Shelly Thomas - The Burning Sky

But as the castle drew nearer, her impatience turned to fear. The thought of facing the wyverns alone turned her lungs weak—and the single moon in the sky was a relentless reminder that this was no make-believe. But she had to have a steed. Either that, or walk an entire day to reach Black Bastion.

At the edge of the briar forest, she saw the tunnel the prince had left behind. So he had been here. Had he got a wyvern too?

No roars greeted her ears as she sprinted through the tunnel. No warning streams of fire passed overhead. Even the air didn’t stink as much. At the other end of the tunnel she saw why. The colossus cockatrices were gone, the pylons anchoring their chains snapped.

She hesitated only a moment before she resumed running. The doors of the great hall were wide open. She entered firing shield spells before her, but nothing attacked her. Only one wyvern was inside, slumped on the marble floor.

Its chest rose and fell. Either it was sleeping, or much more likely, the prince had blasted it unconscious.

She was faint with relief.

Now she could worry about surviving Black Bastion.

It took Titus a stunned second to realize what had happened.

Tempus congelet, he mouthed the time-freeze spell.

The entire Citadel was a permanent no-vaulting zone. With Haywood’s disappearance, the library would be searched from top to bottom. He must get out this moment.

He sprinted. Fast. Faster. Still somehow not fast enough, like running from monsters in nightmares. And then he was out of the stacks, and in the midst of a bizarre tableau of frozen mages.

Still running, he pointed his wand at the Inquisitor. “Mens omnino vastetur!”

It was the strongest, most illicit spell of cerebral destruction he’d been able to find, not the execution curse. Likely he would regret his leniency later, but he was not a murderer. Not yet.

When he skidded to a stop before the stand that held the Citadel’s copy of the Crucible, he was scarcely two feet from the Bane, who looked fifty years old, not two hundred. His features were confident, attractive—and familiar, somehow.

There was no time for the usual long password into the Crucible. Fortunately, he did not need to utter it, when the Crucible was already held open, so to speak. “I am the heir of the House of Elberon, and I am in mortal danger.”

The next instant he was back in the meadow, under a night sky that was rapidly disappearing behind the clouds. Upon its hill Sleeping Beauty’s castle glowed, eerily phosphorescent.

He panted with relief. But the air he breathed in—he grimaced at the pungency of it. Blood. He murmured a spell for light. Almost at once he saw a thin, sharp stake that had been pulled out of its mooring, a length of chain attached to it.

The stake that he had used to keep Helgira’s wyvern waiting for him. He increased the intensity of the light and broadened its radius. Something dark lay on the grass. He ran toward it and stopped in his tracks, his stomach twisting. It was not a whole wyvern, only one bloody wing, crumpled like an old jacket.

Wyverns were terrifically agile creatures, both in body and in mind. They had vicious teeth, vicious claws, and vicious spikes—and could fly for hours at speeds in excess of one hundred miles an hour, with bursts of more than one hundred forty miles an hour. Titus could not think of a single beast both swift and brutal enough to hunt wyverns.

Yet one had.

He began to run toward Sleeping Beauty’s castle. He needed another steed right away. With Haywood’s disappearance, Atlantis might very well not wait until morning to come after him. He must get back to school as soon as possible, let Fairfax know what had happened, entrust the Crucible to her, and hide himself in the Crucible until such time as she could move him somewhere safer.

He could only pray his own copy of the Crucible was not such a perilous place as this one was proving to be.

The ground sloped up. He ran harder to maintain speed. His legs protested. His lungs too. In the nearly pitch-dark night, the thick, rich smell of wyvern blood continued to linger in his nostrils, feeding his nausea.

He stepped on something at once hard and soft. Instinctively he leaped away. The smell of blood intensified. He had been hot from running; now he was cold, his perspiration beads of fear rolling down his neck.

He tapped on his wand. A light flared, shining on a black limb in the grass—the lower portion of a wyvern’s leg.

From the direction of the castle came an unearthly roar. The ground trembled, a vibration he felt in his shins. His heart raced as if it could escape; his breaths overshadowed all other sounds of the night.

Had this been a regular session in the Crucible, he would have hurried forward to find out just what fearsome creature now prowled the castle. But this was real. And he could not afford to end up in pieces all over the landscape.

On his way from Black Bastion to the meadow, he had passed over a market town not too far to the north. If he was not mistaken, it was the setting for “Lilia, the Clever Thief.”

He had not practiced in that particular story in years, but he remembered it opened with the town being terrorized by an untamed wyvern. Not at all what he needed at this juncture, but as nonmages would say, better the devil you knew.

The wyvern would not respond.

Iolanthe had gone up to the costume room next to the ballroom, found a white dress that looked as if it could have been worn in times of antiquity, and slipped it on over her nonmage clothes. Then she’d snatched a black wig from underneath the sleeping wig master and set it on her head with a heavy application of adhesive spells, so it wouldn’t fly away while she was airborne.

She’d read “The Battle for Black Bastion.” She knew that Helgira had put out a call for assistance at some point. She would pretend to be one of the mages coming to aid her.

Her disguise in place, she approached the wyvern with extreme caution, leaped atop it, grabbed onto its skinny, scaly neck, and steeled herself to be violently tossed about.

Only to have the wyvern drool a little.

This was not a problem for which she’d prepared herself. On the one hand, she was thrilled that the prince had used the heaviest spells. On the other hand, she was faced with a comatose steed when she needed a lively one that would fly fast enough to rip off all but the most meticulously adhered wigs.

“Revisce.”

Nothing.

“Revisce forte.”

More of the same.

“Revisce omnino!”

Still nothing. This last was supposed to be a spell that came just short of making the dead walk.

She smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. The next second the wyvern let out a glass-shattering screech and shot up. She screamed and threw her arms around its neck.

The wyvern careened about the great hall with her hanging from its neck. She didn’t know whether it had been traumatized by the prince’s spells or whether it was her weight that made it frantic. Either way, it was doing its best to shake her loose.

She swung one leg up its back. The wyvern flipped upside down. She yelped and lost her footing.

The wyvern, one of the most ferociously intelligent beasts, must have noticed how her legs swung out as it banked a rapid turn. It threw itself at a pillar, pulling away only at the last possible second. She had to yank her legs into her chest to avoid smashing them on the pillar—and losing her grip on the wyvern.

The beast tried again. She tucked herself into a fetal position and cleared the pillar by less than an inch.

All of a sudden she remembered that she now controlled air—how could she have forgotten? Time to make this struggle a little less one-sided.