Page 27 of Wings of Cruelty and Flame (Heir of Wyvara #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

VARIDIAN

T he crowd was so dense I couldn’t fucking breathe, or maybe the lack of oxygen was because Ameirah’s hand was ripped out of mine, my wife swallowed by the chaos and carnage. I’d barely had enough time to process the murder of the man; that got pushed to the back of my mind to examine later. Now, I needed to find Ameirah and get us the fuck out of here.

Wyfell had always been a peaceful city, far enough from the Wall of Hydaran to avoid being touched by the conflict, home to many riders but never to battle. As expected, the people of Wyfell reacted with animal panic, and I was trapped in the middle of it. All my training and strength was useless.

My marriage mark stung on my chest, a constant reminder of what I had to lose. I wouldn’t recover if I lost her. Five days married to her and I was already enamoured. She was mine because of more than our fathers’ signatures on a piece of paper. She was mine because she made me laugh and captured my interest with her casual threats, and because when she smiled, I wanted to murder everyone around us so I was the only one who got to keep the memory.

She stole my heart that first night, somewhere between putting a knife to my throat and telling me she’d never had a wyvern. The sheer nerve she had to mount Mak after our ceremony, when she’d never flown before, knocked the breath out of me. She was so fucking brave, so strong. A warrior, down to her bones. A fighter and survivor like me, like all my legion.

It certainly didn’t hurt that she was as beautiful as sin with eyes like magic, her smile a curve of wickedness, and her skin so soft I couldn’t stop touching her. And that hair, fuck that hair. As colourful as sunset, as rich as the night sky, thick and waving, tempting me like a siren. It looked damn good splayed across my pillow.

Ameirah was mine, and I wasn’t going to lose her to a crush, or to whatever zealots had murdered the man for all to see. No clergy I’d ever met, that was for sure.

I spotted a row of solid stone buildings coming up on my left and began the painstaking process of pushing my way sideways through the crowd. There was little more than a millimetre of space but I forced a path, wincing when bodies smacked mine. I meant what I told Ameirah that first night—I only used my power on our enemies—but this was an emergency. People strained to make room when I barked at them to move. I ignored the twinge of guilt. If this allowed me to find Ameirah and get her home safely, I wouldn’t feel guilty.

By the time I made it to the tan-stone buildings, sweat dripped off my chin and my tunic stuck to my body beneath my leathers. These clothes were made for the slicing winds of wyvernback, not for a stifling crowd. I pushed through the discomfort and hauled myself up onto the sill of the square window, drawing on years of experience climbing Mak to scale the two-storey building. A man in a ripped brown tunic followed me, scrambling onto the window, trying to replicate my handholds. With any luck, others would see and escape the crush to the rooftops. From here, they’d be stuck, but at least they wouldn’t be trampled to death.

I pulled myself onto the roof with a grunt, my ribs protesting an injury I didn’t remember getting, my foot throbbing with an injury I did—a heavyset man put his entire weight on my boot in his attempt to break free of the crush. I didn’t blame him; it was mass hysteria down there.

Panting on the rooftop, I got down to my belly and threw my hand over the edge, reaching for the man climbing after me. He was only a few feet below me, close enough to make it. Shock charged through my heart and I yelled just as his fingers slipped from the wall. His eyes widened, locked on mine. I screwed them shut when he plummeted, landing among the crush. I didn’t want to know if he died on impact, or if he took others with him. I pulled away from the edge, dragged a shaky breath into my lungs, and reminded myself of my job. Get to Mak, find Ameirah, get us home.

He wasn’t the first person I’d watched die. He wasn’t the first who’d looked directly into my eyes in the moment before death, either. It was the life of a rider with a legion. I hated it, but we couldn’t hold off Kalder and save Ithanysian lives without losing others. It was a lesson I’d learned the hard way at eighteen, trying to save everyone in a small village. I’d spread myself too thin. They all died.

“Ameirah will not suffer that fate,” I bit out, reminding myself what was at stake, grounding myself.

I was the prince of these people, and I did have a responsibility to them, but my highest priority was my wife. I brought her here, was so eager to mark her as mine that I’d insisted on visiting Wyfell instead of flying straight home. She was lost in the crowd, injured, potentially—no, I refused to think that—because of me. My obsession with her, my recklessness.

Trying not to choke on that guilt, I braced myself at the edge of the roof and leapt to the next building, then the next, pushing my body near its limit, ignoring my injuries and pain, my exhaustion.

Too much too soon.

“I know,” I snapped. But Ameirah was down there, probably terrified. I had to keep going, and judging by the link between me and Mak, he’d already abandoned the landing field where we’d left him flirting with a pretty ruby. He knew something was wrong, had either heard the people of Wyfell screaming or sensed it through our link. He was close.

I gritted my teeth against the burn of exhaustion in my blood. It felt like I’d pushed my magic too far, expended too much at once, but this wasn’t my power—this was the consequence of riding for three days, fighting a storm, and then getting caught in a crush the following day.

My legion would be thrilled to know they were right, and I should have waited another day. But if I hadn’t, what would have happened to Wyfell and its people? The second we were back in the Red Star, I’d send word to my chief of defence, who could organise legions to handle this. I suppose I’d warn the king too, on the off-chance he hadn’t ordered this to happen. If I hadn’t been here, how long would it have taken word to spread? Longer than hours, I’d bet.

Focus.

I sucked in a shallow breath, ignoring the spike of pain through my ribs and the burn of exhaustion in my blood, making another leap, then another. My head pounded, heat rising from my body, and I jumped again—but this time, my fingers slipped from the rooftop, brick scraping my palms raw as I fell too fast to catch myself. I was used to time slowing when I neared death, but this time passed too fast.

I crashed like a falling star, the world rushing past, the building little more than a golden blur beside me, ripping open graze wounds on whatever parts of me weren’t covered in leather. I tucked myself into a ball to protect my organs when I hit the ground and—slammed into a solid wall that was warm with scales and rumbling bloody murder. A leathery wing buffeted my side when I almost rolled off, and I flung my eyes open, throwing my arm around the nearest spike.

“You could have impaled me!” I yelled at Mak.

His reply was low and furious.

“Yeah, I know I would have died without you catching me,” I muttered, pulling myself into my seat, leaning back against his spike so he could use his right wing again. I panted, waiting for my head to stop spinning, recovering my wits. “Thank you.”

His wings caught air, heavy beats carrying us over the city, avoiding the paths of other wyverns in the sky. My breath froze in my lungs when I watched one unleash wyvernfyre on the civilians. I’d seen it a hundred times and it never got easier to see, and yet this… these weren’t warriors, they were people, our people. Not enemies, not Kalder, not trained riders or ground warriors. If Ameirah was in the line of that wyvernfyre—

I couldn’t draw air.

“Faster, Mak.”

Where was she? And more importantly, how were we going to find one woman in a city full of panicked people crammed in on every street?

It began to rain all at once, not helping my nerves at all. I remembered the storm, almost falling from Mak, losing Fahad…

This is simple rain, not a storm.

Makrukh gave me a pointed look as he swung us around the spire of a mosque, communicating a plan far more elegant than mine. The marriage mark. I could use it to sense Ameirah’s vague location, maybe even find her using it.

“And grand ideas how this works?” I asked Mak, stiffening on his back when he let out a fierce threat as a silver wyvern passed too close to his wing. The silver, half his size, angled away as fast as possible. There was no rider on its back.

Ice hit my veins and spread rapidly.

Mak hit my shoulder when he brought his wing in, snapping me out of my unease. His grumbled sound told me to trust my instincts like I trusted my magic, but that was overestimating my trust in my abilities right now. Still, I pressed a hand over the mark on my chest and imagined a tether expanding to the matching mark on Ameirah’s arm.

“East, over the meat market, Mak,” I said, not sure I could trust my instincts but never doubting my trust in him. If he thought I could follow the mark to Ameirah, I could.

I imagined the sting of the fresh ink heightened as we wove around enemy wyverns—a term I never expected to use—but I was so hot, nearing the burnout of exhaustion, that it was hard to tell for sure.

Please let this work. Please let her be alive and unhurt.

Rain sluiced down harder, bouncing off Mak’s ivory scales. Focused on finding Ameirah, he whipped his head around when we passed over the burning wreckage of a row of stalls, and my stomach roiled at the smell, the ashes that remained. The vibrant souk Ameirah and I had walked through hand in hand was little more than char and cinders. Was the mark-scribe tent still standing? I couldn’t see from here, but the thought of its destruction made me want to scream.

Everything in me tensed, my senses sharpening at the low growl that trembled through Mak’s throat. Adrenaline made me straighten where I sat, buzzing with readiness to fight. He could smell her from here, and she was close.

“Find her, Mak,” I demanded, my heart thumping faster.

My mark burned so viciously now that I knew it wasn’t just my exhaustion. Something was wrong. My wife was hurt.

Someone had hurt her. People were going to die for this.

What we found when Mak tracked Ameirah down made me want to be sick. Two wyverns, one on each side of her, my Ameirah too small and easily broken between them. Protectiveness lit a torch to ward off the chill of my fear.

Makrukh whipped through the air with a threatening screech, driving his powerful tail into a bulky emerald as it leapt into the air. The emerald was thrown into a market stall with a crash that made my ears hurt. It went down with a whine and whatever it beheld in Mak’s face made it limp away instead of challenging him.

There, Mak rumbled, diving at the ground. She’s there.

My breath hitched when I focused on Ameirah, listing to one side as she faced down a sky blue wyvern whose stare never wavered from my wife. The wyvern was sleek and small, but still every bit as capable of murder as any other—razor claws, teeth that would shred fae skin and bones, a body capable of cracking bones, and that was without fire that could melt skin, muscle, and organs. Fear made me so sick I thought I’d throw up.

“You grab her in your claws and we take off,” I called to Mak, my heartbeat frantic and slamming. My hands were slick when I reached for a knife to distract the sky blue while Mak made a grab—

He landed behind Ameirah instead of grabbing her, the ground shaking so hard she fell. No. No, no. A single breath from the sky blue wyvern and she’d be incinerated.

“Mak!” I yelled, fury making my blood pump faster. What the hell was he doing? The blue wyvern was so close it didn’t truly need to breathe fire. It could break Ameirah with a single step or slash her throat with its claws. I was one second from leaping off his back and landing beside her, taking whatever blow was meant for my wife, when Mak gave me an urgent snarl.

It hit me like a punch to the stomach. “What the fuck do you mean she’s her wyvern?” I shook my head rapidly. “You know what? That can wait. Get Ameirah. Now!”

Ameirah was swaying so badly that both Mak and the other wyvern darted forward to catch her. My own warning growl shook my throat, primal and loud when I saw the blue wyvern touching my wife. But there were no teeth, no claws, no fire or blood.

Ameirah stared up at us, her eyes shooting past Mak’s scales until she landed on me. Her shoulders slumped instantly, a hard breath leaving her, and her relief felt like a blessing and gift. I hadn’t done anything to earn it yet, but I would guard that trust with my life.

“Mak’s going to pick you up. You can mount when we’re free from this place.”

Her eyes widened, but she didn’t fight it when Mak clasped her in his talons. She didn’t fight physically at least, but a scream tore from her when he jumped into the air, my wyvern speaking to the sky blue in a calm tone that changed the murder in their eyes to understanding. I met the wyvern’s silver eyes when they landed on me and didn’t break the stare even as Mak leapt into the air.

I began to breathe easier when we cleared the edge of Wyfell, the roars and screams and horrible, crackling flames behind us making a sour sickness twist my stomach. Those were normally sounds of victory, but having wyvernfyre turned against our own people was nauseating. I wanted to turn back and evacuate as many civilians as Mak and I could but… Ameirah was the priority. If I went back, she would too. My wife was too stubborn, too good and caring at her core, to let people suffer. I bet she only let us carry her away now because she was in shock.

I was looking forward to a) holding my wife for a solid hour without letting go and b) telling her I told you so about being deserving of a wyvern. The sky blue flew alongside us, her eyes shifting from the chaos of the burning city behind us to the woman clasped in Mak’s talons. There was no doubt when I read her body language; this wyvern belonged to Ameirah.

“Land on the hill in the distance,” I called to Mak when we were far enough away. “Then I’ll get Ameirah on your back.”

He made a murmur of agreement, and then whipped his head around, angling his wings without warning to spin us in the air.

“Don’t drop her!” I screamed. I couldn’t fucking breathe.

But Mak’s attention wasn’t on the precious woman he held beneath him; his stare fixed on the seven wyverns that had followed us from Wyfell. Shit.

If we had the legion with us, I would have taken them on, but with just Mak and I and a wyvern whose fighting ability I didn’t know, I couldn’t risk it. I wouldn’t gamble my wife’s life on a mere chance of winning.

“Fly!” I yelled. “As fast as you can carry us.”

His low response asked where, and fuck it was a good question. If we went home, we’d lead the wyverns right to the Red Star.

“Try to lose them in the mountains,” I shouted eventually.

I didn’t let myself think about what would happen if we couldn’t shake them off our tail.