Page 40

Without thinking, only responding to the urgency in Fortiss’s voice, I will Gent away, ordering him to vanish from this spot as efficiently as the hummerbill had.

Marsh vanishes a moment later as Caleb crashes into me.

The force of his push sends me sprawling toward Tennet as Fortiss dives for councilor Miriam.

Nazar bounds up to us, and the five of us hit the hard unforgiving ground as one, scrabbling together, wrapping our cloaks tight.

Within moments, the unearthly chittering noise I’d hoped to never hear again fills the air.

At first, it’s a bare murmur beneath the crashing waves of the lake, but it quickly becomes a screeching, hurtling tide.

The crescendo builds and builds, and when I don’t think I can take it anymore, I hear Fortiss ground out his next order. As one he and Tennet howl, “ Now !”

This time I can’t tell if the sky snaps tight, but the arrival of the dragon Divhs is obvious for another reason.

Fire lights up the night, catching the trailing edge of the skrill aflame.

Now that I can get a closer look, I realize this is a far smaller horde than we fought at the coliseum, never mind how loud they are.

But their lesser size only makes Fortiss’s battle strategy more effective, as Ayne and Szonja attack them again and again with gouts of fire.

The poison coating the skrill’s skin acts as an accelerant, and flames lick through the entire horde, blasting it apart and sending fried carcasses skittering through the sky to land against the rocks and into the water with angry hisses.

Several of the dying skin rain down over us, and we hunch together tight until the blighted assault peters out.

With twin screams of pure dragon satisfaction, Ayne and Szonja wink out again, and the five of us roll apart, shucking the last few roasted snake skins caught in our cloaks.

The skies are empty, but the rocky beach and water are littered with skrill carcasses.

“Can any of them survive the water?” Caleb asks, turning to Tennet.

Tennet scowls back at him. “Do I look like an expert in skrill? I’ve never even seen the things before the other night.”

“There will be more,” Fortiss says. “That first group may not have been expecting us, but we won’t be so lucky the second time. To the Eighth House!”

Without another word, he thrusts his left fist into the sky. Szonja appears again, Wrath and Ayne right behind her. Gent howls from the rocky foothills and Marsh pounds up, his wild eyes searching once more for Caleb.

I turn to Miriam and shake her, realizing too late that she is once more covered in sweat, her eyes unfocused, her skin clammy. Now, finally, she’s going through the shock of being banded to a Divh.

“Summon Kreya,” I order her. “You’ve seen it done a thousand times, at tournament after tournament, you know what to do. Summon her.”

Miriam stares at me, then wheels away. Shakily, she lifts her left hand high, forming a trembling fist. Then she closes her eyes, sucks in a deep breath?—

Almost before she is able to get her Divh’s name out, Kreya appears in a flurry of whirling wings and attendant hummerlets, bursting into our small group. A moment later, she’s surging upward again, only this time with Miriam in her clutches.

“Gent!” I shout reflexively, not sure at all that Kreya will have sufficient upward motion to carry Miriam anywhere, let alone to the Eighth House.

My Divh seems to agree with me. He roars and rips his paw toward me, sweeping me into his grasp.

I try to breathe out my fear and fail as he pumps his arms once, twice—then he leaps up, wrapping a mighty arm around the squawking hummerbill midair.

He pulls her close to his body as if he’s plucked flowers for the journey back to the Fated Plane.

Then he touches down lightly on one of the craggy mountaintops he’s spent the day exploring and uses that as a springboard to leap again—this time far, far higher.

As the original bonded warrior to Kreya, for all that she wasn’t able to appear on the battlefield at the Tournament of Gold, I can hear the Divh’s thoughts alongside Gent’s.

I expect her to be furious, but instead she coos and chirrups words of encouragement to her half-dozen hummerlets and a traumatized Miriam, wrapping her wings around them and cuddling close in Gent’s grasp as we rip through the storm clouds.

We break through a thick cloud of heavy mist. Around me, stars explode in a kaleidoscope, zipping currents of energy and pinpoints of brilliant light that I can barely see through Gent’s loosely clenched fist. No sooner do we arrive at this staggering space, than the stars seem to jitter and change direction—or maybe we do.

The dizzying blur of them blanks my mind and everything goes black?—

And then all I hear is screaming.

I jerk more fully awake, my skull nearly splitting with the cacophony of voices jumbling in my head.

I hear Szonja’s and Ayne’s roars, Marsh’s squawk, Wrath’s imperious scream —but their actual words are lost beneath the roar of Divhs of all types and sizes.

Sandworms and flying lizards, four-legged and six-legged beasts covered in fur or leathery hides, chitin-covered winged insects—we all burst out of the sky over a vast, sundrenched landscape of high plains, grasslands, and mountains that stretch up-up—then sheer off at the top, looking more like manmade walls than any purely natural barrier.

But I can only peer at them for an instant as the entire lot of us—nearly forty Divhs strong—land in the great open bowl of grasslands an hour’s slow ride from an imposing fortress of red-and-gray stone tucked into the base of the mountains.

For a moment, everything is silent. Then I hear Caleb’s shaky groan. “Let me down, Marsh. I’m so gonna be sick again.”

“Same,” I gasp, and pound on Gent’s palm.

My Divh opens his hand and drops me onto the thick, waving grass, while Kreya nudges Miriam out beside me.

I stagger over to the councilor, trying desperately to regain my equilibrium as the hummerlets soar skyward in squawking joy.

Miriam’s fully passed out, but she’s breathing, and I lift a shaky hand to shade my eyes as I peer at the Eighth House.

“Where did all these Divhs come from?” Tennet’s exasperated voice explodes in my head, as loud as if he’s standing right next to me.

Then I realize he is standing next to me. Of course he is. He doesn’t speak in my mind, only Divhs speak in my mind. That’s the way that works—the only way.

I turn to explain everything to him, and he glares down at me for half a moment before his eyes go wide with shock. “Talia!”

I collapse into his arms.