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We can do this.

Aurora climbed back up into the sky, her wings pumping hard. All they had to do was follow the years of training the two of them had undertaken together.

The first bolt fired was easily dodged. The second and third crossed paths in order to try to catch Aurora in the middle, but she dodged them, too. There wasn’t enough time to fly out of range. Wren whistled.

With wordless agreement, Aurora snapped her wings closed and dove for the waves. Wren braced herself, pulled in a deep breath, and closed her eyes against the sting of the sea. They cut through the water smoothly. She opened her eyes and held on as Aurora swam beneath two enemy ships, the water bloodied and full of sharks. Aurora banged the bilge with her skull.

Even beneath the waves, Wren heard the cries of surprised and fearful soldiers in reaction to the tumbling of the ship. But then a cannonball came hurtling through the water toward them, and Wren pressed heels to her dragon, just barely managed to direct Aurora back out of the ocean before the deadly weapon could hit her tail.

That was too close!

She gasped for air as the soldiers scrambled to redirect their crossbows. “Higher!” she commanded.

Aurora’s response was a mere click of her tongue, as if telling Wren not to worry.

The two of them repeated this series of actions three more times, Aurora diving down toward the deck of the ship only to swiftly back out at the last second, then going underwater to dislodge the soldiers and prevent them from firing crossbow bolts at the other dragons in the sky. Finally, Jed and Layra managed to lead a coordinated attack against the ship with four other Dragon Riders.

It was with sickening satisfaction that Wren and Aurora flew up higher to watch the carnage of the ship being torn apart by six fearsome beasts, the Verlanti soldiers helpless to resist. But the satisfaction of watching quickly dissipated. With six dragons all together, they made far too easy a target for crossbow bolts, and it wasn’t long before a dozen were being fired through the air.

Wren scanned the smoke and fog to try and catch sight of Jed, but when she located the naval captain, her heart sank. He’d been shot through the heart with a well-aimed spear. And with no captain, Wren knew it was only a matter of time before the rest of the navy fell. This was a suicide mission.

Don’t think like that. As long as one Rider is fighting, there is hope.

Once again, she shored up her nerves before directing Aurora down, down, down, toward one of the largest Verlantian ships. But they did not pull out of the dive this time; instead, Aurora landed directly on the deck of the ship, the wooden boards groaning dangerously beneath her claws. Wren wasted no time yanking her bow from her back and loosing a slew of arrows, screaming alongside Aurora’s roars as together they felled one soldier after another after another.

“If I am going down,” she bellowed, hair flailing wildly around her face, “then I am taking you all with me!”

She meant every word of it.

8

Arrik

Aflash of red in the stormy sky caught Arrik’s attention, but he knew better than to let it distract him. He focused back on the battle. It was a deep-blue massacre on the seas, where the only light to be seen was either a flash of white when a cannonball was loosed or the ugly orange of explosives going off.

“Commander, to your—”

Arrik did not need to hear the rest of his soldier’s warning. For before his comrade finished his sentence, he swung his heavy axe around and caught his would-be attacker square in the forehead. The Lorne soldier had no helmet upon his head; the poor sod never stood a chance.

He stared down at the slain solider and felt nothing. Logically, he should have felt something. Guilt, fear, satisfaction. Arrik turned away from the man and scanned the battle.

Verlanti had been planning their invasion for a long, long time. Having to stand and listen to the ‘negotiations’ his father and his council pretended to go along with during peace talks with Lorne had been, at the very least, tragic. The country had been doomed from the start: how had King Oswin ever imagined he could keep his tiny kingdom full of black diamonds and impossibly valuable dragons safe from Arrik’s covetous, war-happy father?

Part of him admired Oswin’s determination, but the other part said that the Lorne king had been a fool. No one won against Verlanti.

What your father wants, he gets.

Now the King of the Dragon Isles was no more, as was his queen, and soon the heir to the throne would be in the grasp of the elves.

All Arrik had to do was wipe their navy clean off the map first.

He squinted as he spied the flash of red in the sky once more. It was getting closer now, closer, closer, and then, in one fell swoop, it disappeared back into the smog and smoke and clouds.

“A Rider,” he murmured, before turning back to the far more pressing matter of securing their victory. One lone Rider could be dealt with later.

He braced himself against the railing of the Lorne ship he and his men had commandeered and wiped the rain from his eyes. Verlanti didn’t necessarily need any more ships, but it was senseless to destroy an otherwise high-quality vessel when its occupants could just be tossed into the sea.

The Dragon Isles people were like rats. They could survive almost anything.