacle.
The horn blew. It was faint at first, but then other horns placed throughout the field took it up, so they could all hear.
The Royal derby had begun.
The dragons furled their wings to start the race. The snarls and hissing crescendoed, as the dragons began to square off in the air. Lelantos opened his wings, circling them slowly, but stayed on the ground, waiting for her command.
“Leave!” Kesley shouted. He turned further in his seat, his arms outstretched to shove her.
Valeraine saw the knife, handily sheathed at the waist of the flying leathers he wore, and grabbed it. She sliced through his tether line with an instant pop, fast with the force of her fury and the sharpness of the blade.
Kesley was already leaning to the side to grab her, so it was a simple matter for Lelantos to buck and send him sliding, hitting the ground with a satisfying yelp.
Lelantos had been wise to dislike Kesley from the start.
Valeraine sat herself in the saddle, and said, “Fly!”
Lelantos exploded into the air.
Their stuttered start to the race smashed them into the mat of fighting dragons in the air.
Valeraine had never seen so many dragons together. The pressing of wings and bodies, moving past each other only to be snagged in another fight.
They needed to get out of this morass, or everything was lost.
It might already be lost — might already be too late and too slim of chances to win. The start had been entirely botched, with Kesley trying to throw her off.
He had really stolen her dragon.
Valeraine wanted to snarl and attack everything, the nearest flying thing would do.
No, she didn’t. She wanted to determinedly finish the race (then maybe attack Kesley). Lelantos wanted to attack everything, and her mood was not helping his self control.
Valeraine breathed deeply, imagining flying fast, sprinting through clear skies. That was their goal. She tried to calm her racing heart as she pulled the reins up, looking for a break in the melee above her, one that they could squeeze through to touch the icy clouds.
Lelantos got the message, and moved his head to look above, instead of at the temptingly aggressive dragon beside them.
They saw an opening at the same time, and he was powering his wings and shooting toward it even as she was twitching the reins there.
As he flew upward with all of the air his wings could grab, a few things happened. They grazed dragons as they moved, knocking wingtips, jostled again and again. A few dragons swiped for Lelantos with tooth and claw, enough to draw blood but not enough to really slow him down.
Then, as they tilted back and back, aiming for the clouds, Valeraine started to shift off the saddle. Their ascent was too steep, too turbulent. She was falling off.
She wasn’t tethered in — and had no way to tie herself down.
She frantically reached for the pommel, gripping Lelantos with her knees.
She could do this. She had flown without a tether hundreds of times.
But the time that played again and again in her panicked mind was falling through the air, plummeting to her death. The terror of that moment possessed her.
No.
Valeraine pushed it away.
She wouldn’t give Lelantos panic right now.
She focused instead on the feel of the pommel in her hand, sturdy and grippable.
The chilly wind on her neck — thankfully, the mask protected her cheeks from the same fate.
There were the sounds of angry and hurt dragons all around them, but she imagined the quiet of the sky above them instead.
Lelantos flapped his wings, creating vortices of wind that played with her hair.
They squeezed through the fights — a tunnel of dragons.
Valeraine tried not to linger on the images of teeth and claws and blood. She had to stay focused for Lelantos’ sake.
It was the sky for them, her and her dragon. Her reliable, dependable dragon, who even when bothered could be steered away from a fight, whose huge wings could get them higher than these young upstarts.
Even out of the mass of fighting dragons over the starting field, the sky above was riddled with dragons. These, at least, weren’t all slamming into each other. They were trying to move in one direction, even if their progress was hampered by dodging around each other.
Valeraine would need to leverage Lelantos’ strengths. They would sail above all the mess. She pulled Lelantos’ attention far higher, urging him to continue climbing.
Going up might be slower, but she had to bet on the fact it would be safer, and that their dives would be fast enough to make up time.
Nobody else was rising this high; it was a waste of energy for the typical dragon.
For Lelantos, going higher was simple with his vast wingspan, grown over centuries.
It was even more of an advantage now with the skies being so crowded.
They reached clouds. It was difficult to say when the clouds started, but now they were certainly around them, misty and damp. The dragons below were obscured by the fog, giving a sense of artificial distance. Like they weren’t even in the race anymore, just flying for pleasure.
Valeraine kept encouraging Lelantos to speed up, with her reins and her knees, by chanting, “Just a little more. Just a little more.”
She didn’t have a landmark to measure how fast they were going, just the wind of their passing and the beat of his wings, flinging them ever farther into the clouds. “Just a little more. Then, you can rest for a year. Just a little more. Faster.”
How far was it to the midway checkpoint? Did this derby even have a normal checkpoint, or could it possibly have more than one? Kesley would have gotten the route from the race officials when he checked in, but he hadn’t passed on that vital information. She would have to follow the other riders.
Valeraine urged Lelantos lower now, speeding as they dropped, and searched the sky. She saw the colorful shapes of dragons below her, and pointed Lelantos that way.
She counted the dragons. Could they make up for their botched beginning?
Eight dragons immediately ahead of her. Of course, the real winner of the race could have already turned around, and these were lagging behind. But she chose to hope. There was still a chance for Lelantos.
As they dived, they passed a few of the dragons, who fell away under and behind them, out of her view. Now, five dragons ahead of her. The first of them landed on a large hillside, dotted with recently cut stumps, and took off again, coming back.
“There! We land on the hill.” Lelantos saw it, too — no stranger to the routes of derbies — and adjusted his trajectory.
The first dragon, a black brute, was on a collision course for them, coming away from the hill along the same route they were on.
The black dragon gave a growl of challenge, intimidating and loud, but Lelantos stayed his course, roaring back with the gravelly tone of an elder, past his prime but not past the spirit of racing.
The crash was coming for them, and Valeraine tugged on the reins, hoping for a dodge to the side. They couldn’t afford to fight this dragon, one of the fastest and fiercest in Kinella.
But Lelantos was still spoiling for a fight, and gave another roar. She could feel the meaning of it: a challenge, an insult.
The black dragon juked closer to them.
Lelantos flicked his claws forward, pivoting in the air.
Instead of being met with answering claws, the black dragon opened its jaws, and spewed fire forth.
Valeraine had just enough time to see a smirking rider on the black dragon, before her vision was engulfed in flame.
The heat was everywhere, but where she felt it most was her eyes. She had snapped them shut, but her lids still felt the power like the sun on a summer’s day. She felt a lurch, and held on to the pommel as they collided with something.
It wasn’t getting colder. It was getting hotter. Now, she felt the heat centering on her cheek.
She opened her eyes: immediately in front of them was black dragon. She saw the light of flames, mostly on her right side, out of her vision.
Valeraine’s mask — the fragile paper-mache contraption that it was — had caught fire.
She grabbed for the tie with one hand, holding on to the saddle with the other as the two dragons weaved back and forth, trying to claw each other.
She ripped the mask off, immediately cooled by the air hitting her face.
Was she burned? Was she scarred? She didn’t feel pain, but didn’t trust the sensation. She patted herself down, looking for fires. Some smell of burned hair and harness lines, but it seemed the wind had put out any other fires. The direct blast must have missed her.
It was all that black dragon’s fault. They needed to attack it, to take it down with its smiling rider.
No.