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Perhaps it would be for the best.

Arms and wings wide at my sides, I hovered in the air, my great size a target no one could miss.

Lifting my chin, I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, waiting. Waiting for the end and hoping it wouldn’t hurt.

THE END NEVER CAME.

The air was perfectly still. No wind. No whisper of fog shifting and settling like the creaking of an old building.

I opened my eyes slowly. The world was still there.Iwas still there.

I was still alive.

Fell’s voice rose from the silence, from the whiteness, from the noiseless fear. It found me, wrapped around me, merging and colliding with the bitter taste of panic on my tongue, mingling with char and ash.

“Go! Tamsyn, go!”

I flinched, jerking at the sudden volume of his strident voice.

Was he talking to me? Of course he was. Fell was saying my name, but that didn’t make sense. None of this made sense... none of it would right itself in my mind.

I looked around and finally found him, found those changeable eyes of his. Found only more confusion there. More lack of understanding. His panicked expression urged me to flee.No.There was more than urgency in that desperate, hot-eyed stare, in the heated steel. There was pleading. There was prayer. There was a physical push, a tangible force shoving at me, compelling me to go.

Go go go go go.

I shook my head. Why was he helping me? Why wasn’t he lifting his sword against me?

I thought he would kill me. I thought the moment he knew the truth, he would look at me with only hate and regret in his heart. I thought. I thought. I thought.

His sword was in his hand, but he wasn’t wielding it against me. No. He had used it to blockStigfrom striking me down. He had just stopped Stig from attacking me.

Fell hadn’t tried to killed me.

Fell didn’t want me dead.

It was so much to take in, to absorb. An impossible, implausible thing to swallow down my fire-swollen throat.

It was the opposite of everything I had believed, everything I’d expected. The world was no longer solid beneath my feet. The fog no longer wet on my skin. The winter no longer a frigid kiss to my lips.

Everything was this. Not as it should be.

What else could I be wrong about?

You were wrong about Stig.

Stig’s betrayal stung, pressing its sharp edge into me, dragging through my flesh, tearing me open, leaving me raw and bleeding and exposed.

“What are you doing, Dryhten?” Stig panted as he struggled to release his sword from where it was blocked and locked in place by Fell’s sword.

The twin steel blades finally slid free with a hiss and Stig staggered back. The two men regained their fighting stances and squared off.

Fell’s voice came, as resolute and hard as the snow-packed ground: “I won’t let you kill her.”

“Her?” Stig waved his sword at me and then spat blood into the snow, an obscenity on the flawless white. “Thatis a dragon.”

Fell shook his head once. “It’s Tamsyn.” Then to me, again: “Get out of here!”

I shook my head once. I wasn’t leaving him. Not with Stig intent on murder.